Trump and peace in the South Caucasus

On 8 August, US President Donald Trump hosted a summit in Washington DC of Armenia Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilyam Aliev. The summit is the latest Trump endeavour to be viewed as a peace maker towards the goal of receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. The number of wars Trump claims to have settled keeps rising from 6 to 7 and include in Congo, Egypt and Ethiopia, and India and Pakistan. US tariffs on India of over 50 percent are seen by many as Trump’s anger at Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s refutation the US had a hand in ending his country’s recent war with Pakistan, writes Taras Kuzio.

Unfortunately, resolving the biggest – Russia’s war on Ukraine – continues to elude Trump.

Trump is never one to be outshone by President Barack Obama who received the prize in 2009 for promotion of nuclear non-proliferation. Trump has held a personal grudge against Obama since 2011 when he questioned whether he had been and therefore had been ineligible to be president born in the US. Obama was born in the US state of Hawaii.

Trump entered the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict five years after the realities on the ground had changed in Baku’s favour. In 2020, Azerbaijani won the 44-day Second Karabakh War and retook control over most of its territories that had been occupied by Armenia for nearly three decades. Three years later a short one-day war completed this when Azerbaijan took control of Karabakh that had been the centre of Armenian separatism.

Negotiations over encoding this reality on the ground into a legal document, a post-conflict peace agreement, has gone through four waves.

The first, the longest, were negotiations between Prime Minister Pashinyan and President Aliyev. During these talks, Azerbaijan sought to overcome the belief in a ‘greater Armenia’ that lies at the core of Armenian nationalism and replacing this with a commitment to the December 21, 1991, Alma Ata Declaration. Then, Soviet republics had agreed to base their international borders on the republic boundaries in the USSR.

12 of the 15 Soviet republics signed the Alma Ata Declaration: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan. Georgia did not while the three Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia had already left the USSR.

Two signatories – Russia and Armenia – ignored their commitments and pursued irredentism towards their neighbours. By late 1991, Armenia was already expanding its territorial conquest of a fifth of Azerbaijan which would last until 2020. Russia was fomenting separatism in Azerbaijan, Georgia and Moldova and Ukraine, and invaded Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014 and 2022.

Azerbaijan’s stance was therefore seeking to convince Armenia to respect what it had signed in Alma Ata in 1991. Nevertheless, Prime Minister Pashinyan dragged his heels for many years.

The second wave was always a road to nowhere. In November 2020, Russia had brokered a ceasefire with Armenia and Azerbaijan not because Vladimir Putin had the goal of receiving the Nobel Peace Prize but because Russia could continue to dominate the South Caucasus through the introduction of so-called ‘peacekeeping’ forces.

Russia’s ‘peacekeeping’ forces became obsolete because of two factors that took place coincidentally at the same time. The first was Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, led to these ‘peacekeeping’ forces being needed in the war where Russia was suffering from very high casualties. The second was they became redundant after Azerbaijan had retaken control in September 2023 of all its territories that had been occupied.

Prime Minister Pashinyan condemned Russia’s passivity in 2020 and 2023, believing Moscow should have intervened in the first instance under his country’s membership of the CSTO (Collective Security Treaty Organization) and in the second as ‘peacekeepers.’ The Kremlin’s unwillingness to intervene in three conflicts – Armenia-Azerbaijan, Turkish-backed overthrow of the Syrian Assad regime, and Israel-Iran, was more a reflection of the war against Ukraine constraining Russia’s ability to police its self-imposed sphere of influence and defend its allis.

The third wave was the European Union (EU) which in 2022-2023 sought to broker a breakthrough in on-going peace talks between Prime Minister Pashinyan and President Aliyev. Unlike Russia, which sought to maintain the South Caucasus within its self-declared Eurasian sphere of influence, or the US, whose foreign policy is driven by Trump’s ego, the EU could not be criticised for pursuing peace in the South Caucasus for ulterior motives. The EU had maintained little geopolitical interest in the South Caucasus except for Georgia which had sought NATO and EU membership. But Georgia’s pro-Western foreign policy had been eclipsed by a multi-vector pragmatism under Georgian-Russian oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili who has de facto controlled the country since 2012.

The EU one success was in encouraging Prime Minister Pashinyan to stay the course in pursuing peace by recognising international borders based on Soviet republican. The EU de facto pursued Azerbaijan’s long-standing position.

The final wave was led by the US which came into the process after five years of bilateral negotiation, Russian disenchantment with Russia, and the EU’s weakness. Nevertheless, the US brough two important factors to the table.

The first was the US reintroduced itself to the South Caucasus from which it had unilaterally retreated under Presidents Obama and Joe Biden when the US had been a co-chair of the OSCE Minsk Group set up in 1992 to mediate the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict. The presence of the US provided confidence to the large and influential Armenian-American diaspora that had traditionally been pro-Russian and anti-Turkish.

The second was Trump assisted Armenia and Azerbaijan to resolve the question of a 40-kilometre transport link between Azerbaijan and the Azerbaijan territory of Nakhichevan that crosses the Armenian province of Syunik. The Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP) will be operated under Armenia, and the US will sublease the land to a consortium for infrastructure and management.

The agreement signed in Washington stated: ‘Having confirmed that the boundaries between the Soviet Socialist Republics of the former USSR became the international borders of respective independent states and have been recognized as such by the international community, the Parties recognize and shall respect the sovereignty, territorial integrity, inviolability of international borders and political independence of each other.’ It had taken two wars and five years of talks for Armenia to respect the Alma Ata Declaration it had signed 34 years ago.

The only outstanding issue is the removal of territorial claim to Karabakh in the Armenian constitution. After the Washington summit, Prime Minister Pashinyan said he is willing to amend the constitution which was slated to be changed in 2027. Changes would be voted on through a referendum. Prime Minister Pashinyan said that ‘peace has been established between the Republic of Armenia and the Republic of Azerbaijan following the Washington summit which in his view had closed the Karabakh question.

The closure of the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict is an example of what could be undertaken in Moldova, Georgia, and Ukraine. Firstly, pro-Russian proxies and Russian forces need to be defeated. Secondly, Russia’s troublesome interference and divide and rule policies must be sidelined. Thirdly, Russia must be forced to accept, like Armenia, to respect its signatory on the Alma Ata Declaration that recognised Soviet republican boundaries as international frontiers. Fourthly, the EU and especially the US must become involved to take the peace process over the line.

Taras Kuzio is a professor of political science at the National University of Kyiv Mohyla Academy. He is co-editor of Russia and Modern Fascism: New Perspectives on the Kremlin’s War Against Ukraine (Columbia University Press, 2025); co-author of The Four Roots of Russia’s War Against Ukraine (Cambridge University Press, 2025); Crimea: Where Russia’s War Started and Where Ukraine Will Win (Jamestown Foundation, 2024), and Russian Nationalism and the Russian-Ukrainian War (Routledge, 2022).

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