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 exterior 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 Nineties, ethnic Armenians within the Nagorno-Karabakh area broke away from oil-rich Azerbaijan after a warfare that killed 1000’s and displaced tons of of 1000’s.
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 lower off the Zangezur Hall, a 40km (25-mile) logistical umbilical wire to Azeri mainland that consists of a derelict street 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 successful the 2020 warfare 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 the usage of navy drive.
‘A brand new actuality within the area’
The explanations go far past restoring entry to Aliyev’s ancestral land. The hall may develop into a mammoth transport hub between Turkiye, Azerbaijan and Central Asia.
It could improve the stream 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 lower by means of the Gordian knot on Friday, and his function “basically, 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.
“It is a severe shift within the safety structure and transport logistics of the South Caucasus,” he advised 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 professional on the area, advised 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 seems like certainly one of Trump’s favorite actual property offers truly heralds a tectonic shift.
“Trump’s administration has certainly been fast to search out its means in direction of the long-due geopolitical pivot,” Kazantsev mentioned.
China, which has been selling its Belt and Street Initiative in Asia and Japanese Europe, could stay “impartial” to it, and Russia, which has two navy bases in Armenia, could “ignore it, at the least, publicly”, he mentioned. “However for Iran, it’s an actual blow.”
‘A lift of Washington’s clout’
To protect the TRIPP, Washington could use a personal navy firm – and finally construct a navy base that nominally safeguards Armenia however truly retains an eye fixed on Iran, mentioned 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 Nineties, he mentioned.
And Moscow can also be about to lose so much.
“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,” mentioned Alisher Ilkhamov, head of Central Asia Due Diligence, a assume tank in London.
“One of many most important motives for rapprochement of either side is their push to eliminate Moscow’s affect, of the peacekeeper’s function it has imposed on them,” he advised Al Jazeera.
The brand new deal “solely highlights how fictitious Moscow’s function as peacekeeper and intermediary in peace settlement within the South Caucasus is”, Ilkhamov mentioned.
Nevertheless, the deal will not be but set in stone, and the Trump-hosted summit “sparked untimely optimism”, mentioned 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 advised Al Jazeera.
A deal not but finished
Baku, whose annual $5bn defence spending exceeds Yerevan’s complete debt-hobbled state finances, 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 mentioned.
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 may attempt to undermine the deal.
“Their grudging acquiescence is crucial – however removed from assured,” Oskanian mentioned.
Iran threatened on Saturday that the TRIPP “won’t develop into a gateway for Trump’s mercenaries – it should develop into their graveyard”.
Armenia is a democracy “polarised” over the lack of Nagorno-Karabakh and Pashinyan’s battle with the Armenian Apostolic Church, Oskanian mentioned.
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 have interaction with nuance – not simply geopolitics”, Oskanian concluded.
