Iran Conflict Threatens Armenia-Azerbaijan Progress

Last year, U.S. President Donald Trump pulled off a remarkable feat: With an unexpected White House summit and some creative diplomacy, he managed to jump-start the peace process between longtime foes Azerbaijan and Armenia and spur more diplomatic progress than the region has seen in decades. Amid Trump’s wildly overhyped global peacemaking efforts, this was a real win.

Now, though, the fallout from Trump’s war in Iran is threatening to undo his achievement in the Caucasus. Officials in both Armenia and Azerbaijan are expressing concern that Trump’s tiny circle of trusted foreign-policy figures has shifted attention away from the region. Even with a cease-fire declared, the White House is going to be fixated on Iran for some time. As a result, the momentum toward peace in the Caucasus could be lost.

When Trump got involved in the Armenia-Azerbaijan peace process, it was already well advanced. Azerbaijan had, in a series of offensives from 2020 to 2023, retaken all the territory Armenia forces occupied during a war in the 1990s, namely Nagorno-Karabakh and several adjoining Azerbaijani provinces. With Armenia weakened and unable to keep fighting, the two sides were now ready to negotiate in earnest. By early 2025, they had already finalized the text of a peace agreement.

But two critical issues remained. One was the question of Armenia’s constitution, which contains indirect references to territorial claims over Nagorno-Karabakh. Azerbaijan demands that this language be removed before the final peace treaty can be signed.

The second point of contention was the creation of a transportation route connecting the main territory of Azerbaijan and its exclave of Nakhchivan via southern Armenia. This was first stipulated in the Russia-brokered cease-fire agreement that ended the fighting in 2020 and included a provision that it would be guarded by Russian border troops. However, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the Kremlin’s influence in the Caucasus plummeted, and that arrangement was no longer tenable.

But Azerbaijan still badly wanted the route, which would secure access to Nakhchivan and onward to Turkey. It demanded that the route be “unobstructed,” a term included in the initial cease-fire but which Armenia and Azerbaijan each interpreted differently. In its maximalist position, Azerbaijan had demanded that its trucks or trains wouldn’t even have to stop at the Armenian border for passport or customs checks. Armenia rejected the demand, arguing that it was an unacceptable infringement of Armenian sovereignty.

Enter Trump. His foreign-policy team, apparently on the hunt for possible peace accords, identified Armenia and Azerbaijan as low-hanging fruit. They came up with a solution by which Armenian officials would retain control of the border legally but employees of a private company from some third country would actually conduct the checks. It was not a new proposal—U.S. and European officials were floating a similar idea in their mediation before Trump came to office—but Trump’s team added some innovations. The route would be operated by an Armenian-American joint venture. And it would, of course, be named after the president: the “Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity,” or TRIPP. He invited the leaders of the two countries to the White House in August 2025 to sign the deal. The image of him with the Armenian and Azerbaijani leaders smiling and shaking hands was a sight that many in the Caucasus never expected to see.

The openly self-aggrandizing character of Trump’s involvement naturally raised skepticism. Many wondered whether his administration would do the hard work to follow through, especially as Trump never seemed to know the names of the countries he was dealing with; he repeatedly called them “Albania” and “Aberbaijan.”

But the push from Trump turned out to have galvanized the process. Following the White House summit, the two sides began to rapidly take steps to improve relations. Azerbaijani think tank experts began visiting Armenia and vice versa. Azerbaijan began for the first time to sell fuel to Armenia and allow grain from Russia and Kazakhstan to transit its territory en route to Armenia.

All of this would have been difficult to imagine a year earlier. Azerbaijan, which had been threatening Armenia over the route, moderated its rhetoric, and for Armenians, fears of another war began to recede. Some part of this momentum was thanks to the fact that both leaders, for their own reasons, wanted to curry favor with Trump and knew that his cherished reputation as a peacemaker was riding on them.

In January, the United States and Armenia released the text of an agreement laying out the framework for TRIPP. It was proof that the Americans had been doing a lot of work behind the scenes and that critics’ skepticism had been unwarranted. In early February, Vice President J.D. Vance visited Armenia and Azerbaijan in a show of the U.S. resolve to see TRIPP through. Along the way, Trump even learned to pronounce Azerbaijan properly. “I love saying that name now. You know, at the beginning it was giving me a hard time,” he said on Feb. 19 at the rollout of his so-called Board of Peace. (The leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan both attended the launch.)

Barely a week later, he launched the U.S. attack against Iran. The war and its attendant diplomacy now threatens TRIPP—and, by extension, the progress Armenia and Azerbaijan have made—in a variety of ways.

The first stage of TRIPP will run directly along Armenia’s far southern border, within shouting distance of the Iranian border. Companies that the United States was hoping to attract to build and operate the route are no doubt reassessing the security risks of their potential investments. Sources in Yerevan say a visit from the U.S. company conducting site surveys has already been postponed because of the war.

Beyond that, officials both in Yerevan and Baku have told me and my colleagues at Crisis Group that they are worried the war will take critical U.S. attention away from TRIPP. The United States and Armenia still need to work out a contract setting up the company to operate the route, for which there isn’t really a precedent and which involves addressing many sensitive political and financial issues. Handling that process is the same tiny team, led by Trump advisor Steve Witkoff, which now has its hands more than full with Iran.

“Obviously, TRIPP isn’t a high priority with the U.S. administration, at least today, because we see what is going on and what they’re doing,” Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said in March. “Unfortunately, there is a high probability that this will affect the time frame” of TRIPP, he continued.

More broadly, the war could reorder U.S. priorities in the Caucasus in ways that will make peace harder to reach. As it stands now, TRIPP would actually benefit Iran, as it would restore the Soviet-era rail links that connected to Iran via a junction in Nakhchivan. It would also particularly benefit Armenia, a critical trade and security partner to Iran. Will Washington continue to be interested in a project that is going to help Iran?

While everyone in the region was assuming that U.S. interest in TRIPP would wane once its namesake left power, that wasn’t going to happen until 2028. The assumption was that by then, the peace process would be far more consolidated. But what if Trump has already lost interest? It’s hard to know the implications of a highly personalized diplomatic initiative losing its patron, but there is no doubt that the involvement of Trump and the United States has underpinned remarkable progress in the last few months. Losing that would be a real test for the peace process.

Ideally, the Iran war would lead Armenia and Azerbaijan to take greater control of the peace process. Both countries share similar worries about potential spillover from the U.S.-Iran conflict, and it could spur them to redouble their bilateral engagement. Azerbaijan’s access to Nakhchivan has already been compromised: Until TRIPP gets built, the only operable land route between Azerbaijan’s mainland and Nakhchivan is via Iran, and this was closed as a result of the war.

Two Iranian drones also struck Nakhchivan, including its airport. One Armenian official told me that if this war had happened a year ago, Armenians would be worried that Azerbaijan might use it as a pretext to attack them. Now, instead, there are new opportunities to cooperate. These included working on short-term transit arrangements to manage the border closures caused by the war and sharing air defense information on threats coming from Iran.

That is a best-case scenario, though. If that scenario is not realized, the Iran war and its aftermath could undermine one of Trump’s real achievements and expose the risks of his heavily personalized and opportunistic diplomacy.