The other week, Azerbaijan’s president scolded US secretary of state Antony Blinken over efforts to curtail military assistance to the Caspian dictatorship in the wake of its assault on the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. While US arms and assistance to Azerbaijan have largely been overlooked, they are representative of how Washington’s security assistance has facilitated war crimes and perpetuated a global system built on the selective application of human rights and international law. In the case of Azerbaijan, US assistance enabled ethnic cleansing on a shocking scale.

However, amid public outcry over the nonenforcement and rollback of human rights conditions on military assistance to US allies from Turkey to Saudi Arabia to Israel — a recent decision by the Senate to suspend military assistance to Azerbaijan marks an unprecedented step toward the enforcement of human rights standards and congressional oversight long absent from US foreign policy.

Last month, Azerbaijan invaded Nagorno-Karabakh (also known as Artsakh), forcibly expelling its entire indigenous Armenian population, aided by US security assistance. As a direct consequence of the impunity Washington has granted Baku, Azerbaijan, is now threatening further military action against Armenia — a risk recently acknowledged by Secretary Blinken.