Simplesolutions

Analysis of @presidentaz speech by @aircenteraz : - The speech moved on two tracks at once. Looking back, it traced a line from the party's founding congress and Heydar Aliyev's return to power in 1993 to the restoration of the country's territorial integrity in 2023. Looking forward, it named the tasks ahead - security, ideological resilience, an independent foreign policy, economic and financial stability, energy and transport, social policy and the Great Return to Garabakh (relocation of refugees back to their homes). - Azerbaijan did not receive its territorial integrity as a gift. It restored it through a hard and costly fight, in three stages that the speech set out clearly: 1) the 44-day war, from 27 September to 10 November 2020, which ended in Armenia's defeat and capitulation; 2) three years of building the military and political ground for full sovereignty, from November 2020 to September 2023; 3) the anti-terror operation of 20 September 2023, which restored sovereignty over the whole territory and led to the withdrawal of all foreign armed forces. - Having won, Azerbaijan now seeks peace. The peace agreement text, initialed with Armenia in Washington in August 2025, opened a real chance to advance sustainable peace in the years to come. But the lesson Baku draws from its own history is plain. Peace holds when the side that wants it is strong enough that no one is tempted to test it. As the speech put it, Azerbaijan must always be strong so that history does not repeat itself. - The speech's security message starts from a sober reading of the world. Wars are being fought in Europe and the Middle East, great-power rivalry is sharpening, and the international rules that small states rely on are being openly ignored. The South Caucasus sits at the junction of these pressures. In such an environment, the risk of war cannot be dismissed simply because one conflict has ended. - The President also set out a doctrine of deterrence in unusually direct terms. Azerbaijan, he said, does not leave a single blow against it unanswered, so that everyone stays in their place and does not interfere in its affairs. Its purpose is to make aggression too costly to contemplate. - Two other pillars support this posture. The first is financial independence. The second is an independent, multi-vector foreign policy. - Guarding the secular state: the most forward-looking part of the speech concerned ideological security. In a world of the internet, cyberattacks and artificial intelligence, the President warned, ideological sabotage knows no borders. A state can defend its frontiers with soldiers, but the minds of its citizens are defended by other means. - Conclusion: the common thread is that sovereignty and territorial integrity, once restored, has to be defended every day and on every front. Azerbaijan has paid too high a price for its land to take peace for granted. It offers its neighbors a settlement based on mutual recognition of borders. But it will negotiate from strength, protect its secular identity from those who would import the conflicts of other regions, and rely, above all, on itself. eureporter.co/azerbaijan/202…