A US military intervention in Iran doesn’t just risk exposing Gulf states and Israel to Iranian retaliation. It also raises the spectre of a regional war spilling over into the Caucasus.

With no US or Israeli targets within its borders, Iran has threatened to retaliate against Israel and US military bases in the Middle East, a threat directed at Gulf states and Israel rather than NATO member Turkey.

While Iran is unlikely to attack Turkey’s Incirlik Airbase that hosts the US military’s 39th Air Base Wing, an uptick of ethnic nationalism, particularly among Azeris, a Turkic group who account from anywhere between 16 and 24 per cent of the Iranian population, could draw Iran’s neighbours, Turkey and Azerbaijan, into a wider regional conflict on the principle of ‘you may not want war but war wants you.’

Militant supporters of Israel in the United States, like the influential, far-right, Philadelphia-based Middle East Forum appear willing to shoulder the risk.

   

The Forum has advocated a US targeting of Azeri units of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps or IRGC, which the Forum describes as the Guards’ most brutal.

The IRGC is among the prime targets that the US military has presented to US President Donald Trump.

Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has warned in the past that when Iran held military exercises near its border with Azerbaijan, “we had to conduct military exercises on the Iranian border to show that we are not afraid of them. We will do our best to protect the secular lifestyle of Azerbaijan and Azerbaijanis around the world, including Azerbaijanis in Iran. They are part of our people.”

Among Iran’s ethnic and religious minorities, who account for approximately 43 per cent of the Iranian population, Azeris are the most integrated and have risen to high government positions. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is part Azeri.

Increasing the strategic importance of Iran’s minorities is the fact that they straddle the country’s borders: Azeris in the northwest Turkish-Azerbaijani-Iranian triangle, Kurds in the west along the borders with Turkey and Iraqi Kurdistan, Arabs in the southwestern oil-rich province of Khuzestan that straddles the frontier with Iraq, and Baluch along the southeastern border with Pakistan and Afghanistan. Not to mention the Turkmens in the north and the Lors in the south and southwest.

   

Despite being the most integrated, Azeris have, in recent years, asserted their identity more vocally, demanding schooling in their own language, turning to satellite Turkish and Azeri-language media for their news and entertainment, and participating in cultural programmes of Turkish consulates in the Iranian Azeri provincial capitals of Tabriz and Urmia.

In addition, some Azeri municipal and provincial authorities have added Azeri-language designations to Farsi street names and encouraged the use of Azeri in official meetings.

In rare public support for Iranian Azeri nationalism, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan cited a poem during a military parade in Baku, the Azerbaijani capital, in 2020 that laments Azeri speakers being divided between Iran and Azerbaijan.

An Azeri folksong entitled Gulestan written by Azeri poet Bakhtiyar Vahabzadeh, reads, ““They separated the Aras River and filled it with rocks and rods. I will not be separated from you. They have separated us forcibly.”

   

Rising in Turkey, the 1,072-kilometre-long Aras River separates Iran from Turkey, Armenia, and Azerbaijan’s Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic.

The poem is an expression of pan-Turkism that seeks the unification of all Turkic peoples, including Iranian Azeris.

While Reza Pahlavi, the exiled former Shah’s eldest son, positions himself as a future Iranian leader despite lacking significant support or an organisational infrastructure in Iran, Azeris and other minorities view him as a Persian nationalist.

The prospect of Mr. Pahlavi’s return to Iran, a 65-year-old who has not visited the country for almost half a century, could prompt Azeris to rally around the Azerbaijani and Turkish flags.

More than a decade ago, Iranian Azeri soccer fans wore shirts with the Turkish and Azerbaijan flags and raised the two countries’ flags during matches played by Traktor Sazi FC, Iran’s foremost Azeri club.

   

The risk of Azeri and Turkish involvement in a US military conflagration with Iran is heightened by past US and Israeli support for ethnic militants in the country, and Israel’s belief that the fracturing of neighbour and enemy states enhances its security, a school of thought that resonates with some within the Washington Beltway.

Discussing recent cases of potential secession or greater autonomy in Yemen, Somalia, and Syria, and whether in an era of transition in the world order, the borders of nation-states should be sacrosanct, scholar Steven A. Cook concluded, “Sometimes they are, but not always.”

With the prospects of a US military intervention swinging from lukewarm to hot as the United States masses an armada in the Middle East, the risk is high that the Trump administration and Iran have boxed themselves into corners from which it is difficult to escape, despite Mr. Trump’s most recent assertion that Iran was talking “seriously’ to the administration about steps to avoid a military confrontation.

Ali Larijani, the head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, suggested on X that “structural arrangements for #negotiations (were) progressing.”

   

Even so, finding a face-saving solution that would allow both sides to step back from the brink is no mean task.

Saudi Defence Minister Khalid bin Salman, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s brother, conceded as much when he this week seemed to resign himself to the inevitable.

Rather than endorsing a US military intervention, Mr. Bin Salman told a private gathering of think tank analysts and representatives of American Jewish organisations in Washington that the administration had left itself no good options.

“At this point, if this doesn’t happen, it will only embolden the regime,” Mr. Bin Salman said.

He may have a point, depending on the nature and outcome of US military action, or the degree to which Iran bows to US demands to avert intervention, particularly regarding curbs on the Islamic Republic’s ballistic missile programme, a demand that would be difficult to accept by any Iranian government, whether revolutionary or post-revolution.

For now, the more likely trajectory is that both the United States and Iran are doomed if they do and doomed if they don’t, which enhances the spectre of a war in a swath of land stretching from the Gulf to Turkey and the Caucasus.