Since the strike on Iranian nuclear facilities, Donald Trump has begun publicly toying with the idea of regime change. The idea defies the calamitous and consistent record of failure of the West’s Middle East interventions. And even if the neoconservative fever dreams of remaking Iran into a Jeffersonian democracy somehow come true, such an outcome will not, in the long run, fundamentally correct the fading position of the United States. Nor will it provide increased overall long-term opportunities for the Israeli state to endlessly expand its influence. Any removal of Iran from the regional chessboard will create a power vacuum that is, at best, temporary.

It was only last month that, while addressing a crowd in Riyadh, Trump renounced the missionary non-government organizations and liberal internationalists whose promises — that non-Western societies can be refashioned by the West — have brought so much ruin. Trump’s welcome invocation of realism now seems to have been forgotten — just as realism becomes more necessary than ever.

The unspoken context, one that the White House would do well to heed, is that Middle Eastern countries have become wealthier and more powerful over recent years. Like China and other rivals, these countries have each chipped away at American hegemony. The US economy has grown, but these countries have grown faster. Once dominated in singular fashion by the United States, the world is now becoming polycentric. This is as true in the Middle East as in other parts of the world, such as South and East Asia, where it is increasingly clear that multipolarity reigns.

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What this means is that any power vacuum will be filled with local actors before the great powers arrive. An immediate neighbor can be a permanent presence in a way a distant power never could. The local power maintains an advantage both in morale and logistics and therefore can outlast outside forces. In international relations this is often referred to as “escalation dominance”, and it often occurs in places like Ukraine, where Russia will always be more committed to its near-abroad than the United States could be for Eastern Europe. In the Middle East, escalation dominance will be held by those nearer to Iran than the US.

Should the Iranian regime become critically weakened, the true victor would be Turkey. Turkey has much to gain from present tensions. It is strongly committed to pursuing its regional self-interest; it has a large domestic military-industrial complex to satisfy; and its large economy gives it much to gain from trade with neighbors such as Iran. Turkey’s only disadvantage compared with Israel is its lack of nuclear deterrent, but Middle Eastern powers, having just seen the consequences of not having a nuclear deterrent, will now become even more interested in acquiring one. While Iran and Israel damage and discredit each other regionally, Turkey is perfectly positioned to pick up the pieces as both a diplomatic arbiter and as the largest state in immediate proximity to Iran.

A naive faith common among many North Americans and Europeans today is that alliance networks hold some kind of ideological and cultural power that can turn members into perpetual friends. History decisively disproves this. Take the example of democratic Greek city states warring with each other; or the revolutionary republics of the Enlightenment (France and the United States) cutting their alliance almost immediately over divergent interests; or the British and American role in toppling nascent democratic rule in Iran itself in 1953. Alliances are temporary and ultimately interest based. Neither Turkey’s status in NATO, nor its close partnership with Azerbaijan, a state with a tight military relationship with Israel, would provide meaningful stumbling blocks to a growing security competition between Ankara and Tel Aviv. Iran, after all, won the American-led Iraq War; why shouldn’t Turkey win the Israeli-Iranian one? Israel lacks the capability to occupy all these nations and handle an ever-growing number of proxies that could facilitate endless expansion.

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If the Iranian government falls, many Arab states will attempt to maximize their own autonomy against both Turkey and Israel. Some will seek the protection of one against the other, intensifying the rivalry of two powers whose previously buried hostility no longer has a common foe to keep it in check. Long-lasting orders of peace exist elsewhere, in forms such as the “postwar order” of Europe, but this was made possible by overwhelming American (and Soviet) power. Such a dynamic that does not exist in the Middle East today, which lacks the conditions for any order of regional hegemony. Should Iranian society fracture among ethnic or regional lines, this competition will only be heightened. And Israel’s distance from Iran means its strategic operations would most likely be operating at a relative disadvantage in a competition between Turkey, some Arab states, and perhaps Pakistan and Russia. Azerbaijan might even attempt to increase its control over the Azeri-majority northwest of the country. Armenia, likewise, would lose its only reliable foreign backer and have to draw closer to Moscow as a necessity.

It is possible, albeit very improbable, that the unlikely dreams of the regime-change advocates come to pass. Iran, in this scenario, is able to draw upon its internal cultural cohesion and its general populace’s disdain for its theocratic elite, thus making a successful transition to a new and less fanatical state. But this will not change the long-term calculation of multipolar power diffusion. Iranian civilization and statehood predate the 1979 revolution, the rise of European global power, and even Islam itself. Iran is ultimately a regionally-anchored civilizational power made up of the shared cultural experiences of a proud and influential people. Whether it is governed by a theocracy, monarchy, democracy, or any other form of government, that will not change so long as there exists a state strong enough to keep the Iranian plateau secure. And this new state, eventually, will be a regional power again. The current Iranian government’s monomaniacal Israel fixation may disappear, but its interests will not. Even if many in the populace celebrate the fall of the government, the real and obvious danger of Israeli influence undermining the sovereignty of Iran will be apparent for all to see. Such a state will do its utmost to ensure a similar decapitation strike will not occur again. As a result, this state will seek to project regional power and perhaps even revive its nuclear program.

This prospective Iranian state would be less ideological than its existing incarnation and more national interest-based. This more secular Iran would be freed from ideological commitments such as those to Palestinian liberation or the bringing forth of the “Hidden Imam”, a figure promised in the apocalyptic eschatology of some strains of Shi’ism. If anything, a secular Iran would be more capable of building alliance networks, garnering foreign sympathy, and deftly navigating the waters of diplomacy and development in such a way as to prevent the ever-frustrated US-Israeli quest for hegemony. Without a theocratic Shia Iran to hold as bogeyman, Israel and the US would find that the other regional states would pivot their foreign policy accordingly, adjusting towards a balance of power to counteract Israeli ambition. With less archaic and ideological posturing, the Middle East would be a region of hard-nosed realism.

Trends may come and go, but security competition remains eternal. Iran remains a country that sits at a vital junction in the Eurasian landmass. It arguably holds a balance of power that keeps the region out of singular great power control. It may or may not be unwise in the short term to topple such a government. But Iranian civilization will surely outlive this regime just as it outlived the others that have ruled it before. And Iran, in any form, will always act to prevent any form of hegemony over its near-abroad.

Tel Aviv and Washington can try all they like to upset this dynamic, but their efforts are unlikely to pay long-term benefits. Israel, in the end, is going to have to take its place as just one of the regional nodes of influence rather than as a singular domineering force. The United States, likewise, must restrain its ambitions in the region. The era of global crusades is over. For the West, the project of the future is to accommodate the new regionalism and the failure of American-imposed globalization.

