By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

How Common Cause Against Russia Enabled an American Deal

On August 8, U.S. President Donald Trump hosted the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan at the White House for what Trump touted as a “historic peace summit.” As with the president’s unsuccessful high-profile efforts to broker a truce between Russia and Ukraine, this might have seemed an extravagant overbilling. After all, for more than 30 years, the two South Caucasus countries have been implacable adversaries. They have fought two wars, and their populations are steeped in mutually opposing historical narratives. Just two years ago, Azerbaijan decisively seized control of the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, forcing more than 100,000 ethnic Armenians to flee.

Yet in this case, as much by luck as by skill, Trump may have pulled off something of great significance. After months of bilateral talks between the two countries, the moment was ripening for a provisional peace accord. Crucially, both sides did not want Russia, the traditional regional hegemon, to serve as the guarantor of a deal, which made Trump’s offer to host a peace summit especially attractive. If you are going to break pledges you made to Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Oval Office is a good place to do so.

At the White House, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev signed a brief but meaningful statement agreeing to avoid further conflict. They also initialed but did not sign a 17-point text of what observers are calling a “peace agreement” that normalizes diplomatic and political relations after years of conflict. And they jointly approved a plan for a new road-and-rail connection linking Azerbaijan with Nakhichevan, an Azerbaijani exclave bordered by Armenia, Iran, and Turkey. Armenia has given development rights to this 27-mile transportation corridor across its territory to an American company while maintaining sovereign control of the passage, which is to be named the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity, and Azerbaijan will be given “unimpeded access” to and from Nakhichevan. Notably, the TRIPP plan supersedes a 2020 agreement between Aliyev, Pashinyan, and Putin that would have granted Russia control of the route.

For different reasons, both the Azerbaijani government in Baku and its Armenian counterpart in Yerevan are keen to free themselves from Moscow’s grip. The Trump administration, for its part, is eager to sponsor a deal, in part because of potential commercial benefit for the United States but more because a lasting peace deal will burnish Trump’s claim to be a global peacemaker. But the peace framework reached at the White House in August is still fragile. It will succeed only if the United States follows through on implementing the TRIPP and helping reopen other routes shut down by the conflict. To do so, it must work with Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Turkey to finance and build other links in an east-west transport chain across all three countries, which would make the Trump road an international highway and not just a local project.

The United States will also need to work closely with the European Union, which is investing far more in the South Caucasus, both politically and financially, than Washington. European support will be crucial in making a peace deal between Armenia and Azerbaijan stick. Moscow, naturally, would like to see the U.S.-brokered rapprochement between Baku and Yerevan fail. But if Washington and its European partners stay engaged to implement the complicated transit accord and tackle the obstacles that domestic and foreign actors will inevitably raise, the South Caucasus could finally break out of a cycle of conflict that has held it back for decades.

 

Westward Bound

The deal sketched out in the White House reflects Azerbaijan’s emergence as the dominant player in the South Caucasus. This new reality first started to take shape after the second Nagorno-Karabakh war, which was fought between Armenia and Azerbaijan over 44 days in 2020. After years of diplomatic stalemate, Azerbaijan resumed its fight with Armenia that year and managed to reclaim all the territories surrounding Nagorno-Karabakh that it had lost in the 1990s. When Moscow brokered a cease-fire to the 2020 war, Nagorno-Karabakh itself remained a de-facto autonomous Armenian-controlled entity, but it was now dependent for its security on a newly deployed Russian peacekeeping force.

In 2023, however, with Armenia unable to defend the exclave and Russia distracted by its war in Ukraine, Azerbaijani forces took the opportunity to seize Nagorno-Karabakh. Almost overnight, the entire remaining Armenian population there fled. In the wake of this battlefield victory, Aliyev, who has been Azerbaijan’s strongman president since 2003, negotiated with Armenia on a peace agreement but seemed to be in no hurry to conclude it, confident that his country had the upper hand in the regional balance of power.

Throughout his tenure, Aliyev has skillfully managed relations with Russia, which historically has long been an ally of Armenia. In 2022, he signed an interstate agreement with Putin just two days before the Kremlin launched its invasion of Ukraine. In August 2024, Putin even visited Azerbaijan on a state visit. But since then, Baku’s relations with Moscow have sharply deteriorated. In the last nine months especially, Aliyev has grown more wary of Russia and more inclined to pursue peace with Armenia.

