On August 8, 2025, President Donald Trump hosted Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan at the White House, where the two foreign leaders signed a peace agreement. The White House released a statement that the agreement, initiated under the Biden administration, is “a landmark achievement for international diplomacy that only President Trump could deliver.”
On January 13, 2026, Armenian Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan returned to Washington to meet with Secretary of State Marco Rubio to discuss implementation of the agreed corridor across southern Armenia, which Trump insisted be named the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP).
Azerbaijan and Turkey could enjoy trade and transit across Armenia if they established diplomatic relations and ended their blockade.
If sincerity is the basis of peace, then the chances for a lasting solution are tiny. None of the partners professing to seek peace is sincere. The deeply unpopular Pashinyan—who increasingly seems like the Armenian version of former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili—rushes concessions to position himself as the only candidate in forthcoming elections who can deliver peace, no matter that under his watch, Armenia fought two wars and lost both badly. Aliyev, meanwhile, hopes to use the corridor to bifurcate Armenia’s Syunik province. Azerbaijan’s hostage-taking and kangaroo courts appear designed to humiliate Armenians and undermine peace more than achieve it.
The basic problem with the TRIPP is that it serves no economic purpose. Azerbaijan and Turkey could enjoy trade and transit across Armenia if they established diplomatic relations and ended their blockade. That is a decision that only Ankara can make, as Turkey calls the broader strategic shots for Azerbaijan.
Indeed, while Azerbaijan and Turkey argue they need a corridor to enable trade, they play Trump and Rubio for fools. The entire time that Aliyev whined about Armenia’s blockaded border being an impediment to trade, Azerbaijan directed its trade through Iran, a country whose trade relations with Azerbaijan exceed Armenia’s. Indeed, in 2022, Azerbaijan and Iran signed an agreement for a new transit corridor through Iran.
While Aliyev struts at the White House, local dynamics that have nothing to do with the United States or even Armenia shape his actions. Just as Azerbaijan used military force to end Nagorno-Karabakh’s constitutional autonomy, so, too, did Aliyev last month do the same thing with the landlocked exclave of Nakhchivan, which also had been an autonomous republic. Aliyev will now rule Nakhchivan through an appointed representative, ending any semblance of local rule and continuing Aliyev’s transformation of Azerbaijan into the Eritrea or North Korea of the Caucasus.
Aliyev’s powerplay over Nakhchivan suggests dark clouds on the horizon, both for Azerbaijan and potentially for the region. Aliyev is the scion of a family dynasty founded by his father Heydar, a former KGB agent and Central Committee Member of the Soviet Union, but one whose son is rumored to be autistic and two daughters hampered by their own personal and social problems, so managing a future transition will be difficult.
What is looming in Azerbaijan is a three-way mafia war, the outcome of which will determine the fate of the Aliyev dynasty.
While Aliyev was born in Baku at a time when Heydar was the local KGB chief, the Aliyev family roots itself in Nakhchivan, where Heydar himself was born. Over years of Aliyev’s rule, Vasif Talibov, chairman of the Supreme Assembly of the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic from 1995 until 2022, consolidated local control and transformed Nakhchivan into his own mafia fiefdom. A desire to kneecap competition best explains Aliyev’s decision to impose direct rule over Nakhchivan. It is the Azerbaijani equivalent of the New York Genovese crime family’s infiltration into the Patriarca family’s territory in Massachusetts. At the same time, tension grows between the powerful Pashayev family and Aliyev himself. His marriage was supposed to bring unity between the families but instead brought de facto divorce.
What is looming in Azerbaijan is a three-way mafia war, the outcome of which will determine the fate of the Aliyev dynasty. If the Aliyevs lose out, Ilham is likely to launch a new skirmish, if not war, against Armenia to restore an image of strength or use emergency provisions to imprison economic competitors or political threats.
The Nakhchivan mafia machinations also matter for TRIPP, as the Aliyevs, Talibovs, and others now battle over who will profit and receive protection from TRIPP trade. Trump’s love for triumphant ceremonies notwithstanding, if Trump and Rubio force TRIPP, they will bring not a peace about which the president and Pashinyan can brag, but rather, a spectacular collapse. There simply can be no lasting peace until Azerbaijan experiences real and lasting reform.
