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Nearly precisely 20 years after my first journey to Oklahoma as a junior diplomat, I shall be visiting our associate state this week because the Ambassador of Azerbaijan. Then, my mentor, Ambassador Hafiz Pashayev, instructed me to discover the alternatives for cooperation since we had been beginning a State Partnership Program with the Oklahoma Nationwide Guard.
At present, our observe file is proudly expansive. In July 2021, a number of days after my new appointment, the primary U.S. delegation I engaged with in Azerbaijan was from Oklahoma. Gov. Kevin Stitt and his workforce had been the most effective embodiment of the American tradition: open, partaking and patriotic. Through the assembly with President Ilham Aliyev, profitable cooperation with Oklahoma was hailed and Gov. Stitt seemed ahead to strengthening our partnership and connecting Oklahoma corporations with the numerous financial growth alternatives in Azerbaijan. Certainly, Azerbaijan, encompassing virtually the two-thirds of the strategically positioned South Caucasus financial system and demography, awaits extra companies from Oklahoma. Renewable power, data applied sciences, logistics and agriculture are the important thing areas to discover.
We’re additionally wanting to host extra college students and unusual residents to show the most effective of our hospitality, historical tradition and vibrant society.
Alternatively, Azerbaijani corporations are very to take a position and our youths are filling the ranks of scholars in Oklahoma. We are going to search extra alternatives to deepen our engagement in the course of the journey.
In the meantime, our cooperation with Oklahoma can be a critical contribution to total Azerbaijan-U.S. partnership, which celebrates its thirtieth anniversary this 12 months. Involvement of American power corporations in world power and transportation initiatives in Azerbaijan has been instrumental in making certain Europe’s power safety and defending key U.S. nationwide pursuits. The eighth Ministerial Assembly of the Southern Gasoline Hall (which delivers Caspian gasoline from Azerbaijan to Europe by means of a system of related pipelines) Advisory Council, held in Baku in February, reaffirmed the strategic power partnership between the Republic of Azerbaijan and the European Union based mostly on shared objectives of long-term power safety, safety of provide and the inexperienced power transition.
Azerbaijan’s participation in NATO and U.S.-led operations in Iraq and Afghanistan has demonstrated our widespread imaginative and prescient and joint capabilities. It isn’t a shock that round half of all of the flights in the course of the operation in Afghanistan came about over Azerbaijan and our troops had been among the many final 4 nations defending Kabul Airport along with American, British and Turkish associates. Our partnership with the Oklahoma Nationwide Guard is one in every of 85 U.S. Nationwide Guard partnerships around the globe and has performed a giant position for our peacekeepers’ interoperability. Early this month, members of the Oklahoma Nationwide Guard visited the Peacekeeping Brigade of Azerbaijan Armed Forces to help with strategic planning and unit coaching and assist attain NATO certification.
We took the phrases of Will Rogers, whose statue Gov. Stitt introduced to President Aliyev, significantly. He as soon as mentioned, “Even in the event you’re heading in the right direction, you will get run over in the event you simply sit there.” So we don’t sit. We do what the scholars at Oklahoma State College, which I’ll go to, proudly name for: “Journey, journey, journey, journey, Journey ’em Cowboys, Proper down the sector!” I do know that we’ll journey to extra and larger achievements along with the folks of the Sooner State and america of America.
Khazar Ibrahim is an envoy of the Republic of Azerbaijan to the U.S.
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