The Iran war has reshuffled regional alliances across the Middle East, but it is also having consequential effects in the South Caucasus, where the conflict has both accelerated and complicated trends that have been in motion since 2020. Azerbaijan’s military breakthrough that year in its longstanding deadlock with Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh led to its complete military takeover in 2023 of the ethnic Armenian breakaway region.
Since then, Armenia has continued to reorient its international partnerships to seek closer ties with the West, while Russia—Yerevan’s historical economic partner and security patron—has seen its position in the region erode even further. With Iran now bogged down by its war with the U.S. and Israel, other actors—primarily the U.S., Turkey and the EU—are stepping in to fill the vacuum in the South Caucasus.
Since returning to the White House last year, President Donald Trump has sought to broker a definitive peace treaty between Armenia and Azerbaijan, which above all from the U.S. perspective would usher in the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity, or TRIPP. Washington has promoted the proposed 25-mile multimodal corridor cutting through southern Armenia to join Azerbaijan with Nakhchivan—an autonomous Azerbaijani exclave surrounded by Armenia, Iran and Turkey—as a primary economic engine for the region.