On its face, Azerbaijan is a ridiculous choice to host U.N.’s COP29 climate conference. Azerbaijan cannot pitch itself as a potential climate victim; its chief environmental concern is not climate but its own pollution and the ability of those connected to the ruling Aliyev family to stand above the law, Michael Rubin, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote for National Security Journal.
According to him, Azerbaijan cannot pitch itself as a potential climate victim; its chief environmental concern is not climate but its own pollution and the ability of those connected to the ruling Aliyev family to stand above the law.
Many previous hosts have corruption problems, but not to the degree of Azerbaijan. Not only is freedom in decline in Azerbaijan, but it is among the world’s most corrupt states. Aliyev’s two daughters reportedly control a business empire worth more than $13 billion.
Azerbaijan used Armenian hostages it seized as a bargaining chip, telling intermediaries it would release them only if Armenia dropped its bid.
The State Department, anxious to broker peace between Armenia and Azerbaijan, urged Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan to comply. He dropped the bid, but Azerbaijan continued to hold Armenian prisoners and occupy more than 200 square kilometers of land the international community recognizes as Armenia proper. Following last year’s ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh’s millennia-old indigenous Armenian community, Azerbaijan has also systematically begun to destroy Armenian heritage across the region. Worse, it leads tours of foreign dignitaries—including Washington think-tankers and the U.S. ambassador in Baku—to Disneyland-like sanitized versions of ancient settlements in its place. Such tours will increase in frequency as Baku seeks to normalize ethnic cleansing. For the White House to bless Azerbaijan for hosting COP29 today would be akin to allowing Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to host an international forum.
Biden further errs by appointing John Podesta to lead the American delegation. Podesta replaced John Kerry as Biden’s climate envoy, but parts of his resume raises eyebrows. He gained prominence as Bill Clinton’s chief-of-staff. After Clinton left office, he and his brother Tony co-founded Podesta Associates, Inc. (now the Podesta Group), which counts BP as among its top clients. BP is perhaps Azerbaijan’s top Western partner and appears to lobby the United Kingdom if not other Western governments to ignore President Ilham Aliyev’s increasingly erratic behavior.
The author called on the U.S. leadership to boycott COP29 in Baku and signal that they cannot use the environment and caviar diplomacy to avoid their history and actions.
