Rather than keeping the Russians on the outside, letting them have a say over the final Zangezur Corridor arrangement might avert a broader war in Central Asia.
When President Donald Trump spoke to global audiences from an ornate conference room in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in May, he outlined what many referred to as the “Trump Doctrine.” Put simply, Trump’s vision for foreign policy was deeply interrelated to American trade and economic policies. If this notion could be summarized in three words, it would go, “Commerce over conflict.” And it is being put into place by President Donald Trump and his team right now—having hosted a summit between the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan at the White House, and working to put an end to those two countries’ longstanding conflict.
Under Trump’s vision, the United States will play a soft security role in the Zanzegur Corridor, the Azerbaijani corridor running through Armenia and connecting Azerbaijan proper to its Nakhchivan exclave. The corridor plan has been newly christened the “Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity.”
Contextualizing the Zangezur Corridor
It would be foolish to imagine that Trump’s team is acting because of commercial interests alone. Indeed, the impetus for American involvement has been Azerbaijan’s ongoing targeting of Armenian Christians—most notably in 2023, when it conquered the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region and drove the community there, one of the oldest Christian communities in the world, into exile. As part of its peace agreement, the Trump administration is deploying prominent US attorney Robert Amsterdam to the region, in order to “carry out a certain monitoring function and clarify the real state of human rights and democracy” there.
As for the Zangezur Corridor, this is the big movement by America on the grand geopolitical chessboard. Both Turkey and Israel are supporters of the Azerbaijani government’s aims of creating an economic land route linking trade and energy flows between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. It runs through Armenian territory and will connect Nakhchivan to the mother country via railways and new roadways.
Here’s the kicker, though: if Azerbaijan is successful in their attempts to establish the Zangezur Corridor, it will help to achieve the US and Israeli goal of isolating the Islamic Republic of Iran economically. That’s because, under the existing order, Armenia has refused to allow Azerbaijan to transit through its territory to reach Nakhchivan. Instead, Baku has gone through neighboring Iran, which has demanded handsome transit fees for goods and energy flowing out of Central Asia into the Middle East and Europe. The Zangezur Corridor totally upends those conditions, cutting off Iran from these transit fees.
And Azerbaijan has already played a decisive role in helping the US-Israeli alliance in diminishing Iranian power. After all, Israeli drones and warplanes launched multiple devastating strikes from Azerbaijani territory into neighboring Iran during the 12-day war between Israel and Iran last month. With the chance to secure Azerbaijan solidly in the Western camp, Baku’s actions against the region’s ancient Christian community were largely swept under the rug—offered up as a sacrifice by the US-Israeli-Turkish alliance to achieve their grand geopolitical goal of cutting off Iran and rearranging Caucasian geopolitics in the West’s favor.
Trump Wants His Cut of the Central Asian Action
And there is another dimension to this as well. The Americans and their allies are increasingly moving in to complicate and, in fact, get a piece of the action from China’s ongoing “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI). To move goods from the East to the West, China essentially envisions three trade routes.
The first of these, the “northern corridor,” runs through Russia—and basically requires positive trade relations between Russia and the West for that to work. The Ukraine War has all but shut down that corridor. Then there is the southern route, which is ocean-based—but that route takes far longer to transit, and is subject to geopolitical interruptions, as the Houthis in the Red Sea have shown. Because of this, a third way—a middle corridor, a portion of which would pass through the Zangezur Corridor—is needed.
Once through the proposed Zangezur Corridor, the goods flowing out of eastern Eurasia toward the western portion of Eurasia would branch off beyond the South Caucasus, with one route moving overland through Turkey and another route passing through the Black Sea into Europe. This Black Sea portion is nominally planned to exit in the Ukrainian port city of Odesa, but given the city’s position on the front line of the Ukraine War and its uncertain long-term fate, this leg of the proposed US-dominated western Silk Road route will be stymied for the foreseeable future. An alternative exit port for goods traveling along the Zangezur Corridor into Europe appears to be shaping up in Constanta, Romania. Romania’s recent election, in which the popular anti-NATO candidate Calin Georgescu was abruptly disqualified by the nation’s constitutional court and a more acceptable pro-NATO candidate elected in his place, appears to confirm this possibility.
As for Turkey, which is already the last connective tissue linking Europe to cheap Russian natural gas via the Turkstream Pipeline, the country would become another important exit node for the economic corridor that the West is constructing in Central Asia.
In this arrangement, everyone gets what they want. Israel has contained Iran geoeconomically after severely degrading it militarily. The Americans are happy because they, too, are putting Iran back inside its geopolitical box—while also damaging China’s push to dominate the Eurasian-based trading routes linking the goods flowing out of eastern Eurasia into the Middle East and western Eurasia. And the Turks are satisfied because they are ensuring their dominance over the Muslim world, while simultaneously having an outsized hand in controlling which goods from which countries make it to and from Europe.
Russia Should Be Cut Into the Deal, Too
As always (when speaking about Eurasia), however, the Russians are the real wildcards. Or, in Mackinder’s parlance, Russia is the “geographical pivot” around which the Eurasian world island orbits.
Clearly, Moscow would not be sanguine about this Western-backed scheme to take over key flows and energy and other goods in Central Asia. Russia’s attack on Ukraine was already based, at least in part, on the Kremlin’s reticence to hand over these trading routes to Western powers. Similarly, Moscow has always viewed Central Asia as its proverbial backyard. There exists in Armenia a large Russian military base that Moscow has stated would become the site of a massive surge of Russian Armed Forces into Central Asia if this Zangezur Corridor plot is finalized.
Suppose, though, the Trump administration, which is keen on truly resetting relations with Moscow, decided to give the Russians a cut of the Zangezur Corridor’s action?
Rather than keeping the Russians on the outside of the West’s tent micturating in, letting the Russians have a say over the final Zangezur Corridor arrangement—and a percentage of its profits—might satisfy the Putin government and avert a broader war in Central Asia.
Such a move by the West would be strategically prudent, as it would placate the Russians while slowly cleaving them away from China’s firm grasp. It would also disincentivize Moscow from blindly supporting Tehran, which will undoubtedly seek to escalate against Israel for its encirclement via the Zangezur Corridor.
The great error of the post-Cold War period was the Western refusal to fully bring Moscow into the fold, treating Russia like it was an afterthought. Because of that boorish behavior by Western leaders, the world has reached this current unpleasantness between Moscow and Washington.
But if the Americans were to pull the Russians into the Zangezur Framework, that would give the Putin government some real buy-in—and potentially get the Russians to stay their hand at any further hostile actions directed against the West. Why have enemies when you can have business partners?
The bottom line is that the Zangezur framework only avoids conflict with Russia if the West makes a real, good faith attempt to integrate the Russians into this deal. The real threats to the United States and its allies are China and Iran, not Russia. Whether the US administration has the foresight and courage to do this—and whether the infamously paranoid Putin government has the faith to give such a deal a try—remains to be seen.
About the Author: Brandon J. Weichert
Brandon J. Weichert, a Senior National Security Editor at The National Interest as well as a contributor at Popular Mechanics, who consults regularly with various government institutions and private organizations on geopolitical issues. Weichert’s writings have appeared in multiple publications, including the Washington Times, National Review, The American Spectator, MSN, the Asia Times, and countless others. His books include Winning Space: How America Remains a Superpower, Biohacked: China’s Race to Control Life, and The Shadow War: Iran’s Quest for Supremacy. His newest book, A Disaster of Our Own Making: How the West Lost Ukraine is available for purchase wherever books are sold. He can be followed via Twitter @WeTheBrandon.
Image: Wikimedia Commons.
