When President Donald Trump sat between the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan last week, few people realized the significance of the meeting and the months of negotiations that took place beforehand to get two hostile nations to come together at the White House.
Just weeks before the president and his team stepped in to maintain stability in the South Caucasus earlier this year, a full-scale invasion of Armenia’s southernmost province, Syunik, appeared imminent, according to Dr. Nerses Kopalyan, an Armenian-American political science professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Kopalyan informally advised and supported negotiations between the Trump administration and Armenia and spoke to The Daily Wire this week about the agreement that was signed last Friday.
In 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,” said Kopalyan, who previously wrote about the significance of Trump’s Armenia-Azerbaijan deal. “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 added. “They present it as a very unique solution to a problem that should be accepted by both sides.”
Under the TRIPP proposal, Armenia and the United States would build a major trade route through Syunik that Azerbaijan could use freely to gain 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 said.
Not all Armenians were pleased with the deal, with some in the diaspora arguing that Trump’s negotiations favored Azerbaijan. The biggest criticism of the deal is that it does not address Azerbaijan’s past human rights abuses against Armenians, such as the ethnic cleansing in Nagorno-Karabakh and allegations that Azerbaijan’s government is holding at least 23 Armenians — likely more — 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.”
“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.
In a phone call with The Daily Wire, Garen Jinbachian, the community coordinator for the Western Region of the Armenian National Committee of America, said that Trump’s Armenia-Azerbaijan deal “seems like a huge PR stunt to some extent.”
“Frankly, you cannot have lasting peace, you cannot have real peace if one of the parties is held at gunpoint and practically coerced to sign it,” said Jinbachian. “The whole deal is based on injustice, the lack of justice in the region. Ethnic cleansing is not justice.”
Those criticisms are missing the full context of the deal, Kopalyan argued. The deal struck last Friday between Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev was less of an all-encompassing peace agreement and more of the first major step in a long process of securing communication and stability between the two countries. Kopalyan added that the White House would likely negotiate further peace talks between Armenia and Azerbaijan for the next three years.
“This is a normalization process initiated by the United States,” Kopalyan said.
Despite the major progress made between Armenia and Azerbaijan last week, Kopalyan remains pessimistic that a long-lasting peace treaty could be made between the two nations while Aliyev remains 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 said. “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.”