President Trump is putting infrastructure development and economic deals at the center of a peace deal between Azerbaijan and Armenia, as the administration pushes to achieve a historic truce in a decade’s long conflict in the south Caucuses.
Trump will host Armenia’s Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev for a signing ceremony at the White House on Friday. Included in the deal is a call for developing a “Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity,” and will be referred to by the acronym TRIPP.
The White House described it as a multi-modal transit area connecting mainland Azerbaijan and its Nakhchivan enclave, an autonomous region that is bordered by Armenia, Iran and Turkey.
The White House said the transit corridor, which will cut through Armenia, will respect Yerevan’s “sovereignty and territorial integrity and its people.”
The regional transit corridor is a long-held desire for Azerbaijan, and the Trump deal triggered pushback from Armenian diaspora groups in the U.S. who oppose moving forward with Baku without justice for years of conflict and the more recent Azeri takeover of the Nagorno-Karabach region, once an autonomous, Armenian stronghold.
“Real peace must be predicated on justice and accountability for Azerbaijan’s ongoing human rights violations — these issues shouldn’t be left on the back burner,” Alex Galitsky, program director at the Armenian National Committee of America advocacy group, told Politico.
“A deal that rewards Azerbaijan’s aggression, undermines Armenia’s sovereignty, and denies justice to Artsakh’s Armenians will only make it harder to resolve these critical human rights issues down the line.”
Part of the agreements being signed Friday include a commitment by Yerevan and Baku to sign a joint letter calling for the dissolution of the Minsk Group – chaired by the U.S., France and Russia – that was established to find a peaceful solution to the issue of Nagorno Karabakh.
The Trump administration said Armenia is bought in for the economic benefits expected from the transit corridor and separate deals signed with the U.S. Trump is expected to sign separate deals with Azerbaijan and Armenia spanning energy, technology, economic cooperation, border security, infrastructure and trade.
“Armenia walks out of this with an enormous strategic commercial partner, probably the most enormous and strategic in the history of the world, the United States of America. They wind up without concern about yesterday’s conflict, and they’re completely and totally optimistic about tomorrow’s future,” a senior administration official said.
The deal signed Friday is a directive to set up the TRIPP negotiating team to establish the commercial entities in control of development. The negotiations are likely to begin next week.
“Since the announcement yesterday morning, I received calls from nine different operators. I was pleased to see three different American operators,” a senior administration official said.
“We’re going to get everybody around the table. We’re going to find the most first class operating system that we can not because it brings peace, although that’s a fantastic thing, but it’s also going to bring commercial prosperity, which will ensure peace beyond just today’s signing ceremony.”
But the signing ceremony does mark a significant breakthrough in a devastating, more than three-decade conflict and has drawn bipartisan praise. “This administration’s infrastructure plan is a new and powerful element that could finally move the two sides closer to a ratified peace treaty. Good move,” Michael Carpenter, who served as President Biden’s senior director for Europe at the National Security Council, wrote on X.
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