By Doug Casey
November 21, 2025
International Man: Doug, you recently visited Azerbaijan-a country most people have never heard of, let alone could find on a map.
You've spent decades exploring some of the world's least understood regions. What brought you to Azerbaijan, and how does it compare with other obscure countries you've visited for potential opportunity?
Doug Casey: I gave up sport traveling years ago. That's because the world has become quite homogenized. Tons of bucket-listing tourists everywhere, wearing the same clothing, maintained by the same ubiquitous food and hospitality franchises. There's not much point in pretending to be Richard Burton anymore.
That said, some friends-mostly Germans-who belong to ETIC, the Extreme Travelers International Congress, still enjoy travel camaraderie, and retro-rocking off the beaten path. I don't know what the future holds for my friends at ETIC, since there are fewer and fewer extreme places in the world. But on the other hand, I expect over the next five or 10 years we're going to have lots more war zones.
They decided to revisit Azerbaijan and Nagorno-Karabakh, inviting Matt Smith and I along.
ETIC was founded by my friend Kolja Spöri, an ex-Formula One exec. There were ten of us, and everyone had been to over a hundred countries as a bare minimum. To give you a better flavor of the company, one of them had run a marathon on each of the seven continents on seven consecutive days, an unusual world record. No cubicle dwellers here.
The long war between Azerbaijan and Armenia, mostly over a disputed enclave called Nagorno-Karabakh, had been ongoing since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. It finally ended about eighteen months ago. The Extreme Travelers are fairly familiar with desolation, and usually it's hard to beat a recent war zone in that department. But, as I'll explain, the place was a huge surprise.
We spent a few days in Baku, the capital. Incidentally, the first commercial production of oil in the world was here, not in Pennsylvania, as most Americans think. You've probably seen this famous picture of Baku 150 years ago, with several hundred primitive oil wells spraying oil everywhere. No longer. Azerbaijan is still a big producer of petroleum, providing 70% of the national income. But things are now neat, clean, and modern.
After a few days there, we drove hundreds of miles all around Nagorno-Karabakh, which has recently been reclaimed by the Azerbaijanis. About 100,000 Armenians left everything but what they could carry and exited en masse. There are some hard feelings. Not to mention some tens of thousands of war dead. The Azeri army detonated an Armenian anti-tank mine for us in a field they were clearing.
International Man: Azerbaijan sits on a geopolitical fault line at the crossroads of Russia, Iran, and Turkey-and recently played a crucial role for Israel during its 12-day war with Iran.
From your visit, what insights did you gain about where this region is headed and what may lie ahead on this volatile frontier?
Doug Casey: Azerbaijan has ten million people. Like the Iranians, they're Shia Muslims, but religion doesn't seem prominent here. No muezzins on loudspeaker, no burqas or hijabs. Oddly-I'd say opportunistically-they're aligned with Israel, and allowed themselves to be used as a flyover for the recent US-Israeli attack on the Iranians. Strange, in that there are about twenty million Azeris across the border in Iran. Incidentally, Iran's supreme leader Ali Khamenei, is half Azeri.
Central Asia, like the Near East, is chronically unstable-a crossroads of every religious, ethnic, and linguistic group, with periodic bloody conquests. Old resentments seem to linger forever.
I got an email from a subscriber-an American of Armenian descent-who urged me not to go. He said I'd be propagandized and assured me that the Azeris were very, very bad people. And after getting to know a number of Azerbaijanis, I was assured by several that the Armenians were very, very bad people. That doesn't augur well for the peace treaty that Trump claims to have brokered in the area. The Azeris are basically Turks, and the well-known holocaust of the Armenians and Greeks by the Turks is well remembered.
The chances of naïve busybody Americans creating peace on the other side of the world are less than zero. They'll find they've just made more enemies while bankrupting themselves. They never learn. Fuhgedaboudit.
International Man: The US recently brokered a peace deal between historical enemies Armenia and Azerbaijan. As part of the deal, Armenia will lease the so-called 'Trump Corridor' (officially the Zangezur Corridor)-effectively inserting the US into the strategic space between Iran and Russia.
How do you interpret this move in the broader geopolitical chessboard?
Doug Casey: Further proof that, after hydrogen, stupidity is the most common thing in the universe. Wherever the US inserts itself anywhere in the world, it inevitably makes things worse-picking sides, shipping weapons and money around, enabling more warfare. Trump may have put a Band-Aid on the unpleasantness between Armenia and Azerbaijan, but rest assured it's at great cost in dollars and threats from the US government.
