With President Donald Trump’s deposition of Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro and Israel’s and Argentina’s adoption of the Isaac Accords to promote “commercial development,” the contours of a new Latin America may be coming into focus. This is a Latin America where the stick of American imperial intervention (waved first at Venezuela but possibly also at Cuba, Colombia, and Mexico) will be alternated with the carrot of investment from Washington and Tel Aviv, based mostly on the intercessions of Zionist operators.
What will this new region look like? A clue comes an ocean away in a mostly forgotten part of Western Asia that is home to Azerbaijan and Armenia, cradles of Islamic and Christian civilization and neighbors of Iran—like Venezuela a main target of American empire. Thanks to directives from Washington via Tel Aviv and Riyadh and Abu Dhabi and in tandem with the expansion of the Abraham Accords, the model for the Isaac Accords, Azerbaijan and Armenia are set to be transformed by the raw infliction of power on undeveloped spaces and the spread-out people who live in them.
The formal vehicle for this Western Asian operation is another outgrowth of war and commerce: a peace treaty signed at the White House last August at the behest of President Trump. This treaty nominally ends a war that has run intermittently since 2020 between Christian and (d)emocratic Armenia and its more powerful neighbor, Muslim and authoritarian Azerbaijan. What it actually does is open both nations to imperial development plans by Washington and its proxies in the name of “commerce” and “modernization.”
The key provisions of this deal, and the reasons Washington is involved, have to do with what’s known as the Zangezur Corridor. This is a projected 26.7 mile road running through Armenia, connecting Azerbaijan in the North to Turkey in the South. The Corridor will pass through the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic: an Azerbaijani exclave surrounded on three sides by Armenia and on one by Turkey. It will purportedly solve the long-running ethnic and religious conflicts between Azerbaijani Muslims and Armenian Christians, some of which flow from Azerbaijanis’ presence in Armenia via the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic. But, much as narcotics are not the real issues at play in Venezuela, so ethnic and religious conflicts are not the real issues at play in Azerbaijan and Armenia. The real issues at play are resources and geography.
According to the investigative website The Cradle, “Armenia plans to award US companies exclusive special development rights for an extended period on the transit corridor.” The plan, in turn, benefits Azerbaijan, since “the corridor will…give [Azerbaijan] a direct link to Turkey,” an ally of Washington’s. This will make the Corridor “the crucial missing link in a trade route connecting Asia and Europe” by giving “Azerbaijan another route to send natural gas by pipeline to Europe via Turkey,” thus reducing Europe’s oil dependency on Russia. Finally, crucially, “by controlling the Zangezur Corridor, Washington will now be able to post troops directly on Iran’s border, cutting off Tehran’s access to [Iran’s longtime ally] Armenia.”
The agreement over the Zangezur Corridor, then, is Washinton’s way of using Azerbaijan to reduce Russian influence in Western Asia—and to reduce the influence of Russia’s ally and Israel’s enemy Iran. But, much as American involvement in Venezuela was the dramatic crux of a longer Zionist play based on commercial development via the Isaac Accords, so is the inking of the Azerbaijan-Armenia peace agreement part of a quieter play run by three Washington proxies: Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia. It is these proxies who have paved the ground for Washington’s involvement in this part of Western Asia, and who will strengthen that involvement around the peace deal brokered by Trump and via the framework of the Abraham Accords.
The core relationship at play, the one which made Washington’s involvement in the Zangezur Corridor possible, is between Azerbaijan and Israel. This relationship is so longstanding and deep that, in the words of the Jewish News Syndicate in 2025, “Azerbaijan is Israel’s second closest friend” and “Israel’s largest importer of weapons” to the point where, “in the last decade, almost 70% of Azerbaijan’s military imports came from Israel.” Israel’s left-wing newspaper, Haaretz, took a starker view of the relationship:
“…the Israel-Azerbaijan relationship relies on an unholy trinity of oil, arms and intelligence. Israel buys oil from Azerbaijan (about half of Israel’s crude oil originates there), and sells it advanced military equipment. In return, Azerbaijan reportedly gives it access to its land and sea border with Israel’s number one rival: Iran.”