Armenia’s leaders believed it was their special connection to the land that secured their 1994 victory in the First Nagorno-Karabakh War against Azerbaijan. They thought they could win another one too, in 2020, pushing for maximalist demands while failing to obtain a reliable ally in either Russia or the West. They substituted diplomacy and military strategy with dreams of romantic nationalism.

In the Eighties, as the Soviet empire entered its death spiral, a movement for the rights of the majoritarian Armenians in autonomous Nagorno-Karabakh within Soviet Azerbaijan was gaining momentum. The Karabakh movement believed ethnic Armenians had a right to live on their ancestral land after years of harassment and discrimination. But the Soviet Azerbaijanis saw it as separatism, and a crackdown followed.

Rapidly spreading nationalisms turned neighbour against neighbour. In Azerbaijan, Armenians were killed in the streets in a series of pogroms. Homes were looted and victims were raped, murdered and burnt alive by mobs. When the USSR collapsed, in 1992 the two newly established nations declared war.

The Armenians prevailed, securing control over the region and forcing nearly half a million Azerbaijanis from the seven occupied districts adjacent to Nagorno-Karabakh. It was the largest of several exoduses happening in both directions. And in 1994, after a ceasefire was agreed, the smaller, poorer, land-locked Armenia emerged victorious. Even though Armenia’s occupation of the seven districts was a violation of international law, all attempts at reconciliation failed. After years of mutual enmity, pogroms and atrocities on both sides, there was no trust left.

Levon Ter-Petrossian, the first President of independent Armenia and leader of the Karabakh movement, wanted to give the occupied territories back. But he was toppled in 1998 by hardline ministers who rejected the compromise. Nationalist ideas, brewing for decades, burst into the open and the new uncompromising rulers entered an alliance with the previously banned Armenian Revolutionary Federation. It said that the seven districts around Karabakh were historic Armenian lands; they had been liberated, not occupied.

 The Armenians’ “greatest error” was “to give in to a fatal hubris of thinking they could create a ‘Greater Armenia’ on territory emptied of the people who had lived there”, wrote the historian Ronald Grigor Suny. The irredentist ideology which was legitimised in the Nineties would be Armenia’s downfall.

Meanwhile, revisionism took over in both nations’ academia where the study of history was hijacked and “transformed into political ideology… to justify mass violence”. In Azerbaijan, “historians became soldiers of the head of state”. While their defeat in the war caused a wide-spread trauma among ordinary people, on the state level, it led to a policy of “systematic hatred towards Armenians”, according to a European Parliament resolution.

But if Baku’s defeat gave way to mass trauma and state-level hatred, Yerevan’s victory allowed for mass ignorance. Outside fringe nationalist groups, very few actively embraced the occupation. Many simply did not know their country was occupying lands whose pre-war population was majority Azerbaijani. A tiny minority of intellectuals on both sides, though, condemned their side’s atrocities and called for reconciliation. In response, Azerbaijan arrested the critics, and it continues to do so. In Armenia, peaceniks were simply ignored. Seen as hippie lunatics in a region where might makes right, they were dismissed by analysts convinced of their “pragmatic” interests and “realist” strategies.

But the irony is that self-proclaimed realists were promoting an irredentist fantasy. It is not just that there was never any moral justification for the occupation of the seven districts. There was never a chance Armenia would be allowed to get away with it. “Despite the diplomatic efforts of different administrations, the Armenian side never managed to get the international community to endorse its position,” the historian and diplomat Jirair Libaridian told me in 2020.

The political hardliners who had pushed Ter-Petrossian out soon realised there was no other choice but compromise. Serzh Sargsyan, a former Karabakh commander, was one of them. Once President in 2008, he engaged in serious negotiations and put forward a plan that would include an immediate return of five of the seven occupied districts. “I was ready to be labelled a traitor as long as I could solve the issue,” he told me in 2021.

The West and Russia were supportive of the plan, but Azerbaijan showed no interest. And before the deal was even put on the table, Sargsyan’s time was up. Mass opposition rallies paralysed the capital and forced him to resign. The leader of the protests, a little-known MP called Nikol Pashinyan, would win a landslide election. And he became the most popular leader in Armenia’s independent history — living in a modest flat and driving an old car, he appeared like a man of the people. His call for an anti-corruption crackdown appeared to herald a new era.

Internationally, he decided to do things differently, too. Appointing a failed cigar entrepreneur as his top foreign policy adviser, not only did he poke Russia left and right, but he endorsed the old Karabakh nationalism. Worse even, Pashinyan’s vision of the conflict was shaped by the nationalist propaganda of the old regime. He cited conspiracy theories promoted by his predecessor’s mouthpieces and led a rally under nationalist slogans in Karabakh itself. His cabinet sponsored construction in the occupied districts and threatened to take more of Azerbaijan’s lands.

There was little doubt as to what was coming next. While Azerbaijan was buying Bayraktar drones and holding unprecedented drills with the Turkish army, Armenia was oblivious of the sorry state of its own military. Moreover, Armenians believed that they would find support in the West, encouraged by such signs as the country of the year title bestowed upon them by The Economist. In the worst case, they hoped that Russia, as their formal ally, would forgive their trespasses and come to their rescue. But Armenia’s leadership was deluded.

In the war that followed, in the autumn of 2020, the Armenian army was all but annihilated. Azerbaijan managed to retake the seven occupied districts and around half of Nagorno-Karabakh itself, driving tens of thousands of its residents out. In just 44 days, up to 4,000 Armenians were killed. It is a percentage of population comparable to Ukraine’s losses in the ongoing war.

Unsurprisingly, Russia refused to interfere, and the West showed even less interest. In the end, Putin drafted a ceasefire agreement and dispatched 2,000 of his troops to serve as peacekeepers in what was left of Armenian-held Karabakh. And, three years later, with Russia distracted by its invasion of Ukraine, Azerbaijan launched a military operation against the remainder of Nagorno-Karabakh. As the Armenian population fled, Russian peacekeepers stood by and so did the Armenian leadership.

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A century of tragedies culminated in this. “With the carelessness of inexperienced and ignorant men we did not know what forces Turkey had mustered on our frontiers,” Armenia’s first Prime Minister Kajaznuni wrote in 1923 of the fall of the first independent republic, and his verdict largely stands true today. The Armenian elites, Kajaznuni complained a century ago, failed to see that their cause “was an incidental and trivial phase for the Russians, so trivial that, if necessary, they would trample on our corpses without a moment’s hesitation”.

In April 2023, Pashinyan made a similar confession. He told the Parliament he was “guilty of not surrendering lands”, a decision that “resulted in thousands of victims”. After presiding over a defeat, he was disabused of nationalist notions and said he would pursue “a peace agenda”.

