US President Donald Trump will host Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev in Washington DC this week in a bid to forge a long-awaited peace agreement between the two adversaries. The White House meeting on Friday has raised speculation that a formal accord could be unveiled, which would serve to boost Trump's campaign to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
Discussions have reached an advanced level, with both sides likely to make "meaningful progress," as per a White House official cited by the Washington Post. Trump's administration is said to be making arrangements for a significant diplomatic news announcement, and that would be a very big milestone in the decades-old Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict.
The roots of the conflict are in Nagorno-Karabakh, which internationally is part of Azerbaijan but as a territory has been inhabited by ethnic Armenians since historical times. During the 1990s, ethnic Armenians declared independence, resulting in violent clashes. A full-scale war broke out in 2020 that ended in a decisive victory to Azerbaijan, reclaiming most parts of the territory. In 2023, Azerbaijan initiated another armed campaign that compelled close to 100,000 ethnic Armenians to leave the territory an action generally condemned as ethnic cleansing.
Trump, who also vowed to safeguard persecuted Christians in the past, has employed the cause of the Armenians to contrast himself with his Democratic opponents. He singled out Vice President Kamala Harris particularly for what he labeled as her do-nothing approach to the ethnic Armenians' displacement. He vowed to "restore peace" and "end ethnic cleansing" in the region if re-elected.
To Trump and his base, the Armenia-Azerbaijan peace process is not merely a diplomatic initiative. It's a political ploy aimed at defining him as an international peacemaker. His staff has already referenced past mediation efforts in Africa, such as a Rwanda-Democratic Republic of Congo peace deal, and interventions in the Cambodia-Thailand war, to argue in favor of a Nobel Peace Prize.
Nevertheless, critics claim Trump's diplomatic achievements are overstated. For all his rhetoric, he has not stopped the war in Ukraine, which is still going on a war that he had vowed to win within 24 hours. He also did not succeed in negotiating peace in Gaza. Most recently, he prompted the US to further dispute with Iran, which made his role as a peacemaker complicated.
Despite all this, Trump's effort to become a Nobel candidate keeps going. A peace agreement between Azerbaijan and Armenia that is successful can serve to support that narrative particularly as the 2024 presidential elections approach.
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Whether or not the White House sit-down yields an actual peace deal, or is merely political theatre, is up in the air. What is certain, though, is that Trump is pinning his diplomatic hopes on international diplomacy to resuscitate his legacy one peace negotiation at a time.
