WASHINGTON DC – The South Caucasus does not usually sit on the American diplomatic calendar. But next month, it may become the proving ground for US President Donald Trump’s newest peace experiment.
Trump announced Friday that US Vice President J.D. Vance will travel to Azerbaijan and Armenia in February, dispatching his No. 2 to a region that rarely sees high-level US visitors – and even more rarely finds itself at the center of a White House peace project with Trump’s name on it.
The trip, Trump said, will “advance the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity,” the agreement he brokered last August to end nearly four decades of war between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh.
It is an ambitious mission, heavy with symbolism – and freighted with political risk.
Rare Vice-Presidential stop
The South Caucasus has long been peripheral to US diplomacy. The last time a US Vice President set foot in Baku was Sept. 3, 2008, when Dick Cheney swept through the region in the aftermath of the Russo-Georgian war.
Cheney did not visit Armenia then, though he went on to Georgia and Ukraine.
Armenia has seen only one comparable visit in recent years: Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s stop in Yerevan in September 2022.
Now, Vance is headed to both capitals – a signal, aides say privately, that Trump intends to elevate a peace deal that has already become a signature foreign policy calling card.
Trump said Vance will seek to deepen ties on multiple fronts: “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 USA. Defense Equipment, such as body armor and boats, and more, to Azerbaijan,” he wrote on Truth Social.
Trump also thanked the leaders of both countries for upholding the August agreement, declaring there was now “Prosperity and Peace.”
Deal that rewrote a war
The August agreement followed nearly 40 years of intermittent war between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the mountainous enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh.
Under its terms, both countries relinquished all territorial claims against each other, pledged to refrain from the use of force and committed to respect international law.
Earlier this week, Armenia announced it would integrate its energy systems with Azerbaijan, facilitating the import and export of electricity under a US-backed project – an early dividend of the pact.
But the real machinery of Trump’s peace effort arrived in January.
Last week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Armenian Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan unveiled the Implementation Framework for the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity, or TRIPP – a dense but consequential blueprint translating last summer’s White House commitments into rail lines, road corridors and revenue streams.
It lays out how unimpeded, multimodal transit would connect Azerbaijan to its Nakhchivan exclave – while explicitly preserving Armenian sovereignty, jurisdiction and border control.
A US-controlled development company, Armenian regulatory authority and ironclad guarantees on territorial integrity form the backbone.
For Washington, the payoff is strategic. TRIPP expands trade routes and supply chains and plants an American-managed transit artery in one of Eurasia’s most contested corridors.
Timing, with intent
Trump has not announced exact dates for Vance’s South Caucasus trip. What he has announced is everything around it.
Last weekend, Trump said Vance would stop in Milan on Feb. 6 for the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics.
Diplomatic sources told Kyiv Post that Vance will return to Europe on Feb. 13 for the Munich Security Conference.
That leaves a narrow window – the days between Milan and Munich – or a second swing after Munich. Either way, the timing is unmistakable.
“This is a sign of follow-up from last summer’s summit in Washington,” Richard Kauzlarich, former US ambassador to Azerbaijan, told Kyiv Post on Friday.
“Great opportunity to send a message to Iran that the US is going to be a presence in the South Caucasus with the TRIPP project and expanded bilateral partnership with Armenia and Azerbaijan,” Kauzlarich added.
Iran, squeezed between new transit routes and a deeper American footprint, looms quietly over the itinerary.
Autocracy problem
But peace diplomacy rarely unfolds in a vacuum. As Washington prepares to celebrate a breakthrough, Azerbaijan’s domestic politics are sliding sharply in the other direction.
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev’s government has launched a fresh crackdown on opposition figures – even as US lawmakers warn the Trump administration it may be “sleepwalking into complicity.”
Aliyev’s latest target is Ali Karimli, the longtime leader of the Popular Front Party of Azerbaijan and one of the president’s most persistent critics.
Karimli was detained late last year after a raid on his home and charged with attempting a “violent seizure of power,” accusations opposition figures call both fantastical and depressingly familiar.
In an exclusive interview with Kyiv Post earlier this week, Samara Seyidova, Karimli’s wife, called the alleged coup plot “a farce,” accused Aliyev of exploiting a distracted world to crush the last organized opposition and warned Washington that its silence is helping transform a strategic energy partner into what she described as “a completely closed authoritarian system.”
Her message to Washington was blunt: keep the security partnership – but start naming names.
“Why is Aliyev treated as legitimate,” she asked, “while others are sanctioned as pariahs?”
Whether Vance’s trip will press for the release of political prisoners – or quietly sidestep the issue – remains an open question.
Country Vance won’t visit
Notably absent from Vance’s itinerary: Georgia.
Once the West’s most reliable ally in the region, Georgia is now ruled by a pro-Russian party that critics say is stripping the country away from Europe and the US.
Next week, Washington will hold a rare public reckoning. On Wednesday, on Capitol Hill, lawmakers will convene a Helsinki Commission hearing titled “Georgian Dream’s Escalating Crackdown on Dissent.”
Since October 2024, the ruling Georgian Dream party has passed more than 20 new laws expanding state power, curbing judicial independence and criminalizing protest. Authorities have frozen bank accounts of legal aid groups, arrested journalists and jailed opposition figures for refusing to recognize what they call sham proceedings.
Panelists will include Dr. Claire Kaiser of McLarty Associates, Laura Thornton of the McCain Institute and researcher Olesya Vartanyan of George Mason University.
Vance will be nowhere near Tbilisi.
Test of Trump’s peace doctrine
For Trump, the mission fits neatly into a broader narrative: that his brand of dealmaking can quiet old wars, open new trade routes and reshape American influence without deploying troops.
For Vance, it is a baptism by geopolitics – navigating ceasefires, corridors, energy grids and autocrats in a region where every road doubles as a fault line.
And for Washington, it is an experiment with consequences.
The South Caucasus may be far from the Potomac. But in February, it will become the stage on which Trump tests whether his “Route for Peace and Prosperity” can survive contact with reality.
In a region where maps are weapons and silence is policy, the US Vice President’s most important message may not be the one he delivers – but the ones he chooses not to.