But a year after the fall of Karabakh, the peace between the two neighbours still has not materialised. With the tables now fully turned, Azerbaijan has little incentive to compromise. It is both stronger militarily and more important globally, with its oil reserves and natural gas deals with both Russia and the EU, as well as close cooperation with Israel.

In Turkey, Azerbaijan has a powerful and steadfast ally, something that Armenia lacks altogether. Whatever hopes it put in Russia, the fall of Karabakh buried them for good. But its dramatic turn to the West is a bold and dangerous gamble: overly dependent on Russian money, tourists, and natural gas, Armenia is playing a risky game.

Meanwhile, nationalist dogmas still dominate the conversation. For many, the role that the occupation and mistaken policies played in Armenia’s troubles are still taboo. Instead, the government blames everything on Russia, hoping to find a sympathetic audience in the West. Some point to the Biden Administration’s broken promise to prevent the expulsion of Armenians from Karabakh, while for others the European Union is to blame for cosying up to Baku and its gas exports. Finally, many are bitter with Israel, as it became a leading arms supplier to Azerbaijan in recent years. But very few mention Armenia’s hubris.

Over the past 30 years, various options safeguarding Armenian presence in Karabakh were on the table, but they were never good enough. “Freedom or death — we did not see a different option. So we chose death,” wrote the journalist Tatul Hakobyan. And, for small nations tempted by the phantoms of a glorious past, that should sound a warning.

But now, on the other side of that lonely road, lies a construction site. “There will be 38 buildings here, with over a thousand apartments,” Araz Imanov, a senior advisor to the Azerbaijani president, tells me. They will provide homes for people internally displaced in the Nineties. The project is part of a huge, government-led reconstruction effort — one that could serve as a blueprint, when the time comes, for the rebuilding of Ukraine.

Even after peace is declared, the scars of war zones make them hard to rebuild. A dozen or so metres from the edge of the road, there are signs warning of the presence of landmines — a legacy of the illegal military occupation of the town, which only ended after the Second Karabakh War in 2020. “That’s why it took us a long time, almost a month, to get in,” Imanov says.

When the authorities finally found safe passage into the town, they discovered houses that no longer had roofs, window frames or doors. They had been torn apart by hand rather than artillery. Everything, down to the copper wiring, was stripped away by occupiers and shipped over the border to Armenia, to be sold as building materials. The most well-preserved building is a former publishing house with an ornate doorway, flanked by two stone columns: a reminder of how culture, and commerce, used to flourish here.

“For 30 years, the Armenians claimed that these territories belonged to them,” says Imanov with a hint of sarcasm. The areas were given new Armenian names, and “their prime minister made statements claiming that they’re not even a separate territory but a part of Armenia itself. Yet this is the way that they treated the lands that they claimed to be their own.”

Azerbaijan’s intentions, however, couldn’t be more different. Cities that were destroyed in the first war will be rebuilt from scratch. Domestic refugees — of which there are 650,000 — will be given fully-furnished homes financed by the state, free of charge. Private sector businesses will be incentivised to invest in what the Azerbaijanis call “the liberated territories” — an area roughly equivalent in size to the state of Qatar — with tax breaks and customs duty exemptions. Dubbed “The Big Return”, this is a huge nation-building mission comparable to Roosevelt’s New Deal.

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Already, the progress made since the end of the war is remarkable. In April, when I visited Karabakh, only the skeletal outlines of the new apartment blocks had begun, but on the edge of town, the glistening Fuzuli International Airport is already in operation. Construction began just two months after the end of the Second Karabakh War, in January 2021; by September that year, it had already accommodated its first test flight. Meanwhile, hundreds of miles of newly-asphalted roads have been built in the formerly occupied territories. A railway linking Karabakh to the capital, Baku, which sits on the shores of the Caspian Sea, is already under construction.

The largest urban settlement in the liberated territories is Aghdam. Before the First Karabakh War, it was home to around 37,000 mostly ethnic Azeri population people. Nowadays, it’s known as “the Hiroshima of the Caucasus”, because it looks like it’s been hit by a nuclear bomb. The Azerbaijani government plans to rebuild the town from the ground up because the ruination is so total that there is nothing left to salvage. The same is true of Ukrainian cities including Bakhmut and Mariupol, which might one day be inspired by The Big Return.

Before anything can be built on newly liberated land, though, that land needs to be free of explosives. Decades of military occupation by Armenian forces turned south-western Azerbaijan into one of the most heavily landmined territories on the planet; according to the Halo Trust, “there have been more landmine accidents per capita in Karabakh than anywhere else in the world”. However, Ukraine is now in danger of taking this unfortunate title. Last September, the Ukrainian government estimated that 160,000km² of land may be “contaminated” by landmines and other unexploded ordnance — an area more than 13 times the size of the entire liberated territories of Azerbaijan.

“After the war, people wanted to go back to see their villages or visit cemeteries, and this is when the majority of [landmine] accidents happened,” says Samir Poladov, the deputy chairman of the Azerbaijan National Agency for Mine Action [ANAMA]. Founded in 1998, the agency both trains minesweepers and teaches the local population to avoid landmines, using everything from dogs to drones to locate them, Soon, it will begin using giant African rats, which have been trained to sniff out explosive substances.

Yet even with all of these cutting-edge methods, the mine-clearing process is incredibly slow, because the Armenians have largely failed to supply Azerbaijan with maps marked with their locations. “Every square metre might potentially be dangerous,” says Poladov. “The best approach is to be like: okay, everything is mined, the only non-mined territories are the ones that have been cleared.” Azerbaijan reclaimed some 11,700km² of territory in 2020 and, in the first year of operations, cleared a little over 500km² of landmines. For context, de-mining Ukraine at that rate would take over three centuries.

Nevertheless, ANAMA provides a useful model for how Ukraine can deal with its landmine problem once the war is over. As part of the Big Return programme, Azerbaijanis who have been internally displaced since the Nineties, and who wish to return to their former homelands, have the option of applying to the agency for mine clearance training. After they successfully complete it, they are offered jobs with the agency and posted to the liberated territories. “They’re clearing their own land,” says Poladov. “They’re doing this job for themselves.”

The workers are motivated, then, but they are also cheap. “If we didn’t have this agency, our government would have to outsource this to international companies,” says Poladov, “which would be 10 times more expensive.” Instead, Azerbaijan has become a world leader in mine clearance: Poladov regularly shares his expertise at international conferences.

