Once conceived as a tool of lobby-driven pressure on Azerbaijan,
Section 907 of the Freedom Support Act has long since outlived its
purpose. What began as a Cold War–era gesture toward Armenia has
become a legislative relic—one that no longer fits either the
regional security landscape or America’s own strategic interests.
Against the backdrop of Washington’s geopolitical realignment and a
shifting balance of power in the South Caucasus, dismantling
Section 907 is no longer a political gesture but an overdue act of
foreign-policy modernization.
How a Lobby Clause Became a Policy Fossil
Adopted in October 1992, Section 907 was the only U.S. law ever
aimed squarely at a single post-Soviet state—Azerbaijan. It
prohibited any government assistance to Baku until the U.S.
president could certify that Azerbaijan had ended both its
“blockade” of Armenia and all “offensive uses of force against
Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh.” In other words, Washington’s legal
code codified Armenia as a victim and Azerbaijan as an aggressor—a
framing born not of geopolitical analysis but of a well-organized
Armenian lobby operating in early-1990s Washington.
For nearly a decade, the amendment barred Azerbaijan from all
forms of direct U.S. government aid. The only assistance it
received came through humanitarian or NGO channels, while Armenia
enjoyed the full flow of American support.
Everything changed after 9/11. In 2001, Congress authorized the
president to suspend Section 907 each year through a waiver. Every
administration since—from George W. Bush to Donald Trump and back
again—has signed that waiver annually, citing counterterrorism
cooperation, regional security, and the absence of any threat to
peace between Baku and Yerevan. On paper, the ban remained. In
practice, it was neutralized.
A Rule Without a Reality
By the late 2020s, the premises of Section 907 had collapsed.
Azerbaijan had regained control of its territories, the Karabakh
conflict had faded from the political map, and Western analysts
increasingly described the amendment as “anachronistic.” Still, in
2023–2024, Armenian lobbying groups launched a campaign to tighten
it, introducing the “Armenian Protection Act” (H.R. 7288) to bar
the president from issuing waivers for fiscal years 2024 and 2025.
That proposal would have rolled U.S. policy back to the hard-line
logic of 1992.
The White House pushed in the opposite direction. In August
2025, President Donald Trump again extended the annual waiver,
explicitly citing the needs of counterterrorism, border security,
and alliance readiness. Four months later, on December 10, 2025,
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna filed H.R. 6534—a bill to repeal the
restrictions imposed by Section 907 altogether. The text has yet to
be released, but its purpose is unmistakable: to erase the last
vestige of a long-expired policy.
When Policy Turns to Static
The logic driving this shift is simple. The amendment’s original
justification—punishing Azerbaijan for “offensive actions” against
Armenia—has no footing in today’s security environment. Instead,
the clause has become a source of friction, complicating U.S.
engagement in a region that’s increasingly vital to global
connectivity and energy security.
Azerbaijan today is not the isolated belligerent imagined in
1992; it is a keystone of the Middle Corridor linking Europe, the
Caspian, and Central Asia—a critical energy supplier to Europe and
a buffer in the containment of Iran. In this setting, Section 907
isn’t just obsolete; it’s a regulatory defect that weakens the U.S.
strategic position.
The White House’s steady use of the waiver underscores that
reality. Each annual suspension is an implicit acknowledgment that
the law no longer aligns with U.S. interests. What Washington has
been practicing for two decades—governing around its own outdated
statute—is, in effect, a long, slow process of legislative
euthanasia.
Normative Shedding: America’s Strategic
Housecleaning
Trump’s foreign-policy recalibration—from the moral theatrics of
“values interventionism” to a hard-edged model of geopolitical
management—has accelerated this process. In that framework,
eliminating Section 907 isn’t a favor to Azerbaijan; it’s a
functional necessity for the United States. Great powers, after
all, shed obsolete norms to keep their foreign-policy machinery
synchronized with the real world.
Inside Congress, the conditions for repeal are ripening. The
House Foreign Affairs Committee now works through the lens of
high-level strategic recalibration—prioritizing national security,
energy autonomy for allies, and the containment of Iran. The
subcommittee on the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia
provides the technical rationale: keeping Section 907 on the books
weakens U.S. leverage in the region.
Even the Senate Foreign Relations Committee—long the traditional
brake on policy overhauls—has begun to shift. For Republicans, the
amendment is bureaucratic noise obstructing energy diplomacy; for
many Democrats, a “legacy issue” stripped of political meaning; and
for the national-security establishment, a loophole that benefits
Russia and Iran more than anyone else.
