Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev, his late father and predecessor Heydar Aliyev and a few of their closest political allies hail from Nakhchivan.
The identify 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 identify 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 army bases in resource-poor Armenia, supplying it with low-cost vitality whereas promoting arms to Azerbaijan.
Regardless that the battle didn’t contain Nakhchivan, it reduce off the Zangezur Hall, a 40km (25-mile) logistical umbilical twine 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 option 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 wanting to revive the hall, demanding its exterritoriality and even pondering using army power.
‘A brand new actuality within the area’
The explanations go far past restoring entry to Aliyev’s ancestral land. The hall may turn into a mammoth transport hub between Turkiye, Azerbaijan and Central Asia.
It might enhance the movement of Central Asian hydrocarbons to Turkiye and additional to Europe, enhance the regional financial 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 reduce by means of the Gordian knot on Friday, and his position “primarily, cements a brand new actuality within the area”, in accordance with Emil Mustafayev, the Baku-based chief editor of the Minval Politika on-line journal.
“It is a severe 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 means about how one has to speak in Washington,” Andrey Kazantsev, an skilled on the area, instructed Al Jazeera.
In addition 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 seems like one in every of Trump’s favorite actual property offers really heralds a tectonic shift.
“Trump’s administration has certainly been fast to seek out its means in 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 army 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 personal army firm – and finally construct a army base that nominally safeguards Armenia however really retains an eye fixed on Iran, stated Ukrainian political analyst Aleksey Kushch.
“It means extra potential strain 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 lots.
“Irrespective 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 downside of accessing Nakhchivan,” stated Alisher Ilkhamov, head of Central Asia Due Diligence, a suppose tank in London.
“One of many major 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.
Nonetheless, 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 “needs 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 completed
Baku, whose annual $5bn defence spending exceeds Yerevan’s total debt-hobbled state price range, 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 whether Washington’s initiatives are “a principled intervention or opportunistic geopolitics”, he added.
Even with out direct confrontation, Moscow and Tehran may 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 relies on many intricacies of South Caucasus politics – and the West “should interact with nuance – not simply geopolitics”, Oskanian concluded.
