Allies, not wards: how Baku is rewriting the terms of its partnership with Ankara

On October 14, 2026, flight J222 from Tel Aviv landed at Heydar Aliyev International Airport in Baku.

It was an ordinary AZAL Dreamliner on an ordinary route. The Azerbaijani carrier flies dozens like it, and nothing about this one would have caught an observer’s eye. The passengers came down the stairs. But one of them was the president of Israel, and that flight became one of the stumbling blocks in relations between two allies that count each other as their closest.

Isaac Herzog was on his way to the summit of the Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia (CICA). Turkey has long barred Israeli government aircraft from its airspace. In November 2024 the ban forced Herzog to cancel a trip to Baku, and this spring he reached Kazakhstan by an eight-hour detour. This time he booked a seat on a scheduled flight.

As a Turkish official acknowledged to Middle East Eye, Ankara cannot demand the passenger list of every airliner in transit, and Baku did not tell it who was on board. By chance or not, the aircraft bore the name Shusha, the city where Ankara and Baku signed their declaration on allied relations in 2021. A plane carrying that name flew a guest Turkey did not wish to see across Turkish skies and landed in a capital that had not asked its closest ally for permission.

For Baku, the visit itself held no paradox. The guest came from a country with which Azerbaijan has kept steady relations for more than thirty years, and which supplied it with arms at a time when many other doors were closed.

The paradox lies elsewhere. The voices demanding that Baku reconsider those relations come not from the camp of its adversaries but from the house of a brother, the very brother that signed military agreements with Israel in the 1990s and is now rebuilding a railway into Armenia. The route of one scheduled airliner carries more political meaning than many of the statements made this autumn.

Two halves of one formula

Formally, the crisis began with a school uniform. Since September 21, Azerbaijani schools have banned clothing incompatible with the principle of secular education. In Turkey the rules were read as a hijab ban. Lawmakers from the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), Islamist outlets and Oktay Saral, chief adviser to the president, called on Baku to correct its mistake, and protests were held outside Azerbaijan’s diplomatic missions.

Baku’s response was unusually sharp, and most commentators saw a “family quarrel” that a phone call would settle. The call came on October 21, at the Turkish side’s initiative. But to see the autumn episode as nothing more than an emotional outburst between relatives is to miss the main point: for the first time in three decades, the partner that many regarded as the junior one publicly rewrote the terms of the alliance, and the other chose not to argue.

The formula “one nation, two states,” which Heydar Aliyev brought into political usage, worked for thirty years because both of its halves pointed in the same direction.

Yet it always held a hidden contradiction. The larger state tacitly read “one nation” as the right to speak for the whole, while “two states” left the smaller one the right to decide for itself. As long as the country lived with occupied territories, the first half prevailed: kinship was not only a synonym for regional security but also a powerful engine of economic rapprochement.

In the autumn of 2026, however, the two halves came apart, and it was no accident that on October 13 the ruling New Azerbaijan Party saw fit to remind everyone that the formula means one nation and two independent states.

The price of alliance

International relations theory described this mechanism long ago. In 1991 the American political scientist James Morrow showed that an asymmetric alliance is an exchange: the nominally junior partner gains security, while the stronger one gains autonomy, that is, influence over its partner’s policy. Such a bargain holds as long as the junior partner’s need for protection is acute.

After 2020 and 2023, Azerbaijan restored control over its territory. Its need for an external guarantee fell sharply, and with it fell the price Baku is willing to pay for outside support. Part of Turkey’s political class keeps billing at the old rate. Seen in this light, President Ilham Aliyev’s remark on October 2 that the country bought its weapons with its own money, and not cheaply, reads not as a reproach but as a statement of account: a deal paid for in full, and then some, creates no political debt.

The second part of the explanation belongs to Glenn Snyder, who described the security dilemma within alliances. Every ally, he wrote, balances between two fears: being abandoned and being entrapped in other people’s conflicts.

Until 2020, Baku feared the first. Today the main risk is the second. Ankara is waging several difficult confrontations at once: with Israel, in the Eastern Mediterranean, and with Washington over F-35 fighter jets. Azerbaijan is party to none of them and has no intention of importing someone else’s enmity.

Alliance obligations do not include a duty to share an ally’s enemies, and no treaty, the Shusha Declaration included, makes hostility transitive. That is why the episode of September 24, when the Azerbaijani delegation stayed in the General Assembly hall during Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech, should be read not as a demonstration but as a refusal to be entrapped.

An unequal exchange

There is an asymmetry in this dispute that Ankara prefers not to notice. The link between Turkish-Armenian normalization and a settlement between Baku and Yerevan dates to April 1993, when Turkey closed its border with Armenia after the occupation of Kalbajar, almost a decade before the AKP came to power.

Azerbaijan’s relations with Israel are nearly as old. Diplomatic ties were established on April 7, 1992, Israel has been buying Azerbaijani oil since the late 1990s, and Israeli arms reached Baku while Washington kept it under the restrictions of Section 907 of the Freedom Support Act.

Ankara is now revising one of these lines itself, while Baku is expected to abandon the other. The difference between them is fundamental. The closed border was Turkey’s commitment to Azerbaijan; Baku’s tie to Israel was never a commitment to Turkey. What is more, it developed in parallel with the Turkish-Israeli military partnership sealed by an agreement in February 1996. When one partner is expected to give up something it never promised, while the other revises what it promised itself, the arrangement is hard to call an equal exchange, and harder still to call brotherly.