From Symbol to Liability
In the end, Section 907 has morphed from a symbolic instrument
of pressure into a structural liability. Its legal shell remains,
but its political content has evaporated. What’s left is a statute
without a strategy—an ideological echo from the post-bipolar 1990s
haunting a very different century.
Washington’s demolition of Section 907 will not mark an act of
generosity toward Azerbaijan, but the completion of a broader
process: the U.S. shedding the dead skin of its own outdated norms
to realign power, policy, and pragmatism in a world defined by
corridors, flows, and functional leverage.
The Outer Circuit: How Baku’s Diplomacy Outgrew
Washington’s Old Maps
Azerbaijan’s foreign policy today operates in a mode best
described as networked multivector projection—an agile, layered
diplomacy that connects regional and global players across energy,
security, and logistics. Its partnerships stretch from
multinational energy consortia to military alliances, but the most
potent channel runs through pro-Israeli networks for whom
Azerbaijan’s stability is a cornerstone of regional security. In
Washington’s political ecosystem, that argument resonates
instinctively: no one here needs a briefing to understand that an
unstable South Caucasus strengthens Iran.
A Law Without a System
From a policy-analysis standpoint, the verdict is unambiguous:
Section 907 no longer has a strategic, functional, or legal
foundation. It isn’t wired into today’s geo-economic system,
clashes with the operational logic of U.S. foreign policy, and is
annually neutralized by presidential waivers. Within the machinery
of power, it’s viewed less as law than as a parasitic norm—a
leftover clause the system keeps alive out of textual inertia.
The repeal of Section 907, then, isn’t a political gesture or
diplomatic concession. It’s an institutional inevitability,
dictated by the logic of a world order in which norms unsupported
by actual political, economic, or coercive structures are destined
for dismantlement.
A Post-Normative Phantom
Section 907 belongs to a category political theorists might call
a post-normative remainder—a fragment of legal text that
has lost its material foundation yet persists in statute through
sheer inertia. It exists somewhere between discourse and law, a
“trace” in Derrida’s sense: the presence of something absent. The
amendment functions only as an echo of a bygone discursive
formation; its legitimizing reality has been dismantled by history
itself.
In the language of international-relations theory, it’s a
“normative phantom”—a regulatory ghost that no longer shapes
behavior but continues to haunt the legal code. Such norms are
textual afterimages: legally real, politically dead. Section 907
isn’t a policy; it’s a symptom—a relic preserved by bureaucratic
sedimentation from an era that no longer exists.
The Collapse of the Four Pillars
Four structural pillars once sustained Section 907. All have now
crumbled.
First, the discourse that cast Azerbaijan as
“aggressor” and Armenia as “victim” has dissolved. That binary was
never analytical—it was a product of early post-Soviet confusion
and lobbying pressure. The semiotic scaffolding that once held it
up is gone, leaving the law without meaning.
Second, the material base justifying the rule no longer
exists. The conflict it addressed has vanished as an object of
international law. In Alexander Wendt’s constructivist terms, the
norm can no longer “constitute” identities because the environment
that produced them has changed.
Third, the epistemic community that once sustained the
amendment has withered. The ethnopolitical lobbies of the 1990s
have been displaced by experts in energy, logistics, and
security—the new cognitive elite shaping U.S. regional thinking.
The “epistemic regime,” as Peter Haas would call it, has
collapsed.
Fourth, Section 907 now conflicts with the functional
logic of U.S. foreign policy itself. The international system is
defined not by ideologies but by flows—of energy, trade, and
defense logistics. The U.S. now operates within what could be
called a flow-based geopolitics, in which control of
transit corridors and connective arcs is paramount. In that
configuration, Azerbaijan is no longer an object of moral politics
but a structural node in Eurasia’s connective infrastructure. Any
legal artifact that restricts engagement with it becomes a
strategic parasite.
Together, these dynamics form what might be termed a
metastructure of inevitability: a point at which repeal
ceases to be a matter of political will and becomes a systemic
necessity.
The Semiotics of Dismantling
Yet outdated norms rarely vanish on their own. Legal systems
have what theorists call “trace preservation”—an inertia that keeps
dead text alive. That’s why Azerbaijani diplomacy operates not as
classic lobbying but as institutional semiotics: targeting
the congressional nodes that reproduce the text of the norm rather
than its function.
