On Dec. 26, authorities in Azerbaijan raided the local bureau of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a U.S. government-funded service, seizing computers and ordering the office shut down. Earlier that month, police had arrested Khadija Ismayilova, a RFE/RL reporter and the country’s most prominent investigative journalist, on dubious charges of inciting someone to commit suicide. (The alleged victim has since recanted the accusation, but Ms. Ismayilova remains in jail.)

These events have been reported abroad largely as marking a further constriction in Azerbaijan’s already tiny space for alternative points of view. And they are that. But they also suggest a dramatic change in the geopolitics of the volatile Caspian Sea region: the Azerbaijani government’s growing hostility toward Washington.

Azerbaijan is in a prime location, wedged between Russia and Iran on the oil- and gas-rich Caspian Sea. Since gaining independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, it has been a strong partner of the United States. It has worked with Washington to break Russia’s energy monopoly in the region by supporting the construction of oil and gas pipelines to Turkey. It is a key transit point for military cargo to and from Afghanistan. And the government in Baku has forged close ties with Israel, based primarily on the trade of weaponry and oil.

A 2009 U.S. diplomatic cable described Azerbaijan’s foreign policy as characterized by “pragmatism, restraint and a helpful bias toward integration with the West.” Baku’s orientation toward the West was always in service of two priorities: maintaining its grip on power and taking back the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, which Azerbaijan lost to ethnic Armenian separatists in the early 1990s. But as Russia’s dramatic new foreign policy changes the strategic landscape across Eurasia, Baku appears to be recalculating whether its ties to the West really are advancing its own goals.