U.S. Vice President JD Vance’s visit to Armenia and Azerbaijan this week was billed as historic. It was the first time that a sitting American vice president or president had ever traveled to the two South Caucasus nations.

It was reported as the United States “planting its flag” in a region on Russia’s southern border that traditionally has had close ties with Moscow. Armenia and Azerbaijan were former Soviet republics. They also sit atop Iran’s northern border.

Vance touted his visit as consolidating the “peace process” that President Donald Trump had overseen at the White House last summer, when the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan signed a peace deal to end decades of conflict over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region. Trump thinks he deserves a Nobel Peace Prize for that achievement.

Tellingly, Vance held separate back-to-back meetings with the Armenian and Azerbaijani leaders in their respective capitals. If this were a trip to consolidate American-mediated peace, one would have thought that a trilateral summit would have been more appropriate. Which begs the question: was peace the real objective?

Central to the U.S.-led peace deal is the so-called Trump Route for Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP). This is a new U.S.-controlled security corridor that providesAzerbaijan with access to another exclave, Nakhchivan, located across the territory of southern Armenia. Nakhchivan is contiguous with Türkiye to the west.

Speaking in the capitals of Yerevan and Baku, Vance hailed the TRIPP as a peace and prosperity pact that the United States was bestowing on the South Caucasus. The benign words belie a harder-nosed strategic U.S. move to undermine Russia and Iran.

The “peace corridor” is a new trade route between Asia and Europe that aligns with U.S. and........

© Eurasia Review