When Donald Trump began his second term, his foreign policy goals were presented as a framework designed for the pursuit of peace and devoted to defusing wars and violence across the globe.

A chequered performance? 

While it may be fair to denote the Administration’s endeavours hitherto as an ongoing work-in-progress, even dyed-in-the-wool Trump supporters will be compelled to concede that, as a whole, a clear-eyed appraisal of the White House’s performance hitherto would, at best, be “chequered”.

Indeed, across the globe, from the Congo to Cambodia, informed opinion seems to be that the jury is still out on the real results for US initiatives. Indeed, despite a bombastic proclamation of unprecedented peace-making achievements, unequivocally durable results are lamentably few and far between

For Israel, America’s closest Mid-East ally, some of Trump’s latest decisions—from Gaza, via Lebanon to Iran—appear both perplexing and perturbing. By stopping the fighting across all these fronts prematurely, from an Israeli perspective, Trump might just have snatched an imminent defeat from the jaws of what seemed certain victory.

However, there does seem to be one region of increasingly strategic importance where Trump policy initiatives seemed to have resonated and could yield far-reaching results and put Washington’s major rivals “on the back foot”.

The end of a decades-long conflict?

This is in the Caucasus, where the two protagonists, Armenia and Azerbaijan, have fought intermittent wars against each other for........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)