Azerbaijan won its wars against Armenia in 2020 and 2023, paving the way for the peace agreement inked by Trump, “thanks in no small part to game-changing weaponry supplied by Israel.” According to the report in Haaretz, a main guarantor of these services was Israel’s former defense minister: Avigdor Lieberman, who “has served twice as deputy prime minister of Israel and became minister successively at six different ministries.” Lieberman has visited Baku, Azerbaijan’s capital, more than any other Israeli minister, and, according to Haaretz:
“…in recent years, Lieberman’s sons have marketed a number of Israeli high-tech products to the government of Azerbaijan: a cyberoffense product made by the cybersecurity company Candiru; a big data system for improving tax collection by another cybersecurity firm, Rayzone; and water desalination technologies by the Israeli company IDE. The potential commissions from brokering these three ventures alone could reach millions of dollars. Additionally, until recently, the Lieberman brothers represented Azerbaijan Airlines (the national flag carrier controlled by the state) in Israel.”
According to a follow-up report in Armenian Weekly:
“Several Israeli firms like Pegasus and Candiru sold spyware to Azerbaijan to hack the phones of the regime’s opponents. Today, 18 Azeri journalists are in jail. The Candiru sale was mediated by Lieberman’s two sons in exchange for a commission ‘estimated at hundreds of thousands of dollars.’ From a deal with cyber firm Rayzone, they earned ‘a commission of about $200,000,’ according to…Haaretz.”
The other major personnel connection between Azerbaijan and Israel is Tony Blair, the former British prime minister with a deep bench of Zionist connections slated to become a latter-day British viceroy of Gaza under Trump’s 20-point September 2025 “peace plan” to “end” the Gaza War—a peace plan toward which Azerbaijan has already committed troops. In 2023 and 2024, Blair received criticism for his role advising the Azerbaijani government on both exporting natural gas as well as instituting “eco-friendly modernization” policies. This process of “greenwashing”—covering authoritarian modernization programs and their abuses with a “climate-friendly” face to appeal to western investors—is a tactic used by Israel’s main regional allies, the Saudi and United Arab Emirates regimes. Their main vehicles for this tactic are smart cities, which I reported on for the Libertarian Institute in May, most prominently the Saudi regime’s marquee development Neom.
Nominally projects to conserve the environment, these cities relocate indigenous populations in the tens of thousands to create urban spaces for white collar workers serviced by Kenyan or Bangladeshi immigrants and living in “space saving” apartments which double as AI-based surveillance spaces. Troublingly, as I have also reported for the Libertarian Institute, they are quite literally the model for the proposed relocate-then-raze-then-rebuild of Gaza first proposed by Zionist operative Joseph Pelzman at the implicit urging of Zionist operative Jared Kushner in late 2024 and early 2025—a version of which is soon to be presided over by Tony Blair under the peace plan proposed by Kushner’s father-in-law Donald Trump. They also bear more than a passing resemblance to projects in cities like Miami and New York—and some of the same Zionist operators involved in these projects are involved in the ones in the Middle East.
Azerbaijan’s authoritarian ruler Ilham Aliyev appears to have borrowed a page from this eco-friendly, smart city playbook, to the immediate benefit of his relations with the Saudi and Emirati regimes. Starting in 2021, “Aliyev signed an order to develop smart city/smart village projects ‘to improve the quality, safety and efficiency of services provided in urban and rural areas, utilising information technology and ensuring the effective use and management of available resources.’” The fact that climate sustainability is the justification on which the Azerbaijani smart city/smart village project turns was made clear by Bairam Akhundov of the School of Public Affairs of ADA University, an institution established in its current form by Aliyev in 2014, in an article purporting to answer the question, “Why Grow Smartly?”:
“Apart from being the greatest contributors to economic growth, Azerbaijan’s cities account for 70% of its greenhouse gas emissions and 60% of resource use. In view of the looming problem of climate change, it is vital to rethink our cities according to the key principles of sustainable development…Today, the concept of ‘smart cities’ is widely cited in the media and research as a potential solution to the ‘economic growth vs climate change mitigation’ dilemma and is seen as a panacea for the sustainable development of cities.”