Problems began in December, when a Russian antiaircraft missile mistakenly shot down an Azerbaijani passenger plane, killing 38 civilians. When Putin did not apologize, Aliyev issued an unusually blunt rebuke, asserting that Moscow had tried to “hush up” the issue. Then, this summer, Putin put Sergei Kiriyenko, a Kremlin hard-liner who has spearheaded the Kremlin’s policy of integrating occupied regions of Ukraine into Russia, in charge of relations with the South Caucasus countries. In what looked like a deliberate provocation, police in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg rounded up local Azerbaijanis in June and accused them of crimes that were two decades old. Two Azerbaijanis ended up dead. Aliyev responded with fury, canceling Russian official visits and cultural events and leading a media campaign that accused Russia of neoimperialism. All of this signals that the Azerbaijani leader is now determined to keep Moscow out of any new regional settlement.

Notably, Armenia also has a Russia problem, which makes for a tactical convergence of interests with Azerbaijan. Since tsarist times, Russia has ensured Armenia’s loyalty by promising to defend it against the Ottoman Empire (and then against its successor, Turkey) with sustained military support. But of late, Moscow has repeatedly failed to come to Armenia’s aid, such as when it declined to honor its treaty commitment to defend Armenia when Azerbaijan staged a cross-border incursion into the country in 2022. Pashinyan, increasingly skeptical about Moscow’s credibility as an ally, suspended Armenia’s participation in the Collective Security Treaty Organization, a Russian-led security bloc, in 2024. Instead, he has reached out to the United States and Europe for support. In January, shortly before Trump took office, the Armenian government signed a strategic partnership agreement with the Biden administration promising closer political and commercial ties, and the Armenian parliament adopted legislation in March calling on the government to begin seeking membership in the EU.

This led Russia to take ever more blatant steps to destabilize the Pashinyan government. In June, Pashinyan announced that a plot had been foiled to oust his administration. The Armenian authorities did not blame Moscow directly, but a leading Russian Armenian businessman in Yerevan, Samvel Karapetyan, was arrested. In an even more sensational development, two Armenian bishops with links to Russia were detained. The government publicized evidence of the plot, including a cache of weapons that had been found.

Pashinyan’s willingness to confront the Armenian church, which has traditionally been close to Moscow, is a sign of how far he is willing to go to break Armenia’s historic dependence on Russia. Shared defiance of Moscow thus spurred the two leaders into a rapprochement at a moment when Russian capacity in the Caucasus is checked by the war in Ukraine. The diplomatic overtures from Washington were therefore especially welcome. For Aliyev, a leader who is tightening domestic control and shutting down international organizations, Trump’s offer of a “strategic partnership” with the United States—something that the Biden administration always made conditional on Baku’s improving its worsening human rights record—is a gift. There was no demand from the White House at the August meeting that Baku release Azerbaijani political prisoners or Armenian detainees from custody. Indeed, the day before the meeting with Pashinyan, the U.S. oil giant ExxonMobil signed a bilateral agreement with the Azerbaijani state energy company SOCAR.

 

Spoilers Alert

Much work needs to be done to make the deals made in Washington a reality. The 17-point agreement initialed by the two leaders is the key to normalizing relations and formally ending conflict. Important as it is, it is not a comprehensive peace deal between two warring nations. There is nothing in the text about the right of hundreds of thousands of displaced civilians on both sides to return home. There is no accountability process for war crimes committed over decades of fighting. While talking peace at an elite level, Azerbaijan also keeps a young Azerbaijani peace activist, Bahruz Samadov, in prison—on charges of “treason” for having had contact with Armenian civil society activists.

The treaty could yet fail because Aliyev has said he will not sign and ratify it until Armenia changes its constitution to remove an indirect reference to its union with Nagorno-Karabakh. Changing the constitution would require a referendum that Pashinyan will probably try to push through before or after Armenia’s next parliamentary election, scheduled for June 2026. That gives Pashinyan’s nationalist and pro-Russian opponents a double target to mobilize voters against: a prime minister seeking a new term and a peace deal they want to sabotage.

The pact on a corridor connecting Azerbaijan and its exclave of Nakhichevan is also vulnerable. Baku and Yerevan have yet to agree on key details, such as the location of the new road and what security arrangements are needed for it. Exactly how the agreement will both enable Azerbaijani traffic to cross Armenia territory “unimpeded” while Armenian sovereignty is respected remains unclear.

And precisely because this slice of territory has such strategic and emotional value to so many, there is an incentive for spoilers to wreck a solution that they do not like. Iran, whose northern border runs from Nakhichevan to Armenia and then to Azerbaijan, is likely not pleased with the peace agreement. Tehran wants to maintain its current status as the transit country between the two parts of Azerbaijan and has consistently opposed any new arrangements that would station Western security forces along the route to Nakhichevan or hand too much control to its two unfriendly Turkic neighbors, Azerbaijan and Turkey. So far Iran’s threats have been toothless, but that could change if its trucks and trains are cut out of a U.S.-run route.