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There has been a great deal of debate about how the funds set aside by the European Commission to rebuild Ukraine should be distributed, given the corruption that has plagued the country. Western donors fretting that funds might be misspent by government authorities could alleviate their fears by financing Ukraine’s very own version of ANAMA. Because not only is de-mining the unavoidable first step in the long process of reconstruction, but employing Ukrainians to do it would also help frame national renewal as an empowering, patriotic mission.

Citizens invariably want to help rebuild. “After the war, I felt like I must do something for my country,” a young Azeri teacher tells me. She’s based in the town of Agali, which is located in the deep south-western corner of Azerbaijan, nestled between the borders of Armenia and Iran. It is the first urban settlement in the region to welcome back returnees that had been displaced in the Nineties; the first batch arrived last July. As of April this year, Agali is home to roughly 420 people who make up 86 families, all of which live free-of-charge in the several-dozen houses that have been built here at the state’s expense over the past two years.

The teacher I spoke to is one of the few residents who is not a returnee. She grew up on the other side of the country, in a military family; her patriotic duty drove her to apply for a teaching job in Agali. “People younger than me died [in the war],” she says. “The whole people feel a duty to do something with this land. That’s why we want to come here.”

Agali looks and feels like a plush gated community built around a suburban shopping centre. Driving past street after street of identikit, two-storey houses with white walls and green roofs, visitors will arrive at a centre that includes a well-stocked supermarket, bank and a restaurant serving Azerbaijani classics. Nearby is the school where our tour guide works, built to accommodate 360 students, which opened last September and still smells of freshly laid paint.

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“We lived in [the town of] Sumqayit, but we always carried a wish to return to our land,” one man in his early sixties tells me. He’s standing outside his identikit house with his wife and teenage son. “When we finally came back for the first time and received this place, we were moved.” The man’s family were forced to flee in the first war. Since returning, they’ve been employed as drivers for none other than ANAMA: their days are spent ferrying around de-mining experts, their equipment and the scraps of de-fused explosives that get unearthed from the surrounding land.

Rather than simply rebuilding what was once here, state urban planners have taken the opportunity to improve on the past. Agali is fully WiFi connected and entirely energy self-sufficient. Solar panels are fitted to the buildings and a hydroelectric dam has been built on a nearby river. Settlements under construction across the liberated territories will likewise be equipped with green technologies. Azerbaijan is rising from the ashes as a nation of the future, ready for the challenges of the 21st century.

It is a path that Ukraine could follow. Prior to the Russian invasion, the country had been held back by a sclerotic post-Soviet economy. Many Ukrainians have fled to more advanced economies — a million to Germany alone. To entice them to return, and to stem future brain drain, the new Ukraine, built on present-day battlefields, will need to be thoroughly modern. By the time Kyiv is ready to start thinking about making plans, The Big Return to Karabakh should be complete. Then, Azerbaijan’s own hard-won experiences can be put to good use, helping to rebuild a war zone.

Tensions between Iran and Azerbaijan have been rising since the start of the year. In March, the latter became the first country with a Shiite Muslim majority to open an embassy in Israel. Iran, having the largest Shiite majority of any nation, and being Israel’s historic geopolitical nemesis, did not approve. Nor did it approve, in 2020, when Israeli-made Harop drones proved crucial in helping drive the Azerbaijani military towards victory over Armenia in the shockingly underreported Second Nagorno-Karabakh War. Ties between Israel and Azerbaijan have grown increasingly close, and with Russia — traditionally the dominant regional power in the Caucasus — distracted by its engagement in Ukraine, Tehran fears that the balance of power is shifting in favour of Iran’s enemies.

Specifically, the Iranians are concerned that Azerbaijan might allow the Israeli military to use its territory as a launch pad — just as America feared Russia’s use of Cuba in the Cold War. The Azeris ruled out the possibility in March. But this has done little to calm tensions. Since January, a series of confrontations has driven relations between Iran and Azerbaijan to an all-time low that some fear could place them on the path to war.

Fazil Mustafa is a member of Azerbaijan’s parliament, and one of the nation’s most outspoken critics of Iran. The day before his nation opened its new Tel Aviv embassy, he was shot in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. Mustafa survived the assassination attempt, which the country’s foreign ministry appeared to blame on Tehran. Following his discharge from hospital, he emailed me to say there should be little doubt as to who orchestrated the attack against him. “All the suspicion and evidence obtained points directly to Iran,” wrote Mustafa, “because it doesn’t seem likely that such an act could have been committed against me from another source.”

It is difficult to independently verify these claims, which Iran denies. But, if true, it would be the second time this year that the country has attacked an Azerbaijani political target. In a separate incident, on January 27, a gunman stormed the country’s embassy in the Iranian capital, killing its head of security and wounding two others. Baku quickly suspended its diplomatic mission in Tehran and recalled its staff, although its consulates in other Iranian cities remained open. Azerbaijan’s President, Ilham Aliyev, has since blamed the Iranian government for the embassy attack. Tehran claims that the gunman was driven by “personal motivations”.

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A long history of enmity lies behind this tense relationship between the two nations. Although they both have predominantly Shiite populations, the Azeris are a Turkic people and Azerbaijan’s ethnic ties to Turkey have underpinned its foreign policy ever since it regained its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. The Republic of Azerbaijan’s founding president, Heydar Aliyev (father of the current leader), has previously described Azerbaijan and Turkey as “one nation, two states”. This irritates the Iranians, as Tehran sees Ankara as a regional rival.

Relations are further complicated by Iran’s marginalisation of its large Azeri minority. More ethnic Azeris live within Iran’s borders than in Azerbaijan itself: the community is estimated to number anywhere between 15 and 40 million people. They are the second-largest ethnic group in Iran, and are treated with great suspicion by the national government, which fears Azeri secessionism in the country’s North-West.

Iran accuses Azerbaijan of stoking separatist sentiment in the country, which Baku denies. But this has done little to calm nerves in Tehran. It was a similar — and similarly widely-ignored — geopolitical paranoia that drove Russia to invade Ukraine last year.  A failure to treat the Iranian threat more seriously could have similarly devastating consequences.

The more recent antagonism between Azerbaijan and Iran can largely be attributed to the changing geopolitical realities in the Caucasus since the brief war over Karabakh in 2020. Recognised as the sovereign territory of Azerbaijan under international law, Karabakh is home to a large ethnic Armenian minority and was illegally occupied by the Armenian military for more than a quarter of a century before being reclaimed by Baku. The 44-day conflict was suspended by a Russian-brokered ceasefire agreement, but a formal peace treaty has yet to be signed. The leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan were reported to be resuming talks in Brussels at the weekend.

