People truly underestimate just how good at foreign policy President Donald Trump is. Last week, the president managed to get the leaders of both Armenia and Azerbaijan to sit down for peace negotiations. What most were unaware of is this meeting was months in the making. In other words, it was a very long process to even get the talk to happen, let alone reach a deal between the two rival countries.
Several weeks before the meeting at the White House, President Trump and his team took action to provide stability in the South Caucasus earlier this year. The reason? It appeared a full-scale invasion of the southernmost province of Armenia, Syunik, was soon to be underway.
Dr. Nerses Kopalyan, An Armenian-American political science professor for the University of Nevada in Las Vegas, helped to advise and provide support between the Trump administration and Armenia. He also conducted an interview with the Daily Wire.
QIn March, Trump administration officials were briefed on U.S. intelligence that Azerbaijan was planning a major offensive against Armenia, reigniting hostilities two years after Azerbaijan’s ethnic cleansing campaign uprooted thousands of Armenians from their ancestral homeland in Nagorno-Karabakh, Kopalyan said. The American intelligence assessment sparked immediate action from the Trump administration. Later that month, the president’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, opened up negotiations with Azerbaijan as the White House sought to prevent another armed conflict.
“Once U.S. intelligence had that information, the Trump administration decided that they had to step in and put diplomatic pressure on Azerbaijan not to attack, and then initiate diplomacy to find a solution,” Kopalyan, who previously wrote about the importance of Trump’s Armenia-Azerbaijan deal on the geopolitical stage, went on to say. “So if it were not for the Trump administration, Azerbaijan would have attacked, and we would have had severe instability in the region.”
The challenge before the Trump administration at the beginning of the talks in March and April was complicated. Armenia and Azerbaijan have been in and out of severe conflict for the past 35 years, with Azerbaijan most recently taking full control of Nagorno-Karabakh — a large patch of land inside of Azerbaijan that was inhabited by Armenians for centuries. In 2020, conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh resulted in thousands of casualties before a ceasefire was agreed upon. Nearly three years later, Azerbaijan launched a full-scale offensive in Nagorno-Karabakh, forcing Armenians to flee the region.
For the past five years, Azerbaijan has threatened to encroach on Armenia’s sovereignty, pushing for its own trade route — called the Zangezur Corridor — that would cut through Armenia and connect Azerbaijan to its landlocked exclave, Nakhchivan. With Azerbaijan potentially setting its sights on southern Armenia and risking the breakout of another war, the Trump administration had to move fast. The White House presented a “unique solution” to get the two enemies to come to an agreement, Kopalyan said.
“The United States comes and presents the proposal that became the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP),” Kopalyan continued during the interview. “They present it as a very unique solution to a problem that should be accepted by both sides.”
Armenia agreed under the TRIPP proposal, that the U.S. would help to establish a major trade route through Syunik that Azerbaijan would have permission to use for better access to Nakhchivan.
“The United States’ presence would alleviate Armenia’s concerns. It would also mitigate Azerbaijan’s concerns, and Azerbaijan would no longer have the Zangezur Corridor premise to attack,” Kopalyan added.
However, not all of the Armenian population was thrilled with the deal. Some tried to make the case that Trump’s negotiations leaned toward favoring Azerbaijan. Critics say the big issue with the deal is that it doesn’t address the human rights abuses from Azerbaijan against the Armenians.
This includes ethnic cleansing in Nagorno-Karabakh, along with allegations that Azerbaijan’s government is currently holding 23 Armenians hostage in Baku.
“The Armenian National Committee of America — which is affiliated with the pro-Russia political wing in Armenia called the Armenian Revolutionary Federation — blasted the Trump-negotiated deal. The group said that the deal was “rewarding [Azerbaijan’s] aggression, compromising Armenia’s sovereignty, and consolidating Azerbaijan’s genocidal ethnic cleansing of over 150,000 indigenous Armenian Christians.,” the Daily Wire reported.
“A true and lasting peace requires justice — the right of return for displaced Armenians, the release of hostages, protection for Christian heritage sites, and the withdrawal of Azerbaijani forces from Armenia – none of which are addressed in this agreement,” the Armenian National Committee of America added in a statement,” the report continued.
Kopalyan made the case that critics are missing the complete context of the deal. When the paperwork was signed last week between Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, it wasn’t an all-encompassing peace deal. It was, according to him, simply the first steps in a lengthy process of securing communication and ensuring some stability between the two countries.
he then said that the White House would probably help negotiate further peace talks between the two nations over the course of the next three years. However, he doesn’t believe long lasting peace treaties are possible as long as Aliyev stays in power.
“I don’t think Aliyev will ever sign a peace treaty because it is not in his strategic interest. It’s a very rational position by him,” Kopalyan told the outlet. “Because he enjoys so much power asymmetry and because he’s able to utilize that power disparity to exert his position in the region, if he signs a peace treaty, he’s basically giving away the last 10-15 years and the billions that he has spent to establish his position of dominance.”
“He will do normalization, he will — under American pressure — do connectivity, opening of roads and all that stuff, but unless President Trump and the United States put a gun to his head, where he realizes he has no option but to sign, I don’t see him signing a peace treaty,” he concluded.
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