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There are currently few prospects of a thaw between Azerbaijan and the U.S., reads the article of Senior Associate Russia and Eurasia Program Thomas de Waal, that was published on the site of Carnegie Moscow Center.

According to the article in the last year, Azerbaijan has embarked on a crackdown targeted specifically against Western-leaning human rights, civil society activists and opposition politicians. The victims have included two opposition leaders, Ilgar Mammadov and Tofiq Yaqublu, jailed in March; Anar Mammadli, head of a respected election monitoring organization, recently imprisoned for five and a half years; prominent Russian-language journalist Rauf Mirkadirov, arrested in April; and, well-known experts Arif and Leyla Yunus, who have been stopped from leaving the country and are under investigation. This is not to mention many other lesser-known individuals who are in jail as well as USAID and other Western-funded organizations, such as the National Democratic Institute and Radio Liberty, that are under constant pressure, de Waal notes.

According to him critical statements have rained down from the United States and the European Union, Azerbaijan is the subject of hearings in the Helsinki Commission in Congress on June 11. But when Western officials have sounded the alarm they have been accused of “interfering in the internal affairs of Azerbaijan.”

The author notes that this has made for an ongoing clash between U.S. Ambassador to Baku, Richard Morningstar and the Azerbaijani government. The hawkish presidential official Ali Hasanov condemned the ambassador’s interview to Radio Liberty as an attempt to foment a “Maidan” in Azerbaijan.

“The attacks, some of them quite personal in tone, have been made even though Morningstar is the man the Azerbaijanis specifically requested to be ambassador, having been the United States’ envoy on Caspian Sea oil and gas issues and one of the architects of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline project, which is the cornerstone of the country’s independence,” the expert writes.

According to him the Azerbaijani elite has many factions. There is a Western-leaning group, in the Foreign Ministry and some other ministries, which has clearly been losing the argument in recent months. But it is not as though Baku has made a strong pivot to Moscow either. It may be that the Azerbaijanis feel they can compartmentalize the relationship. Yet, it should be obvious that you cannot have a good relationship with Washington if you declare war on the main interlocutor, the State Department.

The Armenian lobby still makes Baku’s life difficult. Section 907 of the Freedom Support Act, passed by the U.S. Congress in October 1992 during the Karabakh conflict, barring many types of U.S government aid to Azerbaijan was never repealed, even though the Azerbaijanis were defeated in the conflict. Yet, of course, the latest actions only strengthen the anti-Azerbaijani message of the Armenian lobby.

There are currently few prospects of a thaw. Ambassador Morningstar leaves in the summer after a scheduled two-year posting and there may well be another long hiatus before his replacement is appointed. The relationship is likely to become even more transactional and piecemeal, the journalist writes.

According to de Waal the simplest explanation for the recent crackdown may be that, after more than a decade in ruling power in Azerbaijan are paranoid and isolated as their actions suggest.

“In that case the challenge for those in the U.S. administration who want to maintain influence in Azerbaijan is to find messengers who can get through some thick palace walls,” he concludes.