Tehran enjoys close relations with Armenia, a nation often considered part of “Greater Iran”. Azerbaijan’s victory in Karabakh was, therefore, a setback for both nations: Azerbaijan reclaimed control over part of the highway that links Iran to Armenia, which is a critical trade route that also connects Tehran to the Black Sea and Russia. Azerbaijan has already imposed a steep tax on Iranian trucks carrying goods to Armenia, which it accuses of supplying separatists in Karabakh. Mustafa claims that, as a result of this new threat to its interests, Tehran is actively trying to sabotage the peace process in Karabakh.

“Iran is trying to conduct a very active policy in the South Caucasus. It acts with the idea of filling the vacuum created in the region after Russia’s war with Ukraine,” he writes. “Although Iran does not have the ability to influence the processes in the entire South Caucasus, it has made attempts to hinder the achievement of stability in the region and the conclusion of peace between Azerbaijan and Armenia.” Indeed, it is possible that Iran might provide military support to ethnic Armenian separatists; recent reports suggest that Tehran might supply this nation of “Greater Iran” with the same suicide drones it provided Russian forces in Ukraine.

Emboldened by its military victory in Karabakh — and a stockpile of high-grade Israeli arms — Baku appears unlikely to back down. Further escalation is possible, if not probable. Azerbaijan also knows that it can also rely on the support of its main ally, Turkey. The two countries have a mutual defense agreement in place and, assured by its membership of Nato, Ankara is unlikely to shy away from supporting the Azeris against the Iranians. Were that to occur, Moscow would feel obliged to step into the conflict. It is this risk of entanglement that makes the current standoff so dangerous.

Geopolitical alliances are key to preventing conflicts. They give smaller nations a degree of security against the threat posed by their larger, more malevolent neighbours. However, they can also have terrible consequences. They can cause a conflict to quickly cascade, as was the case in the Balkans in 1914: the Archduke was shot by a Bosnian Serb, which led to a standoff between Austria-Hungary and Serbia that later dragged in Russia before exploding into a world war.

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There are a number of reasons why there is a real danger of this in the Caucasus: unlike in Ukraine, where both regional and global powers have refrained from intervening directly against a nuclear-armed Russia, neither Turkey nor Iran are restrained by the danger of mutually-assured destruction. Israel, as a responsible actor that often operates by stealth, wouldn’t use a warhead against the Iranians. And, if Turkey’s military adventurism in the eastern Mediterranean, Syria, and northern Iraq, is anything to go by, Ankara looks unlikely to abandon one of its closest allies.

At the same time, a full-scale war between regional powers in the south Caucasus remains a worst-case scenario, says Michael Doran, the director of the Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East at the Hudson Institute in Washington D.C. “The likelihood of a direct military confrontation is probably limited,” Doran told me. “If a war were to actually break out between Azerbaijan and Iran it would risk bringing in Turkey and Israel against Iran and that, as a military alignment against Iran, is probably the thing Iran fears most.” Tehran would not be able to compete with their combined strength.

Tehran will also be hesitant to escalate the confrontation for fear of provoking an internal backlash from its Azeri minority. What’s more likely is that Iran will utilise more covert tactics to strike at Azerbaijan — tactics that give Tehran a degree of plausible deniability. It has form on this front, Iran has long used proxies to pursue its regional goals, most famously Hezbollah in Lebanon; it supports similar radical Shia elements in Azerbaijan. Mustafa claims that “Iran has allocated major funds for the spread of religious fundamentalism in the South Caucasus … it tries to use mosques, different groups, communities and individuals” to achieve these aims.

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With so much international attention focused on the war in Ukraine, this standoff in the south Caucasus has largely flown under the Western radar. Doran is particularly scathing of America’s failures to support the Azeris against Tehran: “This administration in Washington is not viewing Azerbaijan as a counter-balance to Iran,” he says. “That’s because it isn’t looking to counter Iran in any significant way, which is unfortunate.” America has not learned any lessons from Syria, where its failure to properly commit to intervention left the door open for Russia to step in and help Bashar al-Assad cling onto power.

But a war in the south Caucasus could set off a unfortunate chain of events. Since the invasion of Ukraine, Azerbaijan has emerged as a key alternative energy supplier to the EU: between 2021 and 2022, Baku’s gas exports to Europe increased from eight billion cubic meters to an estimated 11.5 billion, and that number is expected to rise to 20 billion by 2027. A military conflict would drastically damage Baku’s production and export capacity. Without Azerbaijan’s oil, European sanctions against Russia might become untenable. In other words, a conflict in the south Caucasus would strengthen Moscow.

Modern warfare is rarely an isolated battle between two states: it is to understand this fact that we teach the First World War. And what was true in the 20th century is even more true now, when our interconnected global economies allow the shockwaves of war to reverberate far away from the frontline. The energy crisis that arose in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine is a vivid recent example. From Washington, London, or Brussels, the Iran-Azerbaijan border might seem like a distant Eurasian hinterland — as the Donbas once did. But it is time we accepted that a faraway war can very quickly come home.

On a hillside overlooking the capital is Armenia’s last line of defence in the event of war. Squeezed between a junkyard and a Soviet-era apartment block is a dusty assault course littered with rusting cars, discarded water bottles and a replica rocket launcher. This is the training ground of Voma, a paramilitary group that prepares ordinary citizens to fight for the future of their country. That future is looking increasingly uncertain.

“Last week, we had just 15 people attending training,” says Nanée, a 24-year-old volunteer teaching first aid. “Now, we have more than 150. Old, young, men, women — everyone wants to know how to act in case there’s another invasion.”

Days before, on 13 September, Armenian towns and villages came under a heavy artillery barrage from neighbouring Azerbaijan, which lasted for two days. Baku insists its forces were attacked first, but after the blasts came its troops, pushing across the frontier and capturing territory inside Armenia in the most dramatic escalation since the two nations fought a bloody war in 2020. There are fears a humanitarian ceasefire could collapse at any moment.

At the heart of the conflict is the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh, which is situated within Azerbaijan’s internationally-recognised borders, but has been held since the fall of the USSR by ethnic Armenian separatists. Two years ago, Baku’s well-armed forces pushed past the barricades and across the minefields to take back swathes of territory in a shock-and-awe offensive. But Moscow swiftly intervened, brokering a peace deal that left the Karabakh Armenians in control of only around a third of the area.

This time, though, it’s different. Baku is insisting that Yerevan formally recognises its sovereignty over Nagorno-Karabakh and ending the three-decades-long stand-off over the region; Azerbaijan says it’s a matter of international law, while Armenians in the breakaway territory fear ethnic cleansing if they are abandoned. The sudden outbreak of hostility towards Armenia, which many see as a tactic to force a deal, has reportedly killed 105 Armenian troops and 71 Azerbaijanis.