What this shift has actually amounted to is similar to what the Saudis have performed: a partial yet much-heralded “switch” by Azerbaijan from producing oil to investing in “green energy.” This “switch” is symbolized by a rush of academic papers on the topic in ADA or other state-tied journals like Baku Dialogues as well as articles in associated media, and by media bon-bons like supplementing Azerbaijan’s thirty-year-old Baku Energy Week, held in June in Azerbaijan’s capital city of Baku, with Baku Climate Action Week, held in October beginning in 2024. Superficial or not, the benefits of these plays have come hard and fast to Azerbaijan at the hands of the UAE, which, according to The Arab Weekly, “is by far Azerbaijan’s major trade partner in the Arab world, accounting for 40 percent of its trade with the region.” Since around 2023, when the UAE invested $3.2 billion in Azerbaijan, much of this investment has centered around “sustainable energy solutions and investment opportunities”:
“For instance, Masdar, the UAE state-owned green energy giant, is actively involved in Azerbaijan’s green energy transition. Its possibly most outstanding project in the Caspian Sea nation is the construction of a…solar power plant. The facility became operational in 2023, while the Abu Dhabi-based company continues building…[a] wind farm…[and] solar farms in Azerbaijan.”
Azerbaijan’s new “climate friendly focus” has also improved its relations with Saudi Arabia. In 2024, according to the Arabic international newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat, Saudi Arabia and Azerbaijan “signed a joint executive program…aimed at strengthening cooperation in renewable energy development and transfer,” especially through “Saudi-based ACWA Power…a leading investor in Azerbaijan’s renewable energy sector.” They signed this program, tellingly, at the annual United Nations Climate Change Conference which was held in Baku—a fairly astonishing public relations coup for Aliyev’s Azerbaijani regime, since the United Nations had only a year before released a report accusing Azerbaijan of “alleged or suspected violations of the right to life reported in the context of its latest military offensive” in Armenia, “during which dozens of people, including peacekeepers, were killed.” This equally astonishing human rights hypocrisy by the United Nations is, most likely, a successful result of the ministrations of Tony Blair. According to a report by The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project on this 2024 United Nations Climate Change conference held in Azerbaijan:
“Newly-released U.N. data shows that no fewer than 12 advisers from the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, where Blair is an unpaid executive chairman, are listed as members of Azerbaijan’s national delegation to the [2024] climate conference in Baku as part of a paid contract with the hosts. Yesterday, a post on X from the official COP29 Azerbaijan account showed a meeting between Blair and the climate conference’s president-designate, [Azerbaijan’s] Ecology Minister…to discuss climate action. It marked the first day of climate talks that will run until November 22 amid controversy surrounding the conference’s choice of host.”
Controversy or no, the “green energy” play sponsored by Azerbaijan via Blair appeared to work. In 2025, Azerbaijan built on its new “climate-friendly” reputation with a proposal for a new deal with Saudi Arabia to use energy investment as the hinge for a much more expansive partnership. Specifically, according to Asharq Al-Awsat, Azerbaijan offered “a proposal to establish a joint sovereign investment fund that would support priority sectors in both countries and finance joint ventures in third markets.” This proposal was described as the latest in “the rapid growth in ties between Baku and Riyadh across multiple sectors, especially energy, investment, tourism, and culture.”
Dig into the fine print of any of this investment and the main vehicle for its realization is sustainable development via smart cities and villages specifically constructed off de facto tabula rasas created by war. Namely, in this case, on the land won by Azerbaijan from Armenia with the help of Israel from 2020 to 2023: the precipitating events for the 2025 peace treaty backed by Washington. As early as 2021, Aliyev’s Azerbaijani regime was announcing “plans to radically transform…war-torn territories by building smart cities and villages there.”
An instructive case study of this “radical transformation” is the village of Agali, located in territory “held by ethnic Armenians from 1993 until Baku launched [the] war to reclaim territory…in September 2020.” According to Radio Free Europe, “Agali is one of several infrastructure projects pushed by [Aliyev’s regime] to attract people into sparsely-populated regions formerly held by ethnic Armenian forces.” The government is offering to pay the relocation fees of Azerbaijanis displaced from the town over the past almost four decades by Armenians, and Aliyev has billed this “resettlement drive” as “the great return.” But what landscape, exactly, will the displaced be returning to?
