61. PfP Enters its Fourth Decade: A Journey Undertaken with Azerbaijan
- Author:
- Rick Fawn
- Publication Date:
- 01-2025
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Baku Dialogues
- Institution:
- ADA University
- Abstract:
- Azerbaijan was one of the first countries to join NATO’s major outreach program, Partnership for Peace (PfP), upon its establishment at the Alliance’s summit in Brussels on 10-11 January 1994—a year that also marked the fifty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the Alliance itself. This happened on 4 May 1994, when President Heydar Aliyev came to Brussels to sign the Partnership for Peace Framework Document, an event that took place about a year after he returned to Baku to begin pulling the country back from the edge of total collapse. Surely there was an element of deliberate sequencing involved, for the very next day after signing this document, on 5 May 1994, a final agreement was reached on a Russianbrokered ceasefire to end the First Karabakh War between Armenia and Azerbaijan. And only four months later, in September 1994, the negotiations on the Contract of the Century were successfully concluded that would facilitate the export westwards of Azerbaijan’s hydrocarbons rather than through Russia. This last development had been predicated—and again unlikely to be coincidental timing—by the Clinton Administration’s abandonment of its “Russia First” policy, which had elevated Moscow’s interests above those of other post-Soviet successor states.
- Topic:
- Foreign Policy, NATO, Partnerships, and Geopolitics
- Political Geography:
- Eurasia and Azerbaijan