Hudson Institute Spotlights Armenia-Azerbaijan

By Elaine Pasquini

Washington, DC: Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan signed a landmark peace agreement in a meeting with President Donald J Trump at the White House on August 8, 2025. The two South Caucasus neighbors have engaged in conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, an ethnically Armenian enclave inside Azerbaijan, since the 1980s. The second war over the small area ended in 2020 and Azerbaijan took back full control of the region in 2023.

Zineb Riboua, a research fellow at the Hudson Institute’s Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East, who moderated the virtual program on the political implications of the historic accord, termed it “a transformation” of the relationship between the long-time adversaries.

 Damjan Krnjević Miskovic, Professor of Practice and Director for Policy, Research, Analysis and Publication at Baku’s ADA University, also editor of the policy journal Baku Dialogues, said the meeting at the White House and signing of the joint peace declaration between the two former Soviet republics “signals that the US wants to play a larger than ever before role in sort of engendering a geopolitical, geoeconomic and a connectivity reconfiguration of the South Caucasus and Central Asia.”

After Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s envoy to Russia, the Middle East and Israel, along with other senior officials, met with President Aliyev in Baku earlier this year, “I think that they saw the value of Azerbaijan as the indispensable state for advancing American interests in the South Caucasus and Central Asia,” Miskovic said. In addition, the Americans also identified Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan as two other sovereign anchors of this Silk Road region.

Azerbaijan is a country that is not “anti-anyone, that puts itself and its national interest first,” he said. “I think that is one reason the Trump administration is thinking they can deal with it in a serious way and saw an opportunity to help in a peacemaking effort that was already underway.”

Pointing out Azerbaijan’s unique position of sharing borders with Türkiye, Russia and Iran, he noted the Iranians have already stated their objection to the Zangezur Corridor trade route through the South Caucasus contained in the agreement. This is a major transit route which, following the White House meeting, is being called the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP).

For the last 30 years, the shortest road route from Azerbaijan’s Nakhchivan enclave, which is separated from Azerbaijan proper by Armenia, to mainland Azerbaijan was through Iran. TRIPP will bypass Iran and shorten that journey.

Putting aside the geopolitical concerns, there’s an economic component to this in that the old route had been a great moneymaker for Iran, and part of a larger Azerbaijani-Iranian relationship that involved trade in various ways. If there’s a shorter route, “no one’s going to use the Iranian alternative,” he said. “And that hurts Iran directly.”

Miskovic emphasized that the new route is not just a transport corridor, it’s an economic corridor for the region, including Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The vision of the Central Asian and South Caucasus countries is to maximize the benefit of their position, he said, so that they can “add value to their citizens.”

Michael Doran, Director of the Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East at Hudson Institute, noted that while Armenia’s economy is dominated by Russia, the Ukraine war has weakened President Vladimir Putin in the South Caucasus, and the victory of Azerbaijan in the second Nagorno-Karabakh war created a space that allows Prime Minister Pashinyan to pivot toward the West and away from Russia.

“The great irony of the whole situation is that the victory of Azerbaijan over Armenia in 2020 is what is allowing Armenia to break free from Russia,” he added.

Dolan also pointed out the importance of the involvement of President Erdogan of Türkiye in this peace process. “The Turks did a lot to pave the groundwork and to hand this package to the Americans so that this will be a success,” he said.  In addition to normalizing relations with Azerbaijan, at the same time, “Prime Minister Pashinyan is also going to normalize with Türkiye and that’s going to open up the Armenian economy. This will not only move Armenia away from Russia but also from its neighbor and ally, Iran, thus propelling it toward the West.”

Another dimension involving Iran, he noted, is that one-third of all Iranians are ethnically Azerbaijani, including Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian.

The Armenia-Azerbaijan peace deal gets the United States involved in this part of the world in a way that it hasn’t been involved before, Dolan said. “This is not a big security commitment by the United States by any stretch of imagination. It’s a political, economic, diplomatic commitment, and it will only redound to the benefit of the American economy and of America’s allies.”

(Elaine Pasquini is a freelance journalist. Her reports appear in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs and Nuze.Ink.)