Turan Research Center

WASHINGTON—A twenty-seven-mile stretch of land running through southern Armenia is poised to reshape the geopolitics of the South Caucasus. On January 13, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Armenian Minister of Foreign Affairs Ararat Mirzoyan announced a detailed framework to implement the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP). This US-brokered corridor, which promises to become a vital connectivity link between Europe and Asia, could go down as one of US President Donald Trump’s most impressive foreign policy achievements of his second term.

TRIPP’s connectivity potential

The idea for a US-brokered transport route in southern Armenia that would link the main part of Azerbaijan to Baku’s Nakhchivan exclave grew out of 2025 peace talks between the two countries coordinated by US officials. Azerbaijan wanted to implement a crucial element of its 2020 cease-fire agreement with Armenia—unfettered transport access to Nakhchivan. At the same time, Armenia sought to maintain control over its sovereign territory along the proposed twenty-seven-mile route across its land.

In stepped Trump and his team with a creative solution: a US-led consortium would construct and manage the route, in concert with Armenian authorities, that would in turn safeguard Azerbaijani access to Nakhchivan. At a summit at the White House this past August, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, and Trump agreed to implement TRIPP with a view toward a comprehensive Armenia-Azerbaijan peace deal. This was a significant achievement: Armenia and Azerbaijan had clashed for more than thirty years, and they had fought a handful of wars in that time that killed tens of thousands.

Read the full article on the Atlantic Council.

Joseph Epstein is the Director of the Turan Research Center.