Among the many unintended consequences of President Donald Trump’s disastrous decision to launch a war on Iran is the delaying of the so-called Caucasus Corridor, known as the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP). The project was supposed to bring peace between Armenia and Azerbaijan, which have been at war on and off for nearly 40 years.
This may turn out to be a blessing in disguise. In a region where Western-backed megaprojects have become major targets for Iranian attacks, abandoning the corridor may have been the best thing that could happen to Armenia.
The project in question — a transportation link through southern Armenia to the Azerbaijani exclave Nakhchevan and Turkey – was hailed as a decisive geopolitical break of the South Caucasus with Russian and Iranian influence. Pundits flattered Trump’s ego by promoting it as a stepping stone for the Nobel Peace Prize for the American president.
There has been reason for skepticism about these claims from the start. Last year, I argued in these pages that “peace requires more than diplomatic theater; it demands difficult compromises that have so far been absent. Until then, the promise of stability remains a mirage.”
Indeed, reality proved far messier than Trump’s vanity play. The signing ceremony in the White House in August 2025, involving Trump and the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan, did not usher in a peace agreement. Talks stalled as Azerbaijan insisted on changes to the Armenian constitution that would formally and permanently forsake Armenia’s claims on Nagorno-Karabakh, a region largely populated by ethnic Armenians prior to an Azerbaijani military campaign in 2023.
The corridor, meanwhile, has increasingly drifted into irrelevance. The agreement stipulated that the corridor would be managed by a joint Armenian-American company based in Armenia. But the company was never established, and the contract was never signed. Consequently, all the other building blocks – funding, security, cross-border and transit modalities – were never put in place.
Now, with the war on Iran consuming the Trump administration’s bandwidth, the project languishes. “Obviously, TRIPP isn’t a high priority with the U.S. administration, at least today,” Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan admitted in March. “Unfortunately, there is a high probability that this will affect the time frame.”
But here’s the rub: the project’s unraveling has spared Armenia from becoming entangled in Iran’s expanding definition of legitimate retaliatory targets.
Because when war broke out with Iran, neighboring countries hosting American infrastructure — military bases, substantial business presence — became such targets, as Iran warned they would.
That threat doesn’t just concern the obvious candidates in the Persian Gulf, such as the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. In early March, Iranian-launched drones struck targets in Nakhchevan, Azerbaijan, including its airport, wounding four civilians. Tehran has always been highly suspicious of Baku’s close security ties with Israel, even accusing it of permitting Israel to use its air space in attacking Iran.
Moreover, Iran has long suspected Baku of supporting Azeri irredentism in Iran, which has 15 to 20 million residents of Azeri descent. A number of hawkish, U.S.-based think tanks have promoted such a policy. Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev himself occasionally seemed to flirt with the idea, positioning himself as the leader of all Azeris in the world, including those in Iran.Among the many unintended consequences of President Donald Trump’s disastrous decision to launch a war on Iran is the delaying of the so-called Caucasus Corridor, known as the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP). The project was supposed to bring peace between Armenia and Azerbaijan, which have been at war on and off for nearly 40 years.
This may turn out to be a blessing in disguise. In a region where Western-backed megaprojects have become major targets for Iranian attacks, abandoning the corridor may have been the best thing that could happen to Armenia.
The project in question — a transportation link through southern Armenia to the Azerbaijani exclave Nakhchevan and Turkey – was hailed as a decisive geopolitical break of the South Caucasus with Russian and Iranian influence. Pundits flattered Trump’s ego by promoting it as a stepping stone for the Nobel Peace Prize for the American president.
There has been reason for skepticism about these claims from the start. Last year, I argued in these pages that “peace requires more than diplomatic theater; it demands difficult compromises that have so far been absent. Until then, the promise of stability remains a mirage.”
Indeed, reality proved far messier than Trump’s vanity play. The signing ceremony in the White House in August 2025, involving Trump and the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan, did not usher in a peace agreement. Talks stalled as Azerbaijan insisted on changes to the Armenian constitution that would formally and permanently forsake Armenia’s claims on Nagorno-Karabakh, a region largely populated by ethnic Armenians prior to an Azerbaijani military campaign in 2023.
The corridor, meanwhile, has increasingly drifted into irrelevance. The agreement stipulated that the corridor would be managed by a joint Armenian-American company based in Armenia. But the company was never established, and the contract was never signed. Consequently, all the other building blocks – funding, security, cross-border and transit modalities – were never put in place.