The Kremlin could also try to stymie the Washington agreements. Russia still attaches strategic importance to this stretch of territory, since it had been pledged control of it after the 2020 war. Moscow believed that it would station Russian border troops along the route, win leverage over both Armenia and Azerbaijan, and secure a missing piece for its International North-South Transport Corridor, a long-sought road, rail, and sea project connecting Russia to the Persian Gulf. So far, the Kremlin’s reaction to the accords has been cool and dismissive rather than openly confrontational. Moscow—and Tehran—will be cautious about openly disrupting a route that bears the name of the U.S president. But they will look for opportunities to discredit the deal if Armenia and Azerbaijan cannot agree on key details, or actively disrupt it when the Trump presidency is over.

The third neighbor in the region, Turkey, is a special case. Although it supports peace in the region and badly wants to see new transport routes across the South Caucasus to Central Asia, the fact that U.S. officials barely consulted their Turkish counterparts about the TRIPP went down badly in Ankara. This was unfortunate because Ankara has the biggest card to promote regional peace: it has the power to normalize relations and open its land border with Armenia, closed since 1993, which would free Armenia from a geographical straitjacket. On September 12, Turkey sent its envoy to Yerevan and announced new confidence-building measures, but in deference to its close ally Azerbaijan, it has prevaricated on declaring a full breakthrough. Meanwhile, U.S.-Turkish relations remain strained. A new line of diplomacy between Washington and Ankara is needed to reassure the Turkish side that it will benefit from the Trump route and U.S. plans for the region.

 

Win-Win

For decades, “historic” breakthroughs have been reported in the dispute between Armenia and Azerbaijan, only to see the two countries slip back into conflict. The Trump deal could suffer the same fate. For one thing, a whole generation of Armenians and Azerbaijanis has grown up shaped by the conflict. Politicians in both countries have instrumentalized the hostility to win legitimacy, selectively playing up grievances with the other side for acts of ethnic cleansing committed in the 1990s and in 2023.

To his credit, Pashinyan—driven at first by dire circumstances, it seems, but now by what looks like genuine conviction—has set out to change this paradigm. Even if it requires major concessions, he is seeking agreements with both Azerbaijan and Turkey that will enable him to open up his country’s borders and finally allow Armenia to loosen its dependence on Russia and become a self-sufficient nation-state. Aliyev needs a peace deal much less, having achieved almost all of what he wants on the battlefield. But he also seems persuaded, at least for now, that it is in his interests to support the embattled Armenian leader rather than see Armenia fall back under Russian dominance.

The current chaotic geopolitical landscape fuels contrary trends in the South Caucasus. On the one hand, the decline of multilateral institutions and European liberal norms made the three regional powers—Iran, Russia, and Turkey—more assertive. In 2021, they devised a “3 + 3” format to assert their right as the new shapers of order in the region. But as far as the other three in this equation—Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia—are concerned, the mightier three powers are also former imperial hegemons with outdated historical claims. That shared suspicion has in turn driven another trend: the aspiration of all three South Caucasus countries—an overdue aspiration, some would say, more than 30 years after they won independence with the collapse of the Soviet Union—to build strategically autonomous nation-states that are not reliant on any one external power.

This is where Trump can be an asset. The advantage of having the United States as a peace broker is that it is both powerful and disengaged from the region. Washington has the capacity to end Moscow’s claim to be the region’s arbiter—an instrument the Russians have used for years to try to exert control over both Armenia and Azerbaijan. At the same time, the days are over when the United States had a more ambitious agenda for this region, as when U.S. President George W. Bush visited Tbilisi and called Georgia a model “beacon of liberty.”

Trump enjoyed the flattering words of Aliyev and Pashinyan at the White House and their professed enthusiasm to jointly nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize, but he has evidently has not devoted much attention to the South Caucasus. Indeed, soon after the White House meeting, he failed to pronounce the names of the two countries he had mediated between, calling them “Albania” and “Aberbaijan.”

Even so, Trump’s backing gives Baku and Yerevan the courage to stand up to Moscow. Having brokered a provisional agreement between Baku and Yerevan—and lent his name to a crucial new transit corridor—Trump now needs to understand that he cannot do this on his own. Rather, he must invest in more old-fashioned American diplomacy to help bring lasting peace to the region.

 

 

For updates click hompage here