Azerbaijan’s strategic position at the crossroads of Europe and Asia establishes it as a key player in regional initiatives, such as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the Middle Corridor, and now, increasingly, the Caspian-Black Sea-EU Green Energy Corridor. This geographical advantage, coupled with a robust infrastructure that includes critical ports, railways, and highways, enables Azerbaijan to position itself as a trade and economic tie across different regions. Notable advancements like the improvements at the Port of Baku (Alat) and the renovation of the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway underline the country’s commitment to enhancing and streamlining its transportation network, aligning with its economic interests by opening new avenues for trade, investment, and cooperation.

In February 2025, I had the opportunity to visit Syria, which recently underwent a rapid regime change. Although this country may be considered far from the South Caucasus at first glance, it is much closer than is commonly believed. This underlines the broader point made by Svante Cornell in the Fall 2020 edition of Baku Dialogues that the “geopolitics of Eurasia and the Middle East have merged.” Today, Syria can be of great value to Azerbaijan.

From 22 to 24 April 2025, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev paid a state visit to China at the invitation of his counterpart Xi Jinping. This milestone event came amid heightened geopolitical and geoeconomic locomotion as well as against the background of a flurry of diplomatic activity centered on Azerbaijan. In the month of April, there were visits by the President of Iran (28 April), the OSCE Secretary General (25 April), the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-President of the European Commission (25 April), the President of Georgia (16 April), and the President of Germany (2 April), as well as several visits by cabinet ministers and senior officials of intergovernmental organizations.

Over the past three years, geopolitical shifts in Europe and the Silk Road region have significantly impacted global supply chains, triggering heated debates on the liability of various transport routes. One of the few whose standing has increased in the past few years is the Middle Corridor multimodal transport route (Trans-Caspian International Route), coming to be seen as one of the most viable options for unhindered cargo flow in the East-West direction. As a geopolitical project, the Middle Corridor is a unique route as it is solely controlled by the participating countries themselves, without the explicit influence of major outside powers.

The second term of Donald Trump’s administration unlocked a period of a worldwide strategic uncertainty and ambiguity. The present-day focus of international attention is centering now on the evolving progression in the U.S.-EU-Russia triangle, mainly in relation to the European War (a.k.a. war in Ukraine). That “grand matter” shades other regions of the globe, which, nonetheless, remain entirely exposed to the direct and unintended effects of the unfolding dynamics. One of such areas is the Silk Road region—the geoeconomic and geocultural amalgam of Central Asia, the Caspian Sea, and the South Caucasus, which stretches along the ancient East-West trade route. This IDD Analytical Policy Memo evaluates how the condensing “strategic haze” at the global level and the growing polarization between major powers can affect the Silk Road region locus and forge both challenges and opportunities to the region’s actors.

An emotional scene from the 2008 Iranian television series Prophet Joseph, where Joseph is reunited with his father Jacob after years of separation, evoked a deep sense of longing in Azerbaijani father Gameddin Mammadov. Overcome with emotion, he reflected on his own sorrow and voiced his hope, saying, “One day, I will reunite with my son like this.” Gameddin Mammadov was the father of 18-year-old Ikhtiyar Mammadov, his only son, who went missing in 1993 during the First Karabakh War in the battles in the Aghdara district. Tragically, Gameddin passed away without ever fulfilling his dream of reuniting with his son.

The inauguration of Donald Trump’s second presidential administration in the United States on 20 January 2025 opened a period of turbulence, uncertainty, and unpredictability at the worldwide level. Shifting strategic paradigms, fluctuating international alliances and new situational alignments, tariff wars, cynical transactional deal offers, non-diplomatic pressures, bombastic claims, and many other factors are reflecting the tectonic rearrangement of the global security landscape.

Two months have passed since the collapse of Bashar Assad’s rule in Damascus. Syria starts progressively disappearing from the news headlines. Fewer “white noises” generated by media makes it possible to construct initial conclusions and intermediate projections related to potential developments in Syria and around it. The most fundamental conclusion is that after the fall of the ancien regime, the Syrian crisis is not over; it is just transforming into the next stage and taking different form. Therefore, the vast cast of domestic and external actors engaged in the Syrian plot reassesses their roles, goals, and objectives in the new environment that emerged after December 2024. One of the key actors in the play is Türkiye.

Azerbaijan has put forward several initiatives to be a platform for cooperation between the Global South and the Global North by increasing its interaction with developing countries. As President Ilham Aliyev stated on 20 July 2024 at the Shusha Global Media Forum: “We launch initiatives. We now actively work with developing countries in order to build bridges between the Global South and the Global North. Our advantage is that we’ve been chairing the Non-Aligned Movement for four years.” As an active supporter of multilateralism (in the past few months, Azerbaijan successfully organized COP29, took over the chairmanship of CICA, and completed its chairmanship of GUAM) that pursues an independent foreign policy posture and is located at the crossroads of flagship connectivity projects, Azerbaijan aims to strengthen its standing as a bridge between East and West.

Judging from the standpoint of its national interests as it itself understood them at the time, Russia lost this war at the moment its missiles first hit Kyiv in the early morning of 24 February 2022. Yet, paradoxically, there is no other way left for Russia except to endure and reiterate the same pattern over and over again in anticipation of a different outcome. Attacking Ukraine was a war of choice. As such, the Kremlin (theoretically) still can reassess its course and agree to negotiate a reasonable compromise whilst finding a way to claim a “triumph” for its domestic audience.