Now, with the war on Iran consuming the Trump administration’s bandwidth, the project languishes. “Obviously, TRIPP isn’t a high priority with the U.S. administration, at least today,” Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan admitted in March. “Unfortunately, there is a high probability that this will affect the time frame.”
But here’s the rub: the project’s unraveling has spared Armenia from becoming entangled in Iran’s expanding definition of legitimate retaliatory targets.
Because when war broke out with Iran, neighboring countries hosting American infrastructure — military bases, substantial business presence — became such targets, as Iran warned they would.
That threat doesn’t just concern the obvious candidates in the Persian Gulf, such as the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. In early March, Iranian-launched drones struck targets in Nakhchevan, Azerbaijan, including its airport, wounding four civilians. Tehran has always been highly suspicious of Baku’s close security ties with Israel, even accusing it of permitting Israel to use its air space in attacking Iran.
Moreover, Iran has long suspected Baku of supporting Azeri irredentism in Iran, which has 15 to 20 million residents of Azeri descent. A number of hawkish, U.S.-based think tanks have promoted such a policy. Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev himself occasionally seemed to flirt with the idea, positioning himself as the leader of all Azeris in the world, including those in Iran.
This backdrop provides a context for Tehran’s skeptical attitude regarding TRIPP from the outset. Iran has long seen the project as designed to entrench the U.S. presence on its northern border and cut off Iran’s border with Armenia, its only friendly northern neighbor.
The current war, not unexpectedly, has exacerbated Tehran’s fears of encirclement. While the Nakhchevan drone incident was promptly downplayed through diplomatic channels between Baku and Tehran, it highlighted the fragility of a regional architecture based on Iran’s exclusion.
Had TRIPP infrastructure actually been built through Armenia’s southern region, it would have been a tempting target for Iran’s formidable missile and drone arsenal. Armenia would have found itself caught between Iranian retaliation and Azerbaijani ambitions – with the Turkish border still closed, and relations with Russia in tatters.
TRIPP’s failure may therefore be Armenia’s greatest strategic stroke of luck. From Tehran’s perspective, there was nothing worth attacking – except, perhaps, the U.S. embassy, but Iran has not stepped up the escalation ladder to that point, yet.
One should not conclude that the risk is over, however. Pashinyan is as committed as ever to TRIPP, which he sees as a fundamental pillar of Armenia’s pro-Western pivot. Facing a critical election next month, his hosting last week of the summit of the European Political Community – a loose network of European states whose membership transcends the EU – should boost his standing. Western leaders, including French President Emmanuel Macron and even the Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, descended on Yerevan in a show of support for Pashinyan.
While TRIPP is a U.S.-led rather than a European Union-led project, the European leaders endorsed it as a means to anchor Armenia in the “Western camp.” Besides this, they have little more to offer than vague recognition of Armenia’s “European aspirations.” Other nations that have trodden this path — like Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia — have wound up with little to show in terms of real deliverables on what matters, namely, actual membership in the EU, a security umbrella, and economic opportunities.
Pashinyan may be on course to win the elections. However, not everybody in Armenia is convinced of the strategic wisdom of the Western pivot. Narek Karapetyan, an opposition leader, struck a dissenting note this week. Speaking from Meghri, a critical cog in the proposed project, he noted that “the TRIPP route runs 30-40 meters from the Iranian border.”
“Over the past two months, we have seen Iran attack U.S. military bases in various countries,” Karapetyan said. “What will happen in the future if their relations deteriorate and only an American company remains here?”
This may sound alarmist as TRIPP, in theory, has no military or security dimension. But the project’s very vagueness creates a dangerous strategic ambiguity. If attempts to revitalize it are undertaken, an Iranian threat could be used to justify its securitization.
It is true that Armenian leadership was careful to communicate with Tehran on TRIPP, and bilateral relations have been generally friendly, even under Pashinyan. But the war has changed Iran’s calculus. Absent a diplomatic deal with the U.S., Iran, under a much more hardline, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-dominated leadership, will regard any U.S.-led regional architecture as a direct threat to its interests. And with Trump himself declaring the ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran “on life support” and thundering new threats against the Islamic Republic, the resumption of active hostilities cannot be excluded.
TRIPP’s failure to launch rendered Armenia invisible. And invisibility, in the shadow of a great power war, is its own kind of salvation.
Eldar Mamedov
Eldar Mamedov is a Brussels-based foreign policy expert and Non-resident Fellow at the Quincy Institute.This backdrop provides a context for Tehran’s skeptical attitude regarding TRIPP from the outset. Iran has long seen the project as designed to entrench the U.S. presence on its northern border and cut off Iran’s border with Armenia, its only friendly northern neighbor.