This got me thinking more about Trump. He thinks he's America's answer to Louis XIV, who said "L'etat c'est moi" (I am the State). But I'll lay odds he won't finish his term; he'll turn out to be Louis XVI.
International Man: You noted how pervasive the propaganda in Azerbaijan was-yet how familiar it felt compared to what we experience in the West.
What did you mean by that?
Doug Casey: It's a huge mistake to believe almost anything that you hear or read in the media. A lot of the news is pure propaganda. It's devoid of any critical thinking or historical background. Media types create "factoids"-an idiotic CNN-created neologism that most people think means something like "a fun little fact". It doesn't. A "factoid" relates to a "fact" the way an "android" does to a human, or an "asteroid" does to a star-deceptively similar, but quite different. The subtle manipulation of words is the best way to lie to intelligent people. Sorry for the tangent... but I mostly listen to the news not to find out what's supposedly happening, but to see what other people are supposed to be thinking.
International Man: Given what you witnessed firsthand in Azerbaijan, what do you see as the broader investment implications?
Doug Casey: Since the 15 Soviet republics broke up in 1991, Azerbaijan has been run by the Aliyev family, first the father, now the son. Hereditary dynasties normally augur badly. But, then again, they may be better than so-called democracies, which are the current fashion.
The Aliyev government rates very low in the assessment by places like Freedom House and the Heritage Institute for things like personal freedom and economic opportunity. It's not Switzerland or Cayman, but it's stable, prosperous, and improving. I think it's an underrated place.
Amazingly, Baku has Ferrari, Bugatti, and Lamborghini dealerships. It also has some of the heaviest traffic jams you're likely to see this side of Bangkok. It seems like none of the cars are more than five years old, and they're all in good condition. So the money is being widely distributed, and I saw no signs of unrest or unhappiness. The place is hard to tell from Denver, except that it's safer.
And while the US sinks into bankruptcy, degeneracy, and corruption, Azerbaijan is providing a counter-example. At least when it comes to public works, like roads. We drove hundreds of miles, all around the country, at high speed.
The US spends $250 billion per year repairing its roads. It takes forever, and we mainly get crews standing around forever just to fix potholes. It seems like a giant grift. Matt Smith's description is quite accurate:
"By far, the most impressive thing I saw during our visit was the level of construction occurring in the country... the scale of which is almost beyond imagination.... occasionally I could glimpse below in the valley a brand-new highway system which included dozens of tunnels. Now this is probably the most difficult terrain possible to do major construction.
"And yet what I glimpsed from above was shocking in scale.... along the roads that we traveled, there were endless streams of heavy equipment, hard at work, reshaping the landscape to expand the highway system we were on. There were cement factories everywhere built bespoke to support this ambitious effort.
"The scale was so massive, so inorganic, and so out of place, we had a hard time making sense of it. To do something like this in America would be utterly impossible. It would cost trillions of dollars. The thinking required, too big, the manpower, unavailable, the will, long gone.... seeing this scale of construction, the costs I imagined seemed utterly impossible. And so, at my earliest opportunity, I did some research. What I found was shocking.
Azerbaijan has built 4,000 kilometers of highway, 45 tunnels, including the second longest in the world, 447 bridges, 16 viaducts. Much of this over very, very difficult terrain. The project is mostly complete. And the total project time was less than five years. All this they're doing for approximately $5 billion.
To put that in perspective, on March 26, 2024, the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore was damaged when a container ship collided into it. As of today, the bridge stands unusable. No repair work has yet started. The estimated cost for reconstruction of that bridge is between $1.7 billion and $1.9 billion. And when will it be done? It hasn't even started yet. The current target completion date is October 2028.
So, in four and a half years, and for about $2 billion, we get an old and important bridge replaced in one of America's cities. And in Azerbaijan, for $5 billion, they get 447 bridges, 4,000 kilometers of highways, dozens of tunnels including the second longest tunnel in the world. All in less than five years."
On the long trip back to Buenos Aires (3 hours Baku to Istanbul, and 13.5 more to BA via Sao Paulo), we stopped off in Istanbul for a couple of days. It's one of the world's great cities, and one of my favorites. I think you'll like the video podcast Matt and I did from there ( link ).
Reprinted with permission from International Man.