PSCRP-BESA Reports No 181 (January 30, 2026)
By Gershon Kogan, PhD, Orientalist, Specialist in Iranian Studies
Introduction: Framing the Problem
In recent analyses of the post-Soviet space, a persistent analytical gap remains between how Israeli–Azerbaijani relations are typically described and how they are perceived in Tehran. Most studies portray this partnership as pragmatic and transactional, largely confined to military-technical cooperation and limited in its implications for regional security beyond the South Caucasus (Cornell, 2017; de Waal, 2013). Yet such interpretations fail to explain the intensity and persistence of Iranian strategic anxiety toward Azerbaijan’s cooperation with Israel.
The core problem lies in the tendency to marginalize Iranian strategic logic, reducing Tehran’s reactions either to rhetorical exaggeration or to attempts at instrumentalizing external threats for domestic mobilization (Dabashi, 2011; Vakil, 2020). This approach leaves unanswered a key question: why Azerbaijan — rather than Turkey, Georgia, or the states of Central Asia — has come to occupy a particularly sensitive place in Iran’s threat perception, and why developments in the South Caucasus generate reactions in Tehran disproportionate to the region’s formal geopolitical weight.
An additional dimension often overlooked in Western and post-Soviet analyses is Iran’s historically ambivalent perception of the post-Soviet space itself. For much of the 1990s and 2000s, this region was viewed in Tehran as a secondary and relatively inert strategic environment — fragmented, inward-looking, and largely insulated from Middle Eastern security dynamics (Keddie, 2006; Vakil, 2020). The South Caucasus, in particular, was not perceived as a primary arena of confrontation but rather as a buffer zone shaped predominantly by Russian influence. The gradual erosion of this perception — driven by technological diffusion, expanding Israeli activity beyond the Middle East, and the growing permeability between Eurasian and Middle Eastern security theaters — has transformed the post-Soviet space from a strategic periphery into a zone of increasing uncertainty in Iranian threat assessments (Inbar, 2018; Rubin, 2022).
This analytical blind spot became especially evident after the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war. While the conflict is often interpreted primarily through the prism of Russian and Turkish influence (de Waal, 2013; Cornell, 2017), its outcome exposed vulnerabilities in what Tehran had long regarded as part of its northern strategic buffer. The widespread use of Israeli military technologies by Azerbaijan did not merely alter the tactical balance on the battlefield; it disrupted a regional status quo that Iran had implicitly incorporated into its security calculus (Fars News, 2020; Tasnim, 2021; Eisenstadt, 2021).
The salience of this shift has been amplified by Iran’s internal crisis. Mass protests over recent years have undermined assumptions about regime stability and heightened elite sensitivity to external reference points — particularly those emerging from culturally proximate societies (Reuters, 2026; BBC Persian, 2026; Brookings Institution, 2023). In this context, Azerbaijan is no longer perceived in Tehran simply as a neighboring state or a junior partner of Turkey, but increasingly as a structurally inconvenient reference point: a secular polity rooted in a historically Shi‘ite cultural space, open to global connectivity and maintaining stable cooperation with Israel.
This article argues that without incorporating the Iranian perspective, it is impossible to fully understand either the resilience of Israeli–Azerbaijani cooperation or its broader implications for regional security. It seeks to explain why Azerbaijan has emerged as a focal point of Iranian strategic anxiety, how Israeli involvement in the South Caucasus reshapes Iran’s northern security perimeter, and why Iran’s domestic turbulence magnifies the significance of these developments across the post-Soviet space.
Why Israel Chose Azerbaijan
Prevailing explanations of Israeli–Azerbaijani cooperation typically emphasize three factors: Azerbaijan’s financial capacity to purchase advanced weaponry, Israel’s interest in expanding partnerships within the Muslim world, and tactical convergence in security interests (Asgarov, 2024). While each of these elements is relevant, none adequately explains why Azerbaijan — rather than other post-Soviet states — became Israel’s most consequential partner in the South Caucasus.
The limitation of these interpretations lies in their tendency to detach the partnership from the Iranian factor. In reality, Iran — rather than Caucasian regional dynamics per se — constitutes the central variable in Israel’s strategic calculus. Since the early 2000s, Israel has sought to expand its strategic depth vis-à-vis Iran through indirect means, extending pressure beyond the Middle Eastern theater (Inbar, 2018; Rubin, 2022). Within this framework, the South Caucasus acquired significance not as an autonomous region but as part of Iran’s northern security perimeter.
From this perspective, Azerbaijan presents a unique constellation of attributes. Unlike Georgia, which lacks a direct border with Iran, and Armenia, which has traditionally maintained cooperative relations with Tehran, Azerbaijan combines a long land border with Iran, relative autonomy from Russian control mechanisms, a secular political system, and a demonstrated willingness to engage in discreet security cooperation (Cornell, 2017; Inbar, 2018). These features render Azerbaijan a particularly effective entry point for Israeli engagement along Iran’s northern frontier.