The current war, not unexpectedly, has exacerbated Tehran’s fears of encirclement. While the Nakhchevan drone incident was promptly downplayed through diplomatic channels between Baku and Tehran, it highlighted the fragility of a regional architecture based on Iran’s exclusion.
Had TRIPP infrastructure actually been built through Armenia’s southern region, it would have been a tempting target for Iran’s formidable missile and drone arsenal. Armenia would have found itself caught between Iranian retaliation and Azerbaijani ambitions – with the Turkish border still closed, and relations with Russia in tatters.
TRIPP’s failure may therefore be Armenia’s greatest strategic stroke of luck. From Tehran’s perspective, there was nothing worth attacking – except, perhaps, the U.S. embassy, but Iran has not stepped up the escalation ladder to that point, yet.
One should not conclude that the risk is over, however. Pashinyan is as committed as ever to TRIPP, which he sees as a fundamental pillar of Armenia’s pro-Western pivot. Facing a critical election next month, his hosting last week of the summit of the European Political Community – a loose network of European states whose membership transcends the EU – should boost his standing. Western leaders, including French President Emmanuel Macron and even the Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, descended on Yerevan in a show of support for Pashinyan.
While TRIPP is a U.S.-led rather than a European Union-led project, the European leaders endorsed it as a means to anchor Armenia in the “Western camp.” Besides this, they have little more to offer than vague recognition of Armenia’s “European aspirations.” Other nations that have trodden this path — like Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia — have wound up with little to show in terms of real deliverables on what matters, namely, actual membership in the EU, a security umbrella, and economic opportunities.
Pashinyan may be on course to win the elections. However, not everybody in Armenia is convinced of the strategic wisdom of the Western pivot. Narek Karapetyan, an opposition leader, struck a dissenting note this week. Speaking from Meghri, a critical cog in the proposed project, he noted that “the TRIPP route runs 30-40 meters from the Iranian border.”
“Over the past two months, we have seen Iran attack U.S. military bases in various countries,” Karapetyan said. “What will happen in the future if their relations deteriorate and only an American company remains here?”
This may sound alarmist as TRIPP, in theory, has no military or security dimension. But the project’s very vagueness creates a dangerous strategic ambiguity. If attempts to revitalize it are undertaken, an Iranian threat could be used to justify its securitization.
It is true that Armenian leadership was careful to communicate with Tehran on TRIPP, and bilateral relations have been generally friendly, even under Pashinyan. But the war has changed Iran’s calculus. Absent a diplomatic deal with the U.S., Iran, under a much more hardline, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-dominated leadership, will regard any U.S.-led regional architecture as a direct threat to its interests. And with Trump himself declaring the ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran “on life support” and thundering new threats against the Islamic Republic, the resumption of active hostilities cannot be excluded.
TRIPP’s failure to launch rendered Armenia invisible. And invisibility, in the shadow of a great power war, is its own kind of salvation.
Eldar Mamedov is a Brussels-based foreign policy expert and Non-resident Fellow at the Quincy Institute.
—
Panorama, Armenia
May 12 2026
Yerevan City Council member Mesrop Manukyan, an MP candidate from the opposition Hayastan bloc, has accused Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s government of allowing a once-prominent Armenian-French kindergarten in Yerevan to fall into ruin, alleging the site has been abandoned and misused.
He posted a video on social media on Tuesday, showing the deteriorated building. He claimed the kindergarten was closed during Pashinyan’s tenure and has since been neglected.
“They shut down the Armenian-French kindergarten, turned it into a public toilet and now they boast about building new kindergartens,” Manukyan said. “Don’t destroy what already exists.”
Manukyan alleged the site has become a gathering place for homeless people, with neighbors reporting fires, deaths and frequent visits by emergency medical services. “The authorities are aware of this situation,” he added.
—
Read the article in: Armenian:
The Human Rights Defender of Armenia, Anahit Manasyan, called on all political forces to avoid hate speech, discrimination, incitement to violence, and any other forms of _expression_ that exceed the limits of freedom of speech.
Manasyan made the remarks in parliament while presenting her 2025 annual report to lawmakers, in reference to challenges in the field of freedom of _expression_.
The Ombudsperson emphasized that in Armenia, freedom of _expression_ is sometimes perceived as an unlimited right, which leads to the spread of hate, discrimination, and speech inciting violence.
Manasyan stressed that freedom of _expression_ has clear limits and that everyone plays a key role in fostering a culture of responsibility in society.
At the same time, she expressed concern over the inconsistent application of accountability mechanisms in cases of violations of freedom of _expression_, particularly criminal liability, noting that differentiated approaches often create a perception of arbitrariness.