To make matters worse, Moscow is refusing to play peacemaker. Armenia is formally an ally of Russia, as a member of the Moscow-led CSTO mutual defence pact. But its pleas for Kremlin support have fallen on deaf ears, with other member states like Kazakhstan ruling out sending troops to de-occupy the territory. Russia is clearly reluctant to spare any resources or manpower from its war in Ukraine, leaving the Armenians on their own.

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“My uncle was one of those killed in the shelling,” says 18-year-old Aram. He signed up to take part in civil defence training the next day, spending his evenings drilling with a heavy wooden mock assault rifle and running laps with other volunteers. “My parents have mixed feelings about it. They don’t want me to go to war and die — but my dad bought me my new uniform.”

Voma is dependent on donations of cash and military surplus gear from the public to train volunteers — many of whom then formally enlist. However, once they are part of the armed forces, many find there’s still not enough equipment to go around.

Lusine, 38, also decided to join up after going through civil defence training. “They gave me a list of everything I need to provide myself — a sleeping bag, a flashlight, a hunting knife, even a spoon. They’ll give me an AK-47 but, as a woman, being captured isn’t an option, so I need to get hold of a pistol as well and save a bullet for myself.”

Armenian society was shaken when reports surfaced days after the latest offensive about the fate of several female soldiers who were captured by Azerbaijani forces. In one video shared online, 36-year-old mother of three Anush Apetyan is raped, murdered and mutilated, her dismembered finger pushed into her mouth. While Baku has not responded to the video, in neighbouring Turkey — a close ally of Azerbaijan — women’s groups gathered to condemn the apparent atrocity, holding placards reading “no to femicide”.

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The incident has left many Armenians feeling they are fighting a battle for their very existence. “This is my home. And they’re trying to invade and destroy something that I’ve come to love,” says Joe Kasabian, an American-Armenian and former US soldier who first moved to the country last year. “We just want to be left alone, and they won’t let us. The fight is here whether we want it or not.” Now, he says, when the time comes, he’s ready to serve again.

Many see the conflict through an ethnic and religious lens, priding themselves on being the first country in the world to adopt Christianity, bordered on two sides by Turkic Muslim nations. Armenia is also a place where genocide lingers within living memory. From 1915 to 1917, shortly before the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, hundreds of thousands of ethnic Armenians living in what is now modern-day Turkey were rounded up and purged, loaded onto boats and sunk, forced into death marches or made to flee their homes for Western Europe. Turkey and Azerbaijan insist the events never took place, despite growing international recognition from countries like the US, France, Germany and Russia.

Now, once again, Armenians are hearing echoes of ethnic cleansing in rhetoric coming from their neighbours. “Make up your mind,” ultranationalist Turkish MP Mustafa Destici told Armenians in mid-September, as pressure built from Azerbaijan to recognise Baku’s sovereignty over the entirety of Nagorno-Karabakh. “I remind you once again that the Turkish Nation has the power to erase Armenia from history and geography, and that they stand at the limit of our patience.”

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Others though have sought to downplay ethnic tensions. “This isn’t about hatred for Armenians,” a top Azerbaijani official tells me on the condition of anonymity. “We’ve lived together side by side for centuries; we’re a secular nation with many ethnic and religious minorities. This is just about respecting international law. Karabakh is ours, and we will take it back one way or the other. They’re preparing for war when they should be negotiating for peace.”

Yet Armenia’s domestic political situation has made any kind of peaceful deal even harder to reach. Following the heavy shelling in September, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan indicated he could be about to secure a deal recognising Azerbaijani sovereignty over Nagorno-Karabakh. Within hours, massive protests had been organised, with marchers climbing the gates of the parliament building and demanding he step down.

“No document has been signed,” the Prime Minister said in a surprise statement, designed to calm tensions, “and I can say that no document will be signed”. And yet, while the U-turn may have prevented an all-out riot, it’s not clear that officials have any alternative plan to avert further conflict. In a nation that sees surviving genocide as a core part of its identity, political concessions are often viewed a milestone on the road to total obliteration.

That said, the Armenian government has so far refused to begin mass mobilisation. Having come to power following a wave of street protests in 2018, known as the “Velvet Revolution”, many local analysts say embattled Pashinyan has purposefully kept the army relatively weak. He is distrustful of the top brass, after senior officers called on him to resign following military defeats in the 2020 war. The post of Chief of the General Staff was left vacant for most of this year, making top-down reforms harder.

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As a result, the army is woefully underprepared for war. Near the village of Nurevan, just a stone’s throw from the border, a detachment of troops are fortifying their positions and bracing for what many see as an imminent onslaught. However, the young soldiers — many of whom are 18-year-old conscripts — are kitted out with uniforms that are falling apart at the seams, their foam lining breaking out through the camouflage. Few have modern helmets and even fewer have body armour. “Our troops need everything from socks to weapons to coffee,” says Armen Hagopjanyan, the head of the local district.

Feeling their government is doing too little to prepare, ordinary citizens are taking matters into their own hands. Seventeen-year-olds Edwin and Serge are among those who have set up an all-night collection point in Yerevan, calling on locals to donate whatever they can to those standing guard on the border. “I’m too young to serve,” Edwin says, manning the bench and packing up boxes of supplies at 1am, “but this is how I can contribute”. As well as clothing and long-life instant noodles, the most popular donations are cigarettes and lighters, which those who have done military service say are as valuable as bullets at the front.

Few Armenians truly believe they can beat Azerbaijan on the battlefield. But with their government unwilling and unable to grant political concessions, many are bracing for an inevitable fight.

Former foreign minister Zohrab Mnatsakanyan is among those calling for the country to get ready to defend itself. “God bless our Army — we can win even when it seems impossible,” he says. At the same time though, he quotes one of Winston Churchill’s more morose lines: “You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than live as slaves.”

But the financier’s real qualification for office seems to be the accruement of a fortune so great that it enabled him to donate £147,500 to the Tories. So now he has been given a lovely lifetime place in parliament to rule over us with a peerage, plus the added bonus of a ministerial job with all those nice perks of office and status.

Offord will find himself in good company in the House of Lords. The Financial Times last year worked out that the elevation of billionaire Tory benefactor Michael Spicer made him the 22^nd former donor to be given a peerage in 13 years. Between them, they had given more than £50m to the three main parties.

Boris Johnson displays a special fondness for placing pals and party donors in the upper chamber; such folk comprise about one quarter of the people he has ennobled. The prime minister even overruled the appointments’ commission to force disgraced former party treasurer Peter Cruddas into the Lords. Lo and behold, the grateful new peer bunged another half a million into Tory coffers a few days after taking up his seat.