The right to decide

The subject of the dispute is no less telling. Where the line between religion and state runs is something each country decides for itself. Turkey took decades to reach its own answer. In May 1999 the lawmaker Merve Kavakçı was forced out of the parliamentary chamber for wearing a headscarf, and the bans in universities and the civil service were lifted only between 2010 and 2013, under Erdoğan. No one from outside hurried Ankara or dictated its decision.

Azerbaijan has reached its own answer and is entitled to the same respect. Secularism here is not a Soviet relic. The Azerbaijan Democratic Republic was the first parliamentary republic in the Muslim East, and in 1919 it granted women the right to vote, before the United States did. Baku is not alone on this question. Kazakhstan has long banned religious dress in schools, and its authorities reaffirmed the rule this September. It was not Baku that ended up on the margins of the Turkic world in this dispute, but the religious-political discourse of part of Turkey’s ruling party.

Baku also has its own memory, paid for in blood, of where religious politics inspired from abroad can lead. On November 26, 2015, in Nardaran, 25 kilometers from the capital, a police operation against the Muslim Unity Movement ended with six people dead, two of them police officers. According to the official account of the Interior Ministry and the Prosecutor General’s Office, the movement sought to overthrow the constitutional order and build a state governed by sharia. For a society that lived through Nardaran, the school uniform is a matter of security, not of fashion. And when pressure on this question comes from outside, whoever applies it, Baku answers the same way.

The Turkic world and the Middle Corridor

This changes the meaning of the Organization of Turkic States summit to be held in Ankara on October 30. The chairmanship will pass there from Azerbaijan to Turkey, and the question will be broader than bilateral relations: will the organization become a community of sovereign secular states, or a space for the ideological influence of one of them? Tellingly, on October 15, when Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan pointedly walked out of the CICA summit hall as Herzog began to speak, no other Turkic state followed him. The published lists of those who left include Iran, Pakistan, Kuwait, the Palestinian delegation and, by some accounts, several other Arab and Asian countries, but not Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan or Kyrgyzstan. Kazakhstan’s president met Herzog in Baku during those same days. Turkish commentators who reproached Azerbaijan because its delegation stayed in the General Assembly hall for Netanyahu’s speech in September chose not to notice that Kazakhstan stayed too. The Turkic world does not want to turn the Israeli question into a loyalty test, and the only capital trying to do so has turned out to be Ankara. It will have to answer with an agenda rather than with words.

Finally, geography. In Ankara, the opening of the South Caucasus (the peace process between Baku and Yerevan, the TRIPP route, the Kars-Gyumri railway) is often seen as a way to reduce dependence on Azerbaijan. In reality, the opposite is true. Every new route east of Turkey leads to the Caspian and Central Asia, and the way there runs through Azerbaijan: the Middle Corridor has no alternative crossing. Experts commenting on the crisis to AFP have pointed to Baku’s energy leverage and its role as a gateway to Central Asia. Robert Keohane once distinguished between states that merely adapt to the international system and those able to shape it. In six years, Azerbaijan has moved from the first category to the second.

The brothers have grown up

This autumn has a prehistory that Ankara would do well to remember. Baku has faced outside pressure more than once, and its Turkish critics are far from the first. One of many examples came in November 2023, when U.S. Assistant Secretary of State James O’Brien told Congress that after the September events in Karabakh nothing would be “normal” with Azerbaijan until there was progress on the peace track. Baku responded by refusing to attend the meeting of the Azerbaijani and Armenian foreign ministers that Washington had scheduled for November 20.

Two months later, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe declined to ratify the credentials of Azerbaijan’s delegation, and Azerbaijan suspended its participation in the Assembly. Not one of these campaigns changed a single decision in Baku. Ilham Aliyev has said in peacetime and in wartime alike that Azerbaijan knows very well what to do and when, and that formula was never addressed to anyone in particular. The Turkish critics of the school uniform have joined a line in which Washington, Brussels and Strasbourg stood before them. That line leads nowhere.

The classic crisis of an asymmetric alliance looks different. In 1956, during the Suez crisis, the senior partner, Washington, put the junior one, London, in its place. When Britain, together with France and Israel, sent troops into Egypt after the nationalization of the Suez Canal, the Eisenhower administration forced it to retreat by putting pressure on sterling. Prime Minister Anthony Eden resigned, and Britain remembered the lesson for decades.

In the autumn of 2026, the script was reversed. On October 21, the leader of the partner many considered the senior one picked up the phone himself. And on October 25, Oktay Saral, the very adviser whose call on Baku to correct its mistake had reignited the crisis on October 12, confirmed to the Turkish journalist Talat Atilla that he had left his post on the president’s instructions, and acknowledged that this was apparently connected to his statements about Azerbaijan.

Five days earlier, Middle East Eye, citing sources, had reported that Baku was seeking his dismissal. The call and the dismissal did not end the crisis; they recorded its outcome. Hans Morgenthau held that what sustains an alliance is a community of interests, not ideological or emotional affinity. The end of the romantic period in Azerbaijani-Turkish relations does not mean the end of brotherhood. It means the brothers have grown up.

Grown brothers live in separate houses. They consult rather than command, and that is precisely why they remain brothers.

In the formula “one nation, two states,” the second half now weighs as much as the first.

Read in other languages:

Союз без опеки: как Баку пересматривает условия партнерства с Анкарой

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