Armenia and Azerbaijan have signed a historic peace agreement that will put an end to almost 40 years of conflict. The meeting between the Armenian Prime Minister, Nikol Pashinyan, and President Azero, Ilham Aliyev, took place last Friday at the White House, with Donald Trump to act as a mediator. Specifically, the Treaty involves the creation of a corridor of about 40 km between Azerbaijan and the Nakhchivan region, an Azer’s Exclave within the Armenian territory and so far not directly connected to Baku. The United States will be directly involved in the development of the corridor: in the meantime, both countries will conclude bilateral agreements with Washington on trade, energy, infrastructure and technology.
It is therefore a diplomatic success for the US President, who since his election campaign has presented himself as a resolver of international conflicts and who, precisely with the same goal, will meet in Alaska Vladimir Putin on August 15 to try to mediate a fire in Ukrainian.
But therefore, why is this agreement so important for Armenia and Azerbaijan and why the tensions between the two countries have continued for almost four decades? The tensions between Yerevan and Baku had begun in 1988, causing a first armed conflict ended in 1994 and the second broken down in 2020, with thousands of victims and displaced people. At international level, Moscow said he was in favor of the peace agreement, while Tehran criticized the construction of the corridor which risks modifying the geopolitical balances in the region.
The origins of the tensions between Armenia and Azerbaijan
It must be emphasized that Armenia and Azerbaijan are in a particularly strategic geographical position: Armenia borders Georgia, Turkey and Iran (as well as with Azerbaijan himself), while Baku has a direct frontier with Russia and Iran and overlooks the Caspian Sea. Both countries, among other things, were part of the territory of the former Soviet Union.
With the dissolution of the USSR in 1991 and the proclamation of independence of the two countries, the tensions between Yerevan and Baku opened. In fact, as early as 1988 the Armenian separatists had tried to take control of some parts of the Azera region of Nagorno-Karabakh, until in 1991 they declared an independent state (called Artsakh Republic) asking for annexation to Armenia.
The subsequent tensions led to the outbreak of a war that continued until 1994, with a balance of 30,000 deaths, hundreds of thousands of displaced people (especially Azeri) and a peace agreement mediated by Russia. The separatist region of Nagorno-Karabakh was proclaimed independent de factoeven if the government remained strongly dependent on economic, political and military Armenia.
The situation remained unchanged until 2020, when the armed clashes always resumed in the Nagorno-Karabakh, decreeing an overwhelming victory of Azerbaijan after just over a month: the war caused 7,000 victims and resolved, once again, thanks to the intervention of Moscow as the main mediator. In 2023, then, a Azero military attack in the separatist region caused the escape from Azerbaijan of more than 100,000 people of Armenian ethnicity.
Precisely for this reason, some territorial claims are still ongoing between Armenia and Azerbaijan, which in recent years have been brought to the International Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).
Because from the corridor for Nakhchivan the USA of Trump also earn
The complete text of the agreement, however, has not yet been published and for the moment, the two countries have limited themselves to publishing the text of a memorandum. According to the CNN, the corridor about 43 km long will be entitled Tripp, an acronym for Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (literally “the Trump route for peace and international prosperity”).
As already mentioned, the United States will maintain the exclusive rights for the construction of this project (second Political For the next 99 years): to deal with it will be a group of private American companies which, according to some rumors, will also take care of creating a railway line, an oil pipeline and a gas pipeline, given that Azerbaijan is particularly rich in natural gas.
It must be said that the corridor will still be subjected to the Armenian laws, but in addition to connecting Azerbaijan with its Exclave, it will allow the country to trad directly with Turkey, its great ally in the region, without having to pass for neighboring states such as Iran or Russia.
The negotiations to establish which American companies will take care of managing the corridor will take place over the next few weeks: in the meantime, in addition to the peace agreement, the Armenian head of state and the Azerus counterpart will approve a formal request to dissolve the so -called “Minsk Group”, founded in 1992 with the aim of mediating the conflict between the two states and chaired by France, Russia and the United States.
It is therefore a peace agreement from which Azerbaijan certainly earns us, which will now be connected directly to the Nakhchivan region, but Armenia will also be able to attract new investments thanks to the economic agreements promised by Washington, keeping formal control over the corridor with the guarantee of a USA intervention in its favor in the event that Azerbaijan decides to resume with hostilities.
But the real winner of this treaty is certainly Donald Trump, who is now increasingly said to the Nobel Peace Prize (to which he aspires for some time), after already in July he had managed to end the new escalation of clashes between Cambodia and Thailand. The United States, among other things, will also have an economic profit thanks to the development rights and bilateral agreements coming.
The proposal was welcomed in a positive way by almost the entire international community, including Russia: however Iran, who with Azerbaijan has always had a complex relationship characterized by growing tensions, has strongly criticized the construction of the corridor towards Nakhchivan, considered a geopolitical change in the southern Caucasian region that risks “moving also the borders of Iran”.
