Why Vance’s South Caucasus trip matters

OPINION:

There are vice presidential trips that fill the calendar and others that actually help shape history.

Vice President J.D. Vance’s visit this week to Armenia and Azerbaijan has a shot at the second category. If the process is handled deftly, there is a huge win in the offing for America in the South Caucasus.

Much of the skepticism surrounding President Trump’s claim that his administration has helped resolve “eight wars” is understandable. In some cases, the definition of resolution is elastic. In others, the causal chain is ambiguous. In the South Caucasus, at least, something tangible has shifted — so much so that if brought across the finish line, it could generate serious talk of a Nobel Prize.

To understand why, we need to take a small step back.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh occupied one of the strangest legal and political limbos in international affairs. Populated overwhelmingly by Armenians, it functioned for three decades as a de facto self-ruled entity yet was internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan.

That contradiction lay mostly dormant until 2020, when Azerbaijan, backed militarily by Turkey, launched a six-week war that shattered the status quo. Large swaths of Nagorno-Karabakh were seized, Armenian defenses collapsed and a Russian-brokered ceasefire froze a new, far more precarious reality into place.

What followed were years of grinding pressure. Border incursions, sniper fire and repeated Azerbaijani advances into Armenian territory kept the region on edge. Baku, a police state run by Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and his family, steadily tested how far it could push democratic Armenia without triggering a serious international response.

In late 2022 and 2023, Azerbaijan imposed a blockade on the Lachin Corridor, the sole road linking Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia. The siege produced acute shortages of food, medicine and fuel, turning a geopolitical dispute into a humanitarian crisis.

In September 2023, Azerbaijan launched a swift military operation that ended Armenian control of Nagorno-Karabakh entirely. Within days, more than 100,000 Armenians fled their ancestral homes in what amounted to an ethnic cleansing of the region. Its political leadership was arrested and transferred to Baku, where key figures remain in detention.

For Armenians, the episode confirmed their deepest fears: not just the loss of territory but also the erasure of a people from their land.

Throughout this period, Mr. Aliyev’s rhetoric was openly coercive. For Armenians, “corridor” echoes a long-articulated pan-Turkic vision of linking Turkic states across Central Asia through uninterrupted east-west access — at the expense of Armenia.

It was into this landscape of distrust that the Trump administration stepped with a dramatic reset, offering not merely mediation but a strategic framework tying peace to security guarantees, economic integration and a redefinition of U.S. engagement in the South Caucasus.

In practical terms, the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity, or TRIPP, is a classic solution in the mold of the president because it reframes a military conflict as a business proposition. It didn’t try to resolve every historical grievance, redraw borders or force immediate reconciliation. It treated the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict as a problem of security guarantees, economic incentives and enforceable logistics.

Although U.S. business may not immediately benefit, TRIPP helps the U.S. lock in strategic access, build client networks, deter rivals from controlling key routes, shape regional rules and standards and create long‑term political leverage.

That is precisely where TRIPP is designed to differ: Rather than institutionalizing a carve-out, it aims to make transit reliable while affirming full Armenian jurisdiction, using oversight to guarantee rules instead of transferring control.

For Armenia, for which I served as ambassador to the U.S. and in other positions, the existential fear was survival. Consider that no standing American president or vice president has ever visited the country. TRIPP binds Armenia into a long-term U.S. security and economic partnership. Yerevan is thus loosening its dependence on Russia and reorienting its security posture toward the West.

TRIPP’s framework could potentially open the door to border security assistance, customs modernization, logistics integration and, eventually, defense normalization.

For the U.S., TRIPP was a way to stabilize the South Caucasus without deploying troops or owning the conflict. It linked peace to trade routes, energy transit and regional integration while weakening Russia’s monopoly over mediation.

Importantly, the framework avoided the symbolic traps that had paralyzed diplomacy for decades. It focused instead on making renewed war strategically stupid and economically costly.

The process has been cautious and carefully sequenced. Nothing is certain yet, and there’s no love lost between Armenia and Azerbaijan. There is simmering anger in Yerevan over the political prisoners still held by their neighbor. This is something Mr. Vance could address in Baku.

Oil-rich Azerbaijan faces a choice between coercive dominance and contractual legitimacy. TRIPP and the vice president’s visit push it decisively toward the latter. They tell Azerbaijan that its future influence will flow from cooperation and predictability, not from pressure and threats. This converts Azerbaijan from a military actor into a stakeholder in the regional order. For this, it should end the dispute over political prisoners.

Critics who dismiss President Trump’s foreign policy as erratic should look closely at this case. It shows a willingness to lock peace into physical, economic and institutional reality.

Mr. Vance’s visit carries a legacy-shaping potential.

• Grigor Hovhannisyan is the former Armenian ambassador to the U.S. and Mexico and Armenia’s former deputy foreign minister.