The new Agali has a fountain in its center and a sports complex. It has apartment blocs— blue buildings with blue, green, yellow, and red sidings around the windows—which wouldn’t be out of place in an American real estate development. It is:
“…labelled a ‘smart village’ — a concept ostensibly intended to boost the rural economy through high-speed Internet access, green technology, and the digitization of many aspects of life, including interaction with the government.”
All of which sounds fine—but look at the fine print in the Radio Free Europe Report and the downsides, even the dark sides, of the new Agali start showing up. “Farmers say a ban on keeping cows near houses in the new village could potentially make life more arduous for rural families.” Other critics “say the settlement, located in an isolated region of Azerbaijan will have little to offer in terms of work.” And, above all, there is the question of what a “smart village” means:
“Some experts say ‘smart’ is becoming a euphemism for surveillance in countries throughout the world where largely…technology is being used to monitor citizens. A pro-government Azerbaijani news website has reported that, along with other digital systems employed in Agali, a medical center would take scans of patients’ eyes, and applications for government services will be made via video link.”
Along with the eradication of older forms of economy and society in places like Agali is the eradication of older forms of community; namely the religious forms which have defined the lives of Azerbaijanis and Armenians. This has begun, in Azerbaijan, with the repression of indigenous minorities like the Talysh who have ties to Iran—a country which many Muslims look to as their primary protector against western colonialist incursions on Islam, and whose Islamic bona fides the Azerbaijani regime wants to undermine. Now, this “modernizing” project has come to Armenia, which, thanks to Israel’s infusions of arms from 2020 to 2023 to Azerbaijan, is a captive of its more powerful and newly-allied neighbor, and struggling to find its feet via investment in green technology, smart cities and a corresponding crackdown on Armenian Christians. According to Eldar Mamedov, writing in The American Conservative at the end of September of last year:
“…Armenia is redefining its very essence in a bid for security and Western integration…The Armenian Apostolic Church, the spiritual heart of this first Christian nation, is facing unprecedented pressure from its own government, with [Armenia’s Prime Minister] directly denigrating the religious leadership and seeking its replacement with compliant yes-men…This is all presented as a necessary transition from a ‘mythological’ Armenia to a ‘real’ one, capable of making peace with neighbors like…Azerbaijan.”
There is a clear gain for both Azerbaijan and Armenia in these “modernizations.” Namely, inclusion in the Abraham Accords: the formal instantiation of American-underwritten Israeli-backed commercial “development” for the Middle East, just as the Isaac Accords represent that future for Latin America. Very likely, Azerbaijan will soon be a signatory to the Abraham Accords even as Iran’s government may soon be deposed by America’s military—clearing the way, much as the Maduro deposition has begun to clear the way in Latin America, for further commercial development.
Unlike in Azerbaijan and Armenia, the terms of commercial development in Latin America under the Isaac Accords so far exist only on paper, but they sound a good deal like the military commercial play in Western Asia. Latin American nations which sign onto the Isaac Accords will, according to the Accords’ backers, become beneficiaries of “Israeli expertise in water technology, agriculture, cyber defense, fintech, healthcare, and energy”—so long as these nations allow themselves to be encouraged to “move their embassies to Jerusalem, formally recognize [Iran’s proxies] Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorist organizations, and shift longstanding anti-Israel voting patterns at the United Nations.” In other words, the price of these countries changing their citizens’ lives, often against their citizens’ own wishes, in the name of “technology” and “fintech,” “cyber defense” and “energy,” is them adhering to Israel’s foreign policy priorities.
Domestically, the effects probably run deeper. It’s easy to imagine Israel’s technology and energy and healthcare and agriculture prowess transforming much of Latin America in the ways Azerbaijan and Armenia are being transformed into a region of “smart villages” that “boost the rural economy through high-speed Internet access, green technology, and the digitization of many aspects of life, including interaction with the government.” In practice, this will mean, as it means in villages like Agali, standardized apartment blocs and a ban on animals; the eradication of old forms of farming and a lack of new opportunities; and “a medical center [that] take[s] scans of patients’ eyes” while “applications for government services will be made via video link.”
This is the brave new world, underwritten by America’s military corporate complex, arbitrated by American Jewish Zionists, and facilitated by Saudi and Emirati and British viceregal operators, that is coming soon via the Abraham Accords or the Isaac Accords or one or other of their adjacent outgrowths in America to a city or a town or a village near you.
