On June 1, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev posted a framed order President Donald Trump gave him waiving Section 907 of the Freedom Support Act. Essentially, Trump’s waiver allows Azerbaijan to purchase American weaponry.In 1992, Congress passed the Freedom Support Act to help the newly independent states that emerged from the Soviet Union’s collapse build their capacity and transition to democracy. At the time, Azerbaijani forces were leading pogroms against Armenians across Azerbaijan and seeking to ethnically cleanse Nagorno-Karabakh, an autonomous Armenian region that Josef Stalin had assigned to Azerbaijan. The Senate wrote into the law a provision that banned U.S. assistance to Azerbaijan but enabled a presidential waiver.For much of its first decade, Section 907 remained in force, and Azerbaijan received little direct support. After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, President George W. Bush issued an ultimatum: “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists,” he told a Joint Session of Congress. Heydar Aliyev, the former Soviet KGB officer and Central Committee member who had taken the reins of power in Azerbaijan in a slow-motion coup against the backdrop of outrage he incited after false rumors of a “genocide” in the tiny village of Khojaly, was savvy. He told Bush he stood with him, then lobbied for a waiver to Section 907. Behind the scenes, for anyone dedicated enough to follow the money, Aliyev was equally aligned with Russia and Iran. When Heydar died and left power to his son Ilham, the younger Aliyev kept the two-faced policy.