Yet Britons like to believe their country is not corrupt, preferring to lecture others on good governance. The harsh truth is the House of Lords, an archaic institution stuffed with people who bought seats or inherited titles, serves as a grotesque symbol of the blatant corruption that stains our nation. Instead of hiding the fact that well-connected people can buy power and influence, we hand them fancy titles, silly crests and scarlet robes.

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By Mary Harrington

Perhaps this is part of the same deluded exceptionalism that makes many Britons believe their empire was less brutal, damaging and greedy than others. Yet once again, we see how Britain is being built on foundations of stolen loot, led by the City of London as its accountants, bankers, estate agents, financiers and lawyers wash mountains of dirty cash for the planet’s dodgiest people. Another scandal has broken with the Pandora Papers, the latest massive cache of leaked papers, giving a glimpse into the hidden wealth, tax dodging and money laundering of some of the world’s richest and most powerful people. And with sickening inevitably, we see once again how our nation sits at the epicentre of these tawdry activities.

Take the revelations about the Aliyevs, the ruling family of oil-rich Azerbaijan which is led by a friend of Prince Andrew and has been home to huge British investment. When I visited Baku in 2012, I met an astonishingly brave woman called Khadija Ismayilova, who has endured blackmail, been filmed on hidden cameras having sex in her home and been imprisoned on trumped-up charges to stop her exposing corruption.

Another activist told me why he always locked his car: “Not just to stop people taking things but to stop the police planting drugs or a weapon.” Now we learn that a network of offshore companies tied to this gruesome family and its close associates has traded almost £400m of UK property over the past 15 years — including flogging a £67m property to the Queen’s crown estate.

Yet this is an autocratic regime frequently condemned for its nefarious activities that include rigged elections. Ismayilova and other journalists risked their liberty to fight for the democratic values we claim to espouse, revealing how their first family benefitted from state contracts awarded through hidden shell companies — including the £177m showpiece Crystal Hall used for the Eurovision Song Contest, which gave me cover to enter the country as a journalist. The European Union and human rights groups have condemned the “widespread and pervasive” corruption that scars Azerbaijan. Yet the Aliyevs were not stopped from buying and selling many lucrative properties in Kensington, Knightsbridge and Mayfair. One purchase was even made through an offshore company owned by the ruler’s son when he was 11.

Again, these sleazy disclosures cut deep into the heart of the UK establishment. They include one Russian businessman whose companies have backed 34 Tory MPs and made millions from an allegedly corrupt Russian pipeline deal, while another prominent Tory donor who backed Johnson’s leadership campaign was reportedly involved in one of Europe’s biggest corruption scandals. Only last month it emerged that George Osborne won business from a firm run by Oleg Deripaska, an oligarch close to Vladimir Putin and banned from the United States. It came through his friendship with the firm’s chairman Lord Barker, a former Tory minister in the coalition given a life peerage.

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Similarly, half of Russian money-laundering involves Britain while our lawyers earn fortunes from their oligarchs fighting legal battles in London’s courts. No wonder Putin sees the West as so weak. The Pandora Papers show how even Raffaele Amato — the mobster tied to a dozen murders who inspired the gangster TV show Gomorrah — was able to use a shell company registered in the UK to buy property.

Five years ago, David Cameron hosted a landmark anti-corruption summit in London that underlined the self-deception — just a few weeks before losing the Brexit ballot and going off to lobby for Lex Greensill. We pour vast sums in aid into combating corruption around the world, then ignore how much of it is stolen by repulsive regimes.

The current chancellor Rishi Sunak seems complacent, claiming Britain’s track record on tackling money laundering is “very strong” while promoting freeports, So is it any wonder the Government does so little to stem the flow of dirty money, let alone shut down the tax havens under our jurisdiction that do so much harm to the world? Looters and thieves need help to stash their stolen cash. And according to the Tax Justice Network, the three places that do most to support such practices are the British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands and Bermuda — all of which come under our flag. An analysis of these latest documents by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists found 956 companies in offshore havens tied to 336 leaders, politicians and senior officials — with more than two-thirds set up in the British Virgin Islands.

Westminster could stop providing cover for crooks, despots and dodgy oligarchs with ease, if it were not so complicit. The Government has repeatedly pledged to bring in a register of the owners of the 100,000 offshore-owned properties; instead, we discover former Prime Minister Tony Blair and his wife Cherie saved themselves £312,000 in stamp duty using such tactics. The National Crime Agency’s international corruption unit has an annual budget of about £4m — which one quarter of the sum spent by its target, Zamira Hajiyeva, wife of a fraudulent Azerbaijani banker, in Harrods on jewellery and designer clothes. Needless to say, her £15m Knightsbridge home was owned by a company based in the British Virgin Islands.

Meanwhile, governments encourage City advisory firms to spread like knotweed in the undergrowth of Whitehall, where they rake off big sums from taxpayers even as they advise plutocrats and multinationals how to avoid paying fair dues to the exchequer. The “Big Four” accountancy firms have been accused by parliament of using expertise from staff seconded to the Treasury to help clients avoid tax. But as the civil service was cut back, ministers increased use of these consultancies. The pandemic boosted their earnings again as normal rules on tendering were ditched. So we see a firm such as Mckinsey pay out fines over links to a destructive South African corruption scandal and its lethal role in the US opioid addiction crisis, yet its advisers are still hired on hefty daily rates by Whitehall.

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The dictator who fooled us

By Ian Birrell

Britain needs to wake up. The mother of democracy has given birth to a system that aids kleptocrats and thieves. And as the famous saying goes, a fish rots from the head down. When appointing his latest minister, Johnson claimed he scoured the country for the best talent and gave Offord the job and peerage because he had “a huge amount to offer”. Few will be fooled.

The Prime Minister’s words drip with contempt for all those artists, carers, doctors, factory workers, retailers, teachers, scientists and soldiers who might contribute far more to the benefit of our nation in return for the £323 attendance allowance in the Lords — a tax-free daily sum roughly the same as the weekly minimum wage. Behind our facade of democracy, led by such a selfish and soiled elite, lies a country hideously stained with corruption.

In December, the National Crime Agency froze a bank account linked to a scheme that laundered billions of pounds out of Azerbaijan, an ex-Soviet republic, having already made the UK property of an Azeri banker’s wife the target of its first ever Unexplained Wealth Order (UWO). That same month, a solicitor was fined £45,000 for trying to help the daughters of Azerbaijan’s president buy luxury property in London, and failing to do the appropriate checks on the origin of their wealth.

