The United States has been at the forefront of brokering peace agreements between foreign countries for two centuries. Recently, President Donald Trump brokered a potential peace agreement between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and he is currently trying to curate a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine.
Since beginning his second term, Trump has been heavily involved with attempting to foster peace between countries such as Pakistan and India, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Cambodia and Thailand. On Aug. 8, he added Armenia and Azerbaijan to that list, being hailed as the “president of peace,” at least according to the White House website.
Armenia and Azerbaijan
Earlier this month, the White House hosted Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan and President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev to come to an agreement on the implementation of a transportation route, referred to by the U.S. government as the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP) and otherwise as the Zangezur Corridor.
Pashinyan and Aliyev signed the agreement in Washington, D.C., but it still has to be passed through Armenia’s parliament and some details have to be hashed out before it goes into effect.
The corridor would travel from Azerbaijan, through the south of Armenia and to the Azeri-occupied Nakhichevan, located southwest of Armenia.
The leaders also agreed to the dissolution of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) Minsk Group, which, established in 1992, made peacemaking efforts between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
Trump believes that the agreement will foster peace and unity between the two nations.
“Now they’re friends and they’re going to be friends for a long time,” Trump said during the August briefing.
The context
Armenia and Azerbaijan have a decades-long history of war and conflict, which is primarily centered around the region of Nagorno-Karabakh.
“Behind [TRIPP] is a war, a series of wars that took place between Azerbaijan and Armenia beginning in 1989 over the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, which is an area which was historically inhabited by Armenians,” said Barlow Der Mugrdechian, Fresno State Berberian coordinator of Armenian Studies.
In 1994, Armenia won the First Nagorno-Karabakh War, and roughly 30 years later, in 2020, Azerbaijan defeated Armenia in the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War and subsequently occupied the ancient region.
Though the area was seized under Azeri jurisdiction, a large Armenian population remained in Nagorno-Karabakh despite rising tensions and increasingly frequent episodes of violence toward Armenians.
In 2022, Azerbaijan imposed a blockade of the Lachin Corridor, the route through which food, water and other necessities were brought into Nagorno-Karabakh. In September 2023, upwards of 100,000 Armenians fled the territory in an escape from starvation, death by disease and massacre.
Today, there are no Armenians left living in Nagorno-Karabakh. Both the political and social climates between the two nations are unstable, as Der Mugrdechian explained.
“Azerbaijan, almost consistently even since the defeat of Karabakh, has been very aggressive toward Armenia,” Der Mugrdechian said. “They’re even asking Armenia to change parts of its constitution before they would sign a final peace treaty.”
He believes that Pashinyan is in favor of potentially altering the constitution, which, according to AP News, may reunify Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia. This will become especially relevant in June with the parliamentary elections in Armenia.
“[Pashinyan is] trying to set a campaign in which he’s seen as being the best candidate,” Der Mugrdechian said.
Peace in the Caucasus?
Attempts by the OSCE Minsk Group to mediate tensions between Armenia and Azerbaijan have been made for decades, but nothing substantial has come of their involvement.
It raises questions about whether or not the TRIPP project, which aims for long-term peace, will effectively accomplish this goal and how precisely Trump’s plan has been considered, especially in its dismantling of the OSCE Minsk Group.
Though Trump, in facilitating this agreement, is confident in the plan.
“The countr[ies] of Armenia and Azerbaijan are committing to stop all fighting forever, open up commerce, travel and diplomatic relations and respect each other’s sovereignty and territorial integrity,” Trump said during the August briefing.
Der Mugrdechian pointed to the will of Pashinyan and Aliyev, which ultimately determines how far U.S. conciliatory efforts go.
“I believe Aliyev is more of a dictator rather than a democratic [leader], like listening to his people,” Der Mugrdechian said. “His rhetoric is not peaceful. Pashinyan’s is, but it’s coming more, again, from a position of weakness.”
The question of peace between the two nations from the TRIPP project hangs loosely in the air.
He described the predicament as a “million-dollar question” and believes it is too difficult to fully judge from the outside.
For Armenia and Azerbaijan’s European neighbors to the northwest, establishing peace from the White House is also a hot topic.
Russia and Ukraine
The war between Russia and Ukraine began when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. Since then, 400,000 Ukrainians and about 790,000 Russians have been killed or injured due to the conflict, according to Russia Matters.
Discussions regarding peace agreements and potential ceasefire deals have been more prominent recently, as Trump met with both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy separately on Aug. 15 and Aug. 18.
“We don’t know much substantively about what the two presidents discussed and agreed on,” said Nataliia Kasianenko, a political science professor at Fresno State who was born and raised in Ukraine. “It seems like, based on their announcements, that they talked about some areas of agreements that have been reached.”
Trump’s summit with Putin on Aug. 15 didn’t conclude with any sort of formal peace deal or ceasefire agreement, but Putin and Trump both stated in their joint press conference that they feel confident that a path toward peace with Ukraine is imminent.
Kasianenko said she believes that Trump and Putin discussed territorial concessions in the closed-door meeting.
“Russia might give [territory] to Ukraine in terms of the territory that Russia currently controls that belongs to Ukraine,” Kasianenko said. “I think there’s been a discussion of the ceasefire that could happen [but] Russia and Ukraine are still agreeing on the specifics.”
But when Trump met with Zelenskyy and other European leaders three days later, he had a different approach to the ceasefire deal.
Trump told multiple news outlets in the Oval Office on Aug. 18 that he believes Russia and Ukraine “don’t need a ceasefire” because the two countries may not agree on a deal. However, Trump said that the U.S. will give security assistance to Ukraine and that Russia would accept those security guarantees.
However, just two weeks after peace talks, on Aug. 28, Russian drones and missiles struck Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, killing 18 people.
“There’s been over 590 drones that Russia hit Ukraine with,” Kasianenko said. “So it’s like, can we really talk about peace negotiations and agreements while Russia is bombarding Ukraine? Are they really open to peace?”
According to Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, Trump was not thrilled with Russia’s attack on Ukraine, but he “was also not surprised.” Other leaders, such as French President Emmanuel Macron and Alex Stubb, the president of Finland, shared posts on social media condemning Russia’s attack.
The Biden administration launched a plethora of sanctions against Russia in 2022 after they invaded Ukraine, and Trump, so far, has not removed any of these sanctions, but has made threats of more sanctions if Russia does not agree to a ceasefire. These sanctions have been hurting Russia’s economic sector, depriving it of over $500 billion in potential war efforts.
Not only are the sanctions hurting Putin’s war budgets, but it has also affected Russia’s domestic life—interest rates have gone up to 21% as a way to combat inflation from the increasing sanctions.
“[Trump] has been kind of threatening enhanced sanctions more and more,” Kasianenko said. “So that might be the most likely outcome here. But at the same time, if peace talks do not happen between Russia and Ukraine, Trump also threatened to pull all aid from Ukraine.”
The future of a ceasefire agreement or peace deal between the two countries seems uncertain, according to Kasianenko.
“I really want to be optimistic about this, because as a native of Ukraine and having friends and family there, everyone just very much wants peace and this nightmare to end,” Kasianenko said. “But realistically, I’m pessimistic because it seems like there’s a lot of hype and attention … but we haven’t seen a lot of points for mutual agreement between the two sides.”
