“Moments of shared exposure can create openings for cooperation that ordinary politics keeps closed.”

Around noon on March 5, a drone struck the passenger terminal of Azerbaijan’s Nakhchivan International Airport. A second fell near a school in the village of Shakarabad in Babek district during class hours. Four civilians were injured.

Azerbaijan’s Ministry of Defense announced that four unmanned aerial vehicles launched from Iranian territory had been detected, aimed  toward the exclave. Tehran denied responsibility. In a call with his Azerbaijani counterpart, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, suggested Israel might be responsible and framed the strikes as an attempt to damage Iran’s relations with its neighbors. Baku was unconvinced, summoning the Iranian ambassador, and placing its armed forces on full combat readiness.

What actually happened remains unclear. The drones may have been launched deliberately by the Iranian leadership. They may also have reflected a rogue decision by a local military unit operating amid the confusion of a war fought across multiple fronts. That same day, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian publicly apologized to third countries caught in the crossfire — only for fresh strikes to hit the UAE hours later, suggesting either military commanders do not take their orders from the interim leadership council and are operationally decentralized, or parts of the council have learned to use apology and escalation as instruments of the same hand. Or they may simply have gone astray.

That possibility is not far-fetched. The war Iran is now fighting, the second major round since U.S. and Israeli strikes in June 2025 and a renewed campaign beginning in February 2026, has saturated regional airspace with munitions operating at the edge of navigational reliability. In June 2025, an Iranian-made Arash-2 loitering munition with a range of roughly 2,000 kilometers crashed in Kazakhstan’s Mangystau region, likely after its navigation system failed during flight across either Turkmenistan or the Caspian Sea.

None of these explanations are reassuring. Whether the incident was the result of policy, indiscipline, or malfunction, the outcome is the same. Munitions originating in Iran landed on Azerbaijani territory.

The harder question is what comes next. The war is not winding down. Iran has absorbed thousands of U.S. and Israeli strikes and is retaliating across a wide arc of U.S. interests, including Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, the UAE, and Iraq. Iran’s Supreme Leader is dead and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has been diminished but so far resilient. Under conditions like these, conflicts expand not only through strategy but also through miscalculation, retaliation, and weapons systems operating faster than the humans controlling them.

If the Nakhchivan strike was accidental, it is unlikely to be the last. If it was deliberate, the logic behind it could advance.

Armenia, which shares a long border with Iran, faces similar risks from debris, misfires, or overflight. The question is no longer whether the South Caucasus will be affected by the war in Iran. It already is. The question is whether Yerevan and Baku are prepared to manage that reality together.

The regional context into which this crisis spills is not the same as it was even a year ago. For the first time since independence, Armenia and Azerbaijan do not formally regard each other as adversaries. The Washington Declaration of August 8, 2025, signed at the White House with Donald Trump presiding, committed both sides to peace, diplomatic normalization, and the opening of transit routes. The text of a peace agreement was initialed and a framework for connectivity, including a route linking mainland Azerbaijan to Nakhchivan through Armenian territory, was established under the rubric of the “Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity.”

Whatever one thinks of the deal’s details, the political shift is significant. Both countries have chosen, at least on paper, to end their rivalry.

But paper is fragile. The Washington process produced a declaration and an initialed agreement, but a final treaty has not yet been signed. The border remains partially contested, demarcation is incomplete, and both societies carry histories that political agreements cannot instantly absolve. A form of peace exists, but its institutional foundations remain thin.

Meanwhile, a serious external shock that forces rapid decisions under such uncertainty, domestic pressure, and along a tense border could further strain that fragile peace architecture.

The war next door is most certainly  such a shock. However, crises can also create openings for cooperation that normal politics rarely allows.

The first step Armenia and Azerbaijan might consider is establishing a dedicated mechanism for day-to-day coordination on spillover from Iran. Communication today largely consists of occasional contacts between officials. What the moment may require is something more structured. Designated envoys or crisis coordinators with direct communication channels between the two governments could help manage incidents as they occur. In a conflict of this scale and speed, coordination cannot remain ad hoc.

The military dimension is equally important. Both countries operate air defense systems and both have an interest in identifying and tracking objects entering their airspace from Iranian territory. A drone striking Nakhchivan today could be followed by missile debris over southern Armenia tomorrow.

Shared air defense information, coordinated tracking of aerial objects, and agreed protocols for interception would allow both sides to respond more effectively. Such cooperation would not require a military alliance, only recognition that the threat is shared.

Nakhchivan’s situation makes the case for practical cooperation even clearer. The exclave has long faced logistical isolation, and the current war has made that vulnerability more acute. Its airport runway has been damaged by the recent strike. Transit through Iran has effectively become impossible, and yet the route through Armenian territory remains closed as it has for decades. Currently, Türkiye and Azerbaijan have organized flights through Iğdır to maintain limited connections, but this is only a temporary workaround.

This crisis may provide a moment to revisit alternatives that have long remained theoretical. One is opening the route along the Aras River crossing Armenian territory. Another is opening the road linking Lachin, Sisian, and Nakhchivan from the north. Both options have remained politically blocked despite their humanitarian potential.

If Armenia were to facilitate the passage of goods and civilians to and from Nakhchivan on humanitarian grounds, the gesture could carry significance far beyond its logistical value. It would demonstrate that the Washington framework can produce tangible cooperation when circumstances demand it.

Such a gesture would likely require reciprocity. Azerbaijan could respond with practical economic steps that benefit Armenia directly, such as expanding electricity exchanges, increasing natural gas supplies, or opening limited border trading arrangements for communities along the frontier. Small measures of this kind could begin to translate political commitments into tangible dividends for both societies.

History offers a useful precedent for such cooperation. In August 1999, a devastating earthquake struck Turkey’s İzmit region, killing more than 17,000 people. Greece, which had nearly gone to war with Turkey just three years earlier over the Imia and Kardak islets, was the first country to send rescue teams. When Athens was struck by its own earthquake weeks later, Turkey reciprocated.

The mutual assistance broke what one Greek ambassador later described as the taboos shaping how both societies viewed each other. Within three years Greece and Turkey had signed ten bilateral agreements and Athens shifted its stance on Turkish EU candidacy. Shared vulnerability opened political space that diplomacy alone had struggled to create.

The analogy is imperfect. Where the İzmit earthquake was a natural disaster, the war in Iran is man-made and its regional consequences are uneven. Yet the underlying lesson remains relevant. Moments of shared exposure can create openings for cooperation that ordinary politics keeps closed.

Armenia and Azerbaijan have already moved further toward normalization than Greece and Turkey had in 1999. The Washington Declaration created a framework and the war in Iran is now testing whether that framework can withstand a real crisis or become the foundation for practical cooperation when it matters most.