TRIPP: American peace route between Baku and Yerevan Article by the Atlantic Council

The Atlantic Council, an American think tank, has published an article on the strategic, economic, and political significance of the TRIPP project. Caliber.Az presents the most telling excerpts from the piece.

Editor's note: The authors of the article are Joseph Epstein, senior analyst at the Turan Research Center at the Yorktown Institute, and Andrew D'Anieri, deputy director of the Atlantic Council's Eurasia Center.

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 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 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 route.

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.

In a joint statement, Rubio and Mirzoyan announced a new TRIPP Development Company (TDC) to construct the initial rail and road elements of the project. The agreement envisions the United States government providing upfront capital to develop the route and making a financial return via the TDC over the life of the project through transit fees and commercial opportunities along the route, in addition to construction contracts to US companies. Armenia will earn revenue based on its minority stake in the TDC, plus taxes and customs duties along TRIPP.

It’s an arrangement that should work well for both parties. The White House can tell Americans that they are getting an economic return for US diplomatic engagement in the South Caucasus and opening new opportunities for US companies. At the same time, Pashinyan can sell the agreement as a means of attracting high-quality Western infrastructure investment—something he had pursued through his Crossroads of Peace initiative—that can help position Armenia as a regional transport hub, all while maintaining control over Armenian territory.

TRIPP could provide spillover benefits to Washington, Yerevan, and the broader Caspian region, as well. The US government has been quietly supportive of the Middle Corridor, a multi-modal trade route that connects Central Asia to Türkiye and Europe via the Caspian Sea and infrastructure chokepoints in Azerbaijan and Georgia. TRIPP provides another route across the Caucasus, increasing transport volume capacity as Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan work to build port capacity to meet trade demand.

The successful implementation of TRIPP would make it cheaper and faster to ship products and critical raw materials from Central Asia to Europe and beyond.

Pashinyan looks west

The TRIPP project is not only an achievement of the Trump administration, but also a new peak of Pashinyan’s shift away from Russia. For thirty years, Armenia relied solely on Moscow for its security, leading to Russian domination of the country’s internal and foreign politics. Understanding that a peace deal with Azerbaijan was the only way to remove Russian leverage and therefore achieve true independence, the Armenian prime minister staked his political future on such a deal. Simultaneously, he inked major defence deals with India, France, Greece, and Cyprus, among others.

But the United States is the only power capable of truly offering Armenia an exit ramp from Russian domination. By conducting peace negotiations under US auspices and placing US interests directly over TRIPP, Pashinyan and Aliyev have protected the most sensitive part of the deal with a US deterrent. But more than that, they tied the success of the peace process to closer relations with Washington. As Aliyev attested at the peace summit, “If any of us—Prime Minister Pashinyan or myself—had in mind to step back, we wouldn’t have come here.”

With parliamentary elections set for 2026, Pashinyan needs to show that his pursuit of peace and ties with the West have been successful. Already, there are some signs. Azerbaijan has begun to ship oil and gas to Armenia, driving fuel prices down by 15 per cent. Meanwhile, incoming stability and regional integration with Azerbaijan and Türkiye have the potential of transforming Armenia into a transit country and providing easy access to the European market.

The implementation of the TRIPP route looks like a major success in the Trump administration’s commercially focused foreign policy, and it is a model of constructive partnership that the White House should use elsewhere around the world. The project promises openings for American companies to build a small but crucial link to knitting the Middle Corridor together, a boon for the United States, as well as its partners in the South Caucasus and Central Asia.