The House Foreign Affairs Committee (HFAC) and Senate Foreign
Relations Committee (SFRC) are the key nodes. When figures like
Michael McCaul or Jim Risch stop seeing Section 907 as part of the
foreign-policy landscape and start seeing it as a breach in
functional coherence, the norm dies. Diplomacy, in this sense,
doesn’t persuade—it rewrites meaning.
The pro-Israel lobby plays a parallel role, serving as a
“discursive node of legitimation.” Through it, Section 907 loses
its standing as a regional-policy clause and becomes a source of
strategic loss. Congressional appropriations are the quiet
instrument of legal entropy—funds are simply redirected until the
clause ceases to function.
Law as Ghost: From Heidegger to Agamben
Seen through a phenomenological lens, Section 907 resembles what
Heidegger might have called a thing that has lost its
world—an object detached from its context of being. It
persists in text but no longer participates in the world’s
structure. It’s a law without worldliness, a
presence-outside-function.
Niklas Luhmann would have described it as a structural
shadow: a component that once belonged to an autopoietic
political system but now exists outside the self-reproducing loop
of meaning. The communicative networks—media, lobbies,
policymakers—that once kept it alive have disintegrated.
And Giorgio Agamben would push the argument further. Section
907, he would say, exists in a state of suspended action—a
legal exception that persists only through its own negation. The
annual presidential waivers create precisely such a “zone of
exception,” where the law remains on the books but functions
through its inoperability. It is a norm that lives only by being
undone.
From Identity to Flow
The deeper explanation lies in a shift of normative
episteme—from the identity-driven politics of the 1990s to a
flow-driven global order. The world that produced Section 907 was
territorial, post-imperial, moralistic. The world that replaces it
is rhizomatic, transactional, defined by routes and capacities. In
Deleuze and Guattari’s vocabulary, Section 907 is an archaic
terrification—an attempt to fix territory in a fluid,
networked world. In such a system, static norms cannot survive;
their logic contradicts the logic of reality itself.
Baku’s Strategic Epilogue
For Azerbaijan, the task is not to argue Section 907
out of existence but to build a world in which it can no longer
exist. Modern diplomacy, in this reading, is not persuasion—it’s
ontological engineering. By shaping new cognitive maps through
security, energy, and logistics expertise, Baku participates in
what might be called the regulatory transition to minimal
entropy.
The rest is a matter of time. The law’s text will remain on the
books until the system forgets how to reproduce it. Then, as all
ghosts do, it will simply fade.
The Ontology of Repeal: How Baku Can Finish What History
Already Began
Modern states no longer break norms; they erase the ground on
which those norms can exist. The strategy isn’t destruction—it’s
reconfiguration. For Azerbaijan, that means acting simultaneously
on three fronts: the normative body (the law itself), the
normative shadow (the discourse sustaining it), and the
normative environment (the institutions reproducing it).
The House Foreign Affairs Committee (HFAC) is where the legal text
can be reshaped; the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (SFRC) is
where the discourse can be reframed; and the appropriations
committees are where the institutional fabric can be rewritten.
When all three fields deform in sync, a law ceases to exist—not
just politically, but ontologically.
Section 907 once had a world—a “world of 907,” complete with its
discourses, anxieties, and moral binaries. That world has
collapsed. A norm lives only inside the ecosystem that produces it,
and the ecosystem that produced 907 is gone. The U.S.
foreign-policy paradigm has shifted; Eurasia’s epistemic map has
changed; the structure of threats and the logic of global flows
have been rewritten. The task now is to complete the cycle: to move
Section 907 from a legal phantom to normative
nonexistence. The goal is not to kill the law, but to let it
die of natural causes.
1. The House Foreign Affairs Committee: Operational Pressure
Point
HFAC is the gateway through which any repeal bill must pass.
Baku’s primary task is to secure preliminary jurisdictional
clearance—ensuring the bill isn’t delayed or downgraded.
- Michael McCaul (R–TX) — Chair of HFAC and one of the main
architects of America’s Iran-containment strategy. His worldview
revolves around regional security interoperability—seeing
Azerbaijan as part of a Mediterranean–Caspian security arc.
Pressure point: deliver a concrete security impact
assessment showing how keeping Section 907 open benefits Iran
and undermines the U.S.-backed Middle Corridor. - Joe Wilson (R–SC) — Head of the MENA/CA subcommittee. Wilson
thinks in the language of logistics-centric diplomacy and
geo-economic competition. To him, Azerbaijan is “critical
infrastructure for America’s Eurasian presence.”