Manasyan highlighted the importance of establishing a unified practice in the application of criminal liability and using this tool only in cases that pose sufficient public danger.
She also found it problematic that such forms of speech, which constitute violations of conduct rules, rarely result in disciplinary accountability measures.
Especially in the context of the pre-election period, Manasyan called on all political forces to exclude from their political discourse any discriminatory language, hate speech, incitement to violence, and any other forms of _expression_ that violate the limits of freedom of _expression_.
Read the article in: Armenian:
Published by Armenpress, original at
—
May 8, 2026
The 8th summit of the European Political Community (ECC) held in Yerevan on May 4 became the watershed that finally crystallized the systemic rift accumulated over the years in Armenian-Russian relations. Although the European vector adopted by official Yerevan was not new, the events that took place within the framework of this event, in particular the participation and speech of the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky, brought the tension of relations to a crisis point.
The most telling episode of this tension was the summons of the Armenian ambassador to the Russian Foreign Ministry and the note of protest presented to him. This is an extreme step in diplomatic practice, which proves that Moscow is no longer limited to public statements.
The ambassador’s summons means that the Kremlin describes Yerevan’s actions not as an ordinary disagreement, but as a direct and gross violation of alliance obligations, which requires an official record. Although, it should also be noted here that both the Armenian authorities and many representatives of the expert community state that Russia has not fulfilled its alliance obligations in many episodes, as a result of which the RA authorities have decided to change RA’s foreign policy, starting to reduce dependence on the Russian Federation.
The observations made by Maria Zakharova on May 7 completed this picture. He emphasized that Yerevan, providing a platform for Zelensky’s anti-Russian rhetoric, actually becomes part of the anti-Russian coalition of the West. For the Russian side, this is not just a manifestation of the “multi-vector” policy, but a demonstrative step against Russia’s vital interests in the territory of its ally.
Read also
- Why is Armenian Ambassador to Russia Gurgen Arsenyan returning to Armenia?
- What did the RA authorities assure Iran? comments the Iranian analyst
- This is a reason for war… The Caucasus is being raised against Russia. Vardan Hakobyan
It should be taken into account that all this is happening against the background of already existing deep grievances. Yerevan’s public questioning of the CSTO’s effectiveness, criticism of the role of Russian peacekeepers, and the ratification of the Rome Statute created an environment where trust was nullified.
The Yerevan summit simply tore the last diplomatic veil, showing that Armenia is going to change its strategic ally.
What can follow the ambassador’s call and similar harsh response? First of all, a new phase of “freezing” of bilateral relations is expected, where Russia can take some steps and apply pressure. Dissatisfaction presented to the ambassador can turn into concrete steps, which Russia often applies to countries that leave its “orbit”.
Armenia may face a serious challenge in the international arena. the strengthening of the European vector, which was so demonstratively implemented during the summit, will require security guarantees from the West.
However, if these guarantees are not adequate and timely, Armenia may find itself in a security zone where the old ally is already hostile, and the new partners are not ready to assume full responsibility.
And the hope of the RA authorities is the peace agenda. And, perhaps, it is no coincidence that in these processes, the RA authorities talk about established peace and consider the very fact of peace as a guarantee, because no western country will assume the role of guarantor of RA’s security in the event of Russia leaving the orbit.
The May 4 summit and the subsequent Russian diplomatic démarche in the form of an ambassador’s summons mark the end of the classical model of Armenian-Russian relations. This is no longer a disagreement, but an open geopolitical separation, where each side starts playing by its own rules. For Armenia, this means a transition to a high-risk zone, where political, economic and energy pressures from Russia are possible.
In case of possible economic and energy pressures from Moscow, the European Union, as a rule, offers a toolkit of “resilience enhancement”. First of all, this implies financial support and investment packages to mitigate the economic shock caused by the possible closure of the Russian market.
However, in the political and security sphere, the EU’s proposals are often limited to the expansion of “soft power” and observation missions, which means that in the event of an open confrontation with Moscow, the European “safety cushion” offered to Yerevan will have a mostly advisory nature.
In the short term, EU “resilience tools” have a rather limited and mainly psychological and financial “first aid” meaning. They cannot quickly replace the decades-old economic and energy circumstances.
Summing up, it should be noted that in the short term EU instruments provide some stability, but not security in all areas.
By the way, European analysts also recognize these circumstances, noting that this is a difficult path. Regardless of the various Western aids, Armenia will have to overcome the difficult transitional phase alone, remaining in a vulnerable state.
—