Crucially, this engagement does not take the form of overt military basing or formal alliance structures. Israeli strategy in Azerbaijan remains deliberately low-profile, relying on arms transfers, intelligence cooperation, and long-term technological interdependence in the security sector (Rubin, 2022). This approach minimizes political costs for both parties while generating a persistent sense of strategic uncertainty in Tehran — an effect arguably more destabilizing than explicit military presence, particularly under conditions of domestic stress within Iran.
Military Reality: Drones, Intelligence and the Karabakh Shift
In much of the post-Soviet literature, Nagorno-Karabakh has long been framed as a lever of Russian influence — a mechanism for maintaining controlled instability and disciplining Armenia (de Waal, 2013; Cornell, 2017). While this interpretation captures an important dimension of Moscow’s policy, it does not account for Iran’s reaction to the outcome of the 2020 war.
For Tehran, Karabakh functioned less as an arena of great-power rivalry than as a component of its northern security buffer, maintaining spatial separation between the Turkish–Azerbaijani axis and Iran’s borders (Fars News, 2020). The persistence of Armenian control over much of the territory, and the absence of a direct land corridor between mainland Azerbaijan and Nakhchivan, objectively aligned with Iranian interests, even in the absence of a formal alliance with Yerevan.
The Azerbaijani victory therefore represented, from Iran’s perspective, not merely a regional realignment but a qualitative shift in its northern security environment (Tasnim, 2021; Mashregh News, 2022). This perception was driven less by the territorial outcome than by the technological character of the war. The extensive use of unmanned aerial systems — including Israeli loitering munitions such as the Harop and tactical UAVs from the Orbiter family — exposed the vulnerability of traditional air defense and static fortifications (CSIS, 2020; Military Strategy Magazine, 2021; Eisenstadt, 2021).
For Iranian military analysts, Karabakh offered a concrete demonstration of how Israeli technologies could reshape strategic realities beyond the Middle East without direct Israeli military involvement. This experience was interpreted not as an anomaly but as a precedent, prompting Iranian media close to the IRGC to frame the conflict as a warning regarding the exposure of Iran’s northern flank (Tasnim, 2021; Mashregh News, 2022).
Beyond media framing, the Karabakh war triggered a more substantive reassessment within Iranian military and security circles. Commentaries affiliated with the IRGC emphasized not only the tactical effectiveness of unmanned systems but also their strategic implications for Iran’s own defense posture, particularly regarding the vulnerability of fixed air-defense installations and critical infrastructure in border regions (Tasnim, 2021; Mashregh News, 2022). The conflict reinforced existing concerns within Iran’s security establishment about asymmetric exposure to technologically superior adversaries operating indirectly through regional partners. Israeli assessments of the war, which highlighted the scalability and adaptability of drone-based warfare beyond the Caucasus, further amplified these anxieties by implicitly situating Iran as a potential future theater for similar operational concepts (Eisenstadt, 2021; CSIS, 2020). In this sense, Karabakh was interpreted in Tehran less as a concluded regional episode than as a rehearsal for emerging modes of conflict increasingly relevant to Iran’s strategic environment.
Azerbaijan as a Structurally Inconvenient Reference Point
The military dimension alone does not fully explain Azerbaijan’s prominence in Iranian strategic thinking. Equally important is the symbolic and ideological dimension, which has become increasingly salient amid Iran’s deepening domestic crisis.
Analytical precision is essential here. Azerbaijan is neither a religious state nor a “Shi‘ite state” in any institutional or political sense. Decades of Soviet rule followed by post-Soviet secular governance have produced a deeply secularized society, where religious practice remains limited and largely cultural rather than doctrinal (Pew Research Center, 2017). Islam — including the Shi‘ite tradition — functions primarily as an element of historical and symbolic identity, not as a foundation of political authority or legal order.
It is precisely this configuration that renders Azerbaijan symbolically sensitive for Tehran. The coexistence of a historically Shi‘ite cultural matrix with a secular political system that is externally connected and strategically pragmatic challenges one of the Islamic Republic’s core legitimizing narratives: the presumed inseparability of Shi‘ite identity from Islamic governance and clerical authority (Keddie, 2006; Vakil, 2020). In this sense, Azerbaijan does not constitute a normative or aspirational “model” for Iran. Rather, it functions as a structurally inconvenient reference point — demonstrating that alternative political trajectories within a shared cultural and confessional space are empirically possible.
