“In February, Vice President Vance will travel to both Countries to build on our Peace efforts, and advance the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity [TRIPP,]” Trump said in a post on his Truth Social Platform.
“We will strengthen our strategic partnership with Azerbaijan, a beautiful Agreement for Peaceful Nuclear Cooperation with Armenia, Deals for our Great Semiconductor Makers, and the sale of Made in the U.S.A. Defense Equipment, such as body armor and boats, and more, to Azerbaijan,” he wrote without giving further details.
The TRIPP is a U.S.-administered transit corridor that would connect Azerbaijan to its Nakhichevan exclave through Armenia’s strategic Syunik region. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian agreed to the controversial arrangement during his talks with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev hosted by Trump at the White House last August.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Armenian Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan released the first major details of the TRIPP after meeting in Washington on January 13. A joint U.S.-Armenian “implementation framework” confirmed that a special company controlled by the U.S. government will build a railway, a road, energy supply lines and other infrastructure along the TRIPP and manage them for at least 49 years.
The TRIPP Development Company is to operate under a “front office-back office” model. It will hire private operators that will provide “customer-facing services” such as “initial document collection for verification” and collect transit fees from cargo and individual travelers, using “digital tools” in the process. Armenian officials are to be given be a “back office” role.
Aliyev has said that Azerbaijanis travelling to from Nakhichevan “should not see the faces of Armenian border guards.” Pashinian has signaled readiness to meet that demand, saying that modern technology will be used to exclude physical contact between Armenian officers and Azerbaijani travelers. Pashinian pointedly declined to say on January 15 whether there will be such contact.
He thus gave more ammunition to his domestic critics who say that the TRIPP amounts to the kind of an extraterritorial “Zangezur corridor” that is sought by Baku. Aliyev made the same point when he met with Trump on January 22 on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos.
“The Zangezur Corridor, including the TRIPP project, is of great importance in terms of regional connectivity,” he was reported to tell Trump.