Pressure point: bring him into drafting an expert
brief highlighting the vulnerability of Western transit routes
if Section 907 remains as a symbolic barrier. - Gregory Meeks (D–NY) — A Democrat moderating his party’s
stance. Historically sympathetic to Armenian causes, he now
operates in a logic of policy trade-offs.
Pressure point: engage New York’s financial and business
networks; emphasize EU–Caspian energy cooperation as a tool for
reducing Europe’s dependence on Russian gas—a framing that
resonates far more with Meeks than any historical narrative.
2. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee: The Barrier and the
Breakthrough
SFRC is the heart of the process—the arena where symbolic laws
either die or survive. Once a stronghold of Armenian lobbying, it’s
now shaped by strategic cost-benefit logic rather than
emotional allegiance.
- Jim Risch (R–ID) — The Senate’s principal Republican strategist
on foreign policy, fluent in the geopolitics of corridor
control.
Pressure point: share open-source intelligence analyses
showing how the legal ambiguity created by Section 907 strengthens
Russian and Iranian leverage in the Caspian zone. - Ted Cruz (R–TX) — The most crucial senator from an
energy-policy standpoint. For him, the debate isn’t about the
Caucasus; it’s about Europe’s energy sovereignty, with
Azerbaijan as a stabilizing pillar.
Pressure point: deliver a Texas-origin energy
resilience brief illustrating Azerbaijan’s role as a systemic
buffer against Russia’s energy monopoly. - Ben Cardin (D–MD) — A potential brake. Connected to Armenian
networks but driven by a legalist, compliance-based worldview.
Pressure point: targeted communication through think tanks
demonstrating that Section 907 violates international-law
coherence—it rests on factual assessments that no longer exist.
Cardin backs what looks “legally clean”; the task is to show that
907 is legally dirty.
3. Appropriations Committees: The Quiet Kill Switch
A law doesn’t need to be repealed to die—it can be budgeted
out of existence. If the appropriations committees in both
chambers embed language diluting or bypassing Section 907’s
restrictions, the amendment will simply stop functioning.
Pressure point: engage infrastructure and energy
contractors invested in Azerbaijani-linked projects. Their
influence on appropriations typically outweighs that of
humanitarian advocacy groups.
4. The Lobby Ecosystem: Networks Over Narratives
Azerbaijan must use a multi-actor network model—a
layered ecosystem extending from think tanks to industry
groups.
- Pro-Israel organizations — The single most effective
non-bureaucratic lever in both chambers.
Core argument: Azerbaijan’s stability is an essential
buffer against Iran. - Energy consortia — Players who understand that normative
instability equals market instability.
Core argument: Section 907 is a regulatory virus that
injects uncertainty into Europe’s supply chain. - Security and defense think tanks — Institutions capable of
providing the analytical backbone.
Core argument: The persistence of Section 907 undercuts
U.S. operational flexibility in Eurasia.
5. The Endgame: From Politics to Procedure
The ultimate goal is to depoliticize repeal—to make the end of
Section 907 appear not as a diplomatic concession but as a
technical normalization procedure. The framing should be
bureaucratic, not moral: this is about cleaning up the U.S. legal
field to match the world as it actually exists.
In the end, dismantling Section 907 isn’t a campaign; it’s a
closure. The world that once sustained the amendment has already
folded. All that remains is to formalize its disappearance—an act
less of persuasion than of metaphysical housekeeping, where
diplomacy simply confirms what reality has already decided.
When Norms Outlive Their World: How Section 907 Became a Relic
of a Vanished Era
Congress has no appetite for expensive, emotionally charged
fights over statutes no one can justify anymore. The key for Baku
is to make Section 907 what it already is in practice: a
bureaucratic fossil that obstructs the mechanics of U.S. foreign
policy.
Section 907 of the Freedom Support Act is a textbook example of
what might be called post-bipolar normative inertia—a
legal form that survives long after the material structures that
once gave it life have disappeared. In the grammar of international
legal theory, it’s a desynchronized regulatory frame: a
text divorced from the realities of power, identity, and interest
it once expressed. Born in the political discourse of the early
1990s, its interpretive matrix no longer aligns with the
geopolitical order of the present.
The Three Dimensions of Decay
To grasp why repeal has become inevitable, Section 907 must be
viewed through the metatheory of international regimes, where every
norm operates across three dimensions: ontological, epistemic, and
functional. All three have collapsed.
