The sides had announced the completion of this text on 13 March already, and now it has President Trump’s formal blessing

What are the variables in terms of how it's managed? No doubt that nothing chokes Arm-Az dialogue quicker than historical grievances so my mind is open on this. But 2 context-specific problems are the culture of memory around genocide in Armenia and victory-related legitimacy in Azerbaijan.

Thanks Nicolas, that's a good TLDR summing up!

Be that as it may, these issues will not disappear. They will resurface, sometimes in unpredictable ways, and their eventual acknowledgment is the best antidote to revanche.

There are arguments that pragmatism is needed to convert a crucial window of opportunity today, that can allow a different environment for these issues to be dealt with tomorrow.

While this is a premise we can all get behind, it also seems to be the case that today’s vision of peace also rejects & excludes the realms of memory and justice. We seem to bear witness to an Armenian-Azerbaijani pacto de olvido – an agreement not to raise the past as a route to a better future.

Beyond specifics, I already noted that our whole lexicon for discussing Armenian-Azerbaijani peace is now about logistics, transit, connectivity & other externalities. The last words of yesterday’s Joint Declaration say “We resolutely reject & exclude any attempt of revenge, now & in the future.”

www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/pre... The European Union is firmly committed, if by force of geography alone, yet it is sidelined in the reported agreements, which it nevertheless immediately affirmed yesterday. EU support can + should be leveraged to broaden and deepen stakes in success.

Geopolitical branding also suggests the contingent & conjunctural nature of US interest, rather than a multi-actor, long-term Western investment in peace in the South Caucasus. If the US inserts itself now, will it remain committed when the problems & snags build up as they inevitably will?

carnegieendowment.org/emissary/202... These insertions are inevitably conjunctural and do not last. Indigenous peace is what can last and here what’s crucial is the bilateral dynamic since 2023 that made yesterday possible (as argued here).

For this reason I am cautious about ‘Pax Americana’ framings. Projects to stabilize Armenian-Azerbaijani violence have traditionally involved external insertion: Bolsheviks in 1920-23, Euro-Atlantic axis in the 1990s, Russia & Turkey in 2020 and now the US in 2025.

mid.ru/ru/foreign_p... If Iran has so far been measured, Russia has already condemned the interference of 'non-regional' actors and claiming its ideas originated in its own trilateral discussions with Armenia & Azerbaijan. We should expect more and sustained Russian hostility to the TRIPP plan.

But let’s now consider some of the possible snags. First, in a fractured & competitive environment, geopolitical action invites geopolitical reaction. There are two possible spoilers in this plan – Russia & Iran – both of which are embedded in the Caucasus & have numerous levers that they can use.

Avoidance of a Russian monopoly on managing the conflict between them (ironically the situation which the Second Karabakh War ended in) has always been the least ambiguous consensual position shared by Baku & Yerevan, and a sine qua non of their sovereignty.

The TRIPP agreement clearly aspires to definitively superseding Article 9 of the 10 November 2020 Ceasefire Statement, which mandated the Russian military supervision over the Syunik route.

It certainly looks like American involvement will be limited to the TRIPP, which is sure to be seized upon by Armenian critics who will see the TRIPP as embedding unequal transit rights.

Yet what reciprocity means remains vague: “reciprocal benefits for international & intra-state connectivity for the Republic of Armenia.” This points to 2 areas of uncertainty: what, in the end, will be the modalities of transit across the TRIPP, & will these modalities be unique to that route?