Crucially, Azerbaijan does not actively project itself as an ideological or civilizational alternative to Iran, nor does it seek to export its political system across borders. Its symbolic significance for Tehran arises not from intentional competition, but from structural contrast. The absence of revolutionary ideology, combined with a pragmatic foreign policy and selective security partnerships, produces an implicit comparison that operates independently of Baku’s intentions (Cornell, 2017; Al-Monitor, 2021). This dynamic underscores the largely involuntary nature of Azerbaijan’s role in Iranian strategic imagination: it is not the product of ideological confrontation, but a byproduct of regional transformation in which proximity, cultural familiarity, and divergent political paths intersect in ways that destabilize established narratives.
Israeli–Azerbaijani cooperation further intensifies this symbolic dissonance. The stability and functional pragmatism of Baku’s relationship with Israel undermine one of the Islamic Republic’s central ideological claims — namely, the assumed incompatibility between Shi‘ite societies and the Jewish state (Inbar, 2018; Tasnim, 2021). In a period marked by internal legitimacy erosion, such contradictions acquire disproportionate psychological and political weight, amplifying regime sensitivity to external reference points that complicate binary ideological frameworks (Brookings Institution, 2023).
At the same time, this role is not cost-free for Azerbaijan. Close cooperation with Israel increases Baku’s exposure to regional escalation dynamics and complicates its long-standing balancing strategy vis-à-vis Iran. Heightened Iranian suspicion constrains diplomatic maneuverability and introduces persistent security risks that Azerbaijan must manage rather than eliminate (Al-Monitor, 2021). This underscores an important corrective to overly celebratory readings of the relationship: Azerbaijan’s position as a structurally inconvenient reference point is not a strategic objective, but a condition imposed by geography, history, and regional realignment.
Iran’s Internal Crisis and the Construction of External Threats
Iran’s domestic turmoil fundamentally reshapes the context in which external threats are perceived. Recent waves of mass protests have undermined the regime’s narrative of social consensus and exposed the limitations of repression as a universally effective governing tool (Reuters, 2026; BBC Persian, 2026).
Historically, the Islamic Republic has relied on the construction of external threats to consolidate internal cohesion and legitimize the expanding role of security institutions (Keddie, 2006). Under current conditions, however, this mechanism has become more rigid and less calibrated, increasingly dominated by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) at the expense of diplomatic pragmatism and strategic nuance (Dabashi, 2011; Financial Times, 2025).
Within this framework, Israel functions as a convenient explanatory anchor for domestic unrest, largely independent of empirical substantiation (Iran International, 2026; Al-Monitor, 2026). Azerbaijan is incorporated into this narrative not as an autonomous regional actor, but as a spatial and symbolic extension of a perceived encircling hostile infrastructure. Iranian media and security discourse increasingly frame the South Caucasus — and Azerbaijan in particular — as a vulnerable northern corridor through which external influence, technological penetration, and ideological contamination might flow (Fars News, 2026; Tasnim, 2026). Azerbaijan’s cultural proximity makes it a particularly potent reference point, one that cannot be easily dismissed as part of an abstract or distant “West.”
Conclusion: Reassessing Iran’s Northern Calculus
Viewed through an Iranian lens, Israeli–Azerbaijani cooperation reveals dynamics that remain obscured in conventional post-Soviet analyses. The 2020 Karabakh war demonstrated not only a shift in regional military balances but also the vulnerability of entrenched geopolitical arrangements to external technological intervention (CSIS, 2020; Eisenstadt, 2021).
Equally significant is the symbolic dimension. Azerbaijan’s trajectory — secular, historically embedded in Shi‘ite culture, and pragmatically engaged with Israel — challenges the ideological assumptions underpinning Iran’s political model (Vakil, 2020). Amid an internal legitimacy crisis, such external reference points acquire heightened strategic significance.
This anxiety does not imply an inevitable turn toward escalation. It coexists with pragmatic diplomacy and continued efforts to manage relations with Baku. Yet the divergence between Iran’s restrained external behavior and its increasingly securitized strategic imagination introduces long-term risks of misperception and miscalculation.
For Israel, cooperation with Azerbaijan does not guarantee regional stability. On the contrary, it introduces new variables into an already fragile security environment, reshaping threat perceptions and escalation dynamics beyond the Middle East (Rubin, 2022). Azerbaijan, in turn, must continuously balance the strategic benefits of this partnership against the diplomatic and security costs it entails.
Gershon Kogan is an Israeli-based researcher and analyst specializing in Iran and regional security, with a particular focus on the informational and cognitive dimensions of contemporary conflict. He holds a PhD in Iranian Studies from Moscow State University and combines academic training in philology with extensive professional experience in journalism and strategic communications. His research is grounded in systematic use of Persian-language primary sources and Iranian media.
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