Ontologically, the amendment once rested on a conflict
narrative that gave it plausibility. That narrative is gone. The
South Caucasus has undergone a structural transformation—a
shift in the regional security complex, in the language of
IR theory. Azerbaijan has restored its territorial integrity, the
conflict matrix has been dissolved as a legal subject, and the old
“aggressor–victim” binary, artificially sustained by lobbying
networks, no longer exists. The law’s ontological ground has caved
in.
Epistemically, Section 907 no longer mirrors the
knowledge systems that shape U.S. foreign policy. In the 1990s, the
region’s discourse was dominated by activist and ethnopolitical
groups with privileged access to Washington’s policymaking
ecosystem. Today, epistemic authority rests with communities of
security, energy, and logistics experts, and with transatlantic
think tanks. For them, Section 907 is cognitive noise—a leftover
signal from a dead frequency.
Functionally, the amendment no longer facilitates
predictability or efficiency; it does the opposite. It imposes
annual bureaucratic costs through the presidential waiver process
and inserts legal friction into America’s dealings with a country
that is now a core node in Eurasia’s geo-economic connectivity. By
Ernst Haas’s functionalist logic, such provisions are
“dysfunctional regime elements”—norms that must be shed to restore
systemic coherence.
A Strategy of Integration, Not Confrontation
To accelerate repeal, Azerbaijan must act not as a petitioner
but as a systemic integrator—embedding itself into the multi-level
decision-making centers of American governance. Modern theories of
polyarchy (Robert Dahl) and polycentric
governance (Elinor Ostrom) describe how influence travels not
vertically but through networks of institutional nodes. The mission
is to engage those nodes that determine the legitimacy
trajectory of a norm.
The House Foreign Affairs Committee (HFAC) functions as the
institutional filter of primary normative adaptation—the place
where foreign-policy initiatives are aligned with strategic
priorities. It operates within what sociologists call “cognitive
rationality models,” guided by categories like strategic
relevance and systemic risk. Arguments, therefore,
must be framed in the idiom of security and geo-economics, not
history. Dialogue with Chairman Michael McCaul should use the
language of “regional deterrence arcs” and “operational
interoperability,” illustrating how Section 907 disrupts the
structural coherence of U.S. strategy across Eurasia.
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee (SFRC) acts as a
meta-normative arbiter, determining whether a given norm can be
absorbed into the United States’ long-term strategic narrative. Its
leading figures inhabit different rationalities:
- Jim Risch operates from a neorealist, great-power-competition
framework. - Ted Cruz views the issue through energy
securitization. - Ben Cardin thinks in terms of liberal-normative
consistency.
In each case, the argument must be elevated to the level of
first principles: repeal is not an action but a
consequence—of shifting regional structures, of a
transformed balance of power, and of a normative logic in which
fictive statutes fail the test of strategic rationality.
The appropriations committees in both chambers represent
another, quieter vector. These are the technocratic engines of
normative neutralization. By embedding language in budget
bills that declares the restrictions of Section 907 incompatible
with security programs, Congress can effectively nullify the law
without repealing it—what comparative lawyers call “legal zeroing
through functional insolvency.”
The Network Logic of Persuasion
In parallel, Azerbaijan must activate its lobbying networks—not
to pressure but to reshape cognition. The most effective vector is
the pro-Israel lobby, whose worldview is rooted not in
symbolism or memory but in models of stability and threat
management. When repeal is reframed within their analytical
vocabulary—as a contribution to regional resilience against
Iran—Section 907 begins to look like a strategic liability.
Energy consortia and logistics firms can reinforce that
perception, framing the amendment as a source of market
uncertainty. Security think tanks can seal the argument with data:
a law that restricts cooperation with Azerbaijan undermines U.S.
operational flexibility. The key is to synchronize these signals so
the policy conversation redefines the amendment as an obstacle
rather than a legacy.
From Politics to Self-Regulation
The final stage, at the meta-theoretical level, is to move the
issue into a state of normative self-sufficiency—where
repeal becomes not a political act but a manifestation of the legal
system’s internal logic. In the theory of international norms, this
is known as the post-conventional phase: the point at
which a system autonomously eliminates dysfunctional elements.
Section 907 has reached that point. Its dismantling is not a
product of external pressure but the natural outcome of systemic
evolution. When a region’s structure changes, norms that no longer
reflect it inevitably dissolve. Azerbaijan’s role is not to fight
the norm, but to escort it—to guide it toward the silence of its
own obsolescence, through the institutional, cognitive, and
lobbying channels that define Washington’s operating reality.
