President Donald Trump on March 17 warned the Iranian regime that it would “suffer the consequences” for any further attacks by Yemen’s Houthi movement. These remarks came a day after the U.S. conducted massive airstrikes targeting facilities of the Iranian-backed group. Clearly, the U.S. is increasing pressure on Iran.

Also, on March 17, Azerbaijan’s Economy Minister Mikayil Jabbarov and Israel’s Energy Minister Eli Cohen signed an agreement to expand natural gas exploration in the eastern Mediterranean. Azerbaijan’s relations with Iran are complex, if not adversarial. The current instability in the arc between the Caspian Sea and the Red Sea requires that the U.S. have all the allies it can muster to step up and help get the region on track toward sanity and prosperity.

Strategically located in the land bridge between Europe and Asia, Azerbaijan can play a key role in facilitating U.S. efforts and interests in the areas of the Caucasus and Central Asia, as well as the Middle East. As the only country in the world that borders both Iran and Russia, Baku can help Washington deal with the challenges that Moscow and Tehran present. In view of the Azerbaijani victory in Nagorno-Karabakh in 2023 and Azerbaijan and Armenia having announced agreement on the terms for a peace treaty to settle that decades-old conflict on March 13, as well as Israeli efforts to bring Azerbaijan into the Abraham Accords framework, the Trump White House should engage with this rising middle power in the South Caucasus in pursuit of U.S. national security interests.

A number of additional significant developments have emerged in just the past few days. The day after the Armenians and Azerbaijanis announced their agreement toward a peace treaty, the Trump administration’s special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, made a stopover in Baku after meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow. Separately, U.S. national security adviser Mike Waltz advised on March 15 that he had spoken with Hikmet Hajiyev, national security advisor to Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev, on the need to finalize the peace deal.

Azerbaijan sits at the junction of some of the world’s most intractable conflicts in Eurasia: the Ukraine conflict, the wars involving Iran, and the U.S.-China competition. Moreover, the country, as a rising multi-regional player, can have a key role furthering the Trump administration’s efforts to bring an end to the “forever wars” as well as its goal of resetting global geoeconomic relations. Likewise, in addition to being a major energy producer, Azerbaijan is strategically placed to facilitate international commerce in both the east-west and north-south directions.

Azerbaijan took the initiative 30 years ago to forge relations with Israel, which is far from its immediate environs. This underscores a sophistication in Baku’s strategic thinking. Originally informed by the shared threat perception vis-a-vis Iran, over time, a much broader bilateral relationship developed. Azerbaijan became a key source of oil supplies to Israel, and Jerusalem became a major source of weapons procurement for Baku.

This relationship continues to evolve, as is evidenced by the latest efforts to expand the energy cooperation from oil and into natural gas. There is also an ecclesiastical dimension: the recent call by a group of prominent rabbis who urged Trump to integrate Azerbaijan into the Abraham Accords framework was unprecedented.

As a secular Shiite-majority Turkic nation, Azerbaijan’s entry into the regional framework would help diversify the current Muslim composition of the Abraham Accords, consisting of Sunni Arab states. This would serve as a strong counterweight to Iran’s Shiite Islamist regime and its revisionist agenda in both the Middle East and the South Caucasus.

Azerbaijan’s military victory was already a serious setback for Iran on its northern flank. Peace between Baku and Yerevan will further aid in containing Iran and could help with U.S. efforts to limit Russian-Iranian strategic cooperation. It will also free up Baku to play a greater role in the Middle East in alignment with both Israel and the U.S., which the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies has called for. Such a three-way alignment can potentially force behavioral change in the Islamic Republic (already deep in socio-economic crisis and at the cusp of regime evolution), which the Iran Daily noted in a March 1 front page report as a “red alert” moment for Iran.

The forthcoming peace treaty with Armenia is an opportunity for Baku to enhance strategic relations with the U.S. in the commercial realm as well. The expected peace agreement will hopefully hasten the repeal of outdated Section 907 of the Freedom Support Act, the major bottleneck in the efforts to establish the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route (also known as The Middle Corridor), a key geoeconomic artery linking the West to Central Asia. Enhanced U.S. relations with Azerbaijan can help counter China’s westward expansion in Central Asia via its BRI projects and before Beijing’s influence extends to the Caspian Basin.

The Trump administration should also look beyond its goal of ending the conflict in Ukraine. It is in the American interest to ensure that there are checks on Russia unencumbered by war and many of the current sanctions. Here is where a relationship with Azerbaijan positions Washington on the Russian southern frontier as it develops a post-conflict security arrangement for Europe and the Caucasus. A U.S.-Azerbaijani-Israeli trilateral relationship can become a pillar of stability not just limited to the Middle East but the broader Eurasian space.

Kamran Bokhari is a senior director at the New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy in Washington. He is a national security and foreign policy specialist and teaches a graduate course on Central Asia & Eurasian Geopolitics at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service.