Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev, his late father and predecessor Heydar Aliyev and a few of their closest political allies hail from Nakhchivan.
The title of this tiny, mountainous and underdeveloped Azeri space sandwiched between Armenia, Iran and Turkiye sounds unfamiliar to these outdoors the strategic South Caucasus area.
However Nakhchivan’s title and geopolitical significance resurfaced after United States President Donald Trump hosted a White Home summit between Azeri and Armenian leaders on Friday.
Azerbaijan’s Aliyev and the Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan signed a preliminary peace deal to finish the decades-long battle over Nagorno-Karabakh.
Within the early Nineteen Nineties, ethnic Armenians within the Nagorno-Karabakh area broke away from oil-rich Azerbaijan after a conflict that killed hundreds and displaced lots of of hundreds.
Moscow brokered a truce in 1994, sustaining two navy bases in resource-poor Armenia, supplying it with low-cost power whereas promoting arms to Azerbaijan.
Despite the fact that the battle didn’t contain Nakhchivan, it minimize off the Zangezur Hall, a 40km (25-mile) logistical umbilical wire to Azeri mainland that consists of a derelict highway and parallel rusty rail tracks.
Air journey and hours-long, bumpy transit by means of Iran remained the one strategy to attain the exclave, whose authorities dominated it like a private fiefdom, with legal guidelines and methods of life typically contradicting these of the mainland.
After profitable the 2020 conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh and restoring management over it three years later, Baku has been desirous to revive the hall, demanding its exterritoriality and even pondering the usage of navy power.
‘A brand new actuality within the area’
The explanations go far past restoring entry to Aliyev’s ancestral land. The hall might turn into a mammoth transport hub between Turkiye, Azerbaijan and Central Asia.
It might improve the stream of Central Asian hydrocarbons to Turkiye and additional to Europe, enhance the regional economic system – and upend Russia’s two centuries of domination within the area that additionally contains Georgia.
Armenia was reluctant to permit Azeri entry to the hall, fearing that the emboldened Turkish-Azeri tandem could jeopardise its safety.
However Trump minimize by means of the Gordian knot on Friday, and his position “primarily, cements a brand new actuality within the area”, in response to Emil Mustafayev, the Baku-based chief editor of the Minval Politika on-line journal.
“This can be a critical shift within the safety structure and transport logistics of the South Caucasus,” he instructed Al Jazeera.
Whereas within the White Home, Aliyev and Pashinyan lavished Trump with reward and nominated him for a Nobel Peace Prize.
“What cracked me up is that [they] didn’t lose their approach about how one has to speak in Washington,” Andrey Kazantsev, an skilled on the area, instructed Al Jazeera.
Additionally they flattered Trump by naming the hall the Trump Route for Worldwide Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP) and leasing it to Washington for as much as 99 years with unique improvement rights.
What appears to be like like considered one of Trump’s favorite actual property offers really heralds a tectonic shift.
“Trump’s administration has certainly been fast to search out its approach in the direction of the long-due geopolitical pivot,” Kazantsev stated.
China, which has been selling its Belt and Highway Initiative in Asia and Jap Europe, could stay “impartial” to it, and Russia, which has two navy bases in Armenia, could “ignore it, not less than, publicly”, he stated. “However for Iran, it’s an actual blow.”
‘A lift of Washington’s clout’
To protect the TRIPP, Washington could use a non-public navy firm – and ultimately construct a navy base that nominally safeguards Armenia however really retains a watch on Iran, stated Ukrainian political analyst Aleksey Kushch.
“It means extra potential stress on Iran and a lift of Washington’s clout within the resource-rich Caspian area the place US oil firms made sizeable investments” within the Nineteen Nineties, he stated.
And Moscow can be about to lose rather a lot.
“Regardless of how paradoxical it sounds, it’s Moscow that has been and nonetheless is a decisive issue within the peace settlement between Armenia and Azerbaijan and in fixing the latter’s drawback of accessing Nakhchivan,” stated Alisher Ilkhamov, head of Central Asia Due Diligence, a assume tank in London.
“One of many important motives for rapprochement of either side is their push to do away with Moscow’s affect, of the peacekeeper’s position it has imposed on them,” he instructed Al Jazeera.
The brand new deal “solely highlights how fictitious Moscow’s position as peacekeeper and intermediary in peace settlement within the South Caucasus is”, Ilkhamov stated.
Nevertheless, the deal just isn’t but set in stone, and the Trump-hosted summit “sparked untimely optimism”, stated Kevork Oskanian of the College of Exeter, in the UK.
This optimism “ought to be tempered by realism and historic precedent [as] many peace processes have failed regardless of promising begins”, he instructed Al Jazeera.
A deal not but accomplished
Baku, whose annual $5bn defence spending exceeds Yerevan’s total debt-hobbled state funds, affirmed Armenia’s territorial integrity however didn’t withdraw from some 200sq km (77sq miles) of its land.
The TRIPP’s idea avoids Baku’s demand for the hall’s extraterritoriality, balancing sovereignty with strategic entry, Oskanian stated.
However there are additionally questions as as to if Washington’s initiatives are “a principled intervention or opportunistic geopolitics”, he added.
Even with out direct confrontation, Moscow and Tehran might attempt to undermine the deal.
“Their grudging acquiescence is important – however removed from assured,” Oskanian stated.
Iran threatened on Saturday that the TRIPP “is not going to turn into a gateway for Trump’s mercenaries – it’ll turn into their graveyard”.
Armenia is a democracy “polarised” over the lack of Nagorno-Karabakh and Pashinyan’s conflict with the Armenian Apostolic Church, Oskanian stated.
To finalise the peace deal, Pashinyan would wish to carry a referendum amending Armenia’s structure that mentions the “reunification” with Nagorno-Karabakh – and win the 2026 parliamentary vote.
Subsequently, the success of Trump’s deal is determined by many intricacies of South Caucasus politics – and the West “should interact with nuance – not simply geopolitics”, Oskanian concluded.