By the low standards of law enforcement in the UK, where allegations of laundering the proceeds of grand corruption tend to be greeted with something between a shrug and a grin, this is big. Rumours are rife that other wealthy Azeris are being considered for UWOs of their own, up to and including members of the ruling Aliyev family. If these three steps become the start of a journey into the heart of all Azeri-owned wealth in the UK, it could prove uncomfortable, and not just for lawyers and estate agents.

London and Baku have a close relationship thanks to BP, which opened an office in Azerbaijan within six months of its independence from the Soviet Union. The oil revenue has gradually allowed the Aliyev family – first Heydar, the former head of Azerbaijan’s KGB, and then, following his death in 2003, his son Ilham – to turn the country into a hereditary kleptocracy. Heydar is commemorated by a vast swooping museum in central Baku, designed by Zaha Hadid and set among magnificent fountains. This glorious building houses various bits of ephemera from his life – a train ticket, a school report from the KGB academy, various of his limousines – like the grave goods of a pharaoh.

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Under the rule of the Aliyevs, their friends and relations have become enormously wealthy, and used the global banking system to launder much of their money into the West (as revealed by the “Azerbaijani Laundromat” leak of financial documents). “Azerbaijan’s economy is largely dominated by monopolistic interests,” wrote the US embassy in a 2010 cable released by wikileaks. The cable was part of a series in which American diplomats explained to Washington which families were most powerful in Azerbaijan, and they provide a fascinating insight into a system where bribes, influence, and abuse of power control everything.

This particular cable dealt with the business activities of Emergencies Minister Kamaladdin Heydarov (of “the second most powerful commercial family in Azerbaijan”, according to the State Department officials). The kind of behaviour described in the cable was beginning to get Azerbaijan a bad reputation and it was to improve the country’s image that, in 2008, Heydarov’s two sons Nijat and Tale created a London-based lobby group: The European Azerbaijan Society (TEAS).

TEAS specialised in promoting Azerbaijan, and acted as secretary for the All-Party Parliamentary Group for the country. It flew MPs out to Baku, where it showed them around, and tried to persuade them that the country was a reliable source of energy, the wronged party in its long-running dispute with Armenia, and a generally lovely place for all its citizens.  “Such visits have great effectiveness, because to read about Azerbaijan is one thing, witnessing the development of the country is another thing,” Tale Heydarov boasted at a lobbying conference in Baku in March 2012.

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Jim Sheridan, then the Labour MP for Paisley, accepted a three-day £3,100 trip to Azerbaijan in March 2013, and came back full of praise. “We discovered that the trade unions there enjoyed better relationships and more employment rights than we do here in the UK. Azerbaijan is a young democracy and we are the oldest, yet we are still fighting for employment rights,” he told the House of Commons later that year. (The International Trade Union Confederation is less sanguine, saying that in Azerbaijan many labour rights exist only on paper.)

Over on the Government benches, Mark Field, Tory MP for Westminster and recipient of a five-day £3,500 trip in May 2011, told the Commons in the month after he got back that Azerbaijan “has made tremendous strides forward both politically and economically in recent years. That should be recognised and rewarded.” At the time he was on TEAS’ payroll, as a member of its advisory board.

I asked Heydarov about the source of TEAS’ funding, when I met him on the sidelines of a business forum that TEAS organised in Mayfair. He said the money came from members’ subscriptions, but refused to be drawn on their identities or the amount they contributed. These members have certainly been very generous, whoever they are. TEAS and other Azeri lobbying groups spent more than £70,000 on MPs alone. Most of it went on 23 trips to Azerbaijan, although Slough’s Labour MP Fiona McTaggart received £1,000 of hospitality in Britain, at the Royal Windsor Horse Show, and TEAS even got into publishing.

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When Liam Fox wrote a meditation on globalisation called Rising Tides it failed to trouble either the charts or the reviewers on either side of the Atlantic (sales figures show it has sold just over 3,000 copies in English worldwide), but TEAS bought the Azeri translation rights for an astonishing £11,400, paid in two instalments in 2014, and then flew him to Istanbul to promote it at the cost of another £3,579.94.

One book industry source described this as barely believable: “Azeri rights for something like Malala, or Michelle Obama, or Dan Brown might go for £11,000, but it would need to be a big name. This does not look like a wise investment”.

Of course, the nature of an investment depends on the return you are looking for. If TEAS was seeking friends, rather than profits, perhaps the investment was a wise one, particularly since Fox has risen to be the minister in charge of negotiating our post-Brexit trade deals.

“MPs have a history of accepting funding from Azerbaijan’s lobbyists and keeping quiet about gross and systemic human rights violations, including some now in senior governmental positions,” said Rebecca Vincent, a former US diplomat in Baku and now head of the UK Bureau of Reporters without Borders.

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She was particularly critical about the fact that so few British politicians had supported journalists who have revealed the extent of the wealth of Azerbaijan’s ruling family, and been harassed or jailed as a result. “As the source of the largest foreign direct investment in Azerbaijan, the UK has a responsibility to speak out. As long as our politicians turn a blind eye to this repression, courageous individuals like Mehman Huseynov and Khadija Ismayilova will continue to pay the price.”

This is not to say that TEAS was an organisation packed with ruthless and sinister geniuses, since it was at times almost hilariously incompetent. In 2010, it hired the 1980s two–hit-wonder Smiley Culture to produce propaganda music in the mistaken belief he could persuade Lady Gaga to do the singing, which he could not. This and other pratfalls notwithstanding, the budding scandal over Azeri money in London does raise questions over whether MPs should have been quite so willing to accept the organisation’s money.

Goran Lindblad, a Swedish ex-MEP who worked for TEAS in Brussels, told me his pay cheques came from a Marshall Islands company via Danske Bank’s branch in Tallinn, the same branch that is now at the centre of perhaps the biggest money laundering scandal of all time: the movement of €200 billion through non-resident accounts in 2007-15.

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We have become accustomed to hearing stories of kleptocratic cash pouring into UK property, which is what the NCA is (belatedly) beginning to investigate, but perhaps the scandal will turn out to be not how much dirty cash was spent in Knightsbridge, but how much ended up in Westminster. Because Azerbaijan is not the only country that has sought to buy friends in this way.

Ukrainian oligarch Dymtro Firtash ran a similar lobbying group, as did the Bahraini ruling family. Bashar al-Assad’s father-in-law ran the British Syrian Society, which took MPs to Damascus. Even the Russians tried to get into the game, with a group called the Conservative Friends of Russia, though Kremlin money eventually proved too hot even for our MPs to handle.

There are many urgent issues being ignored by politicians thanks to the Brexit gridlock, but perhaps this is the most important: who exactly has been paying their wages? In a democracy, voters have to know who their elected representatives are working for. Once trust in their integrity has been lost, it will be all but impossible to restore.