Mount Ararat dominates Yerevan's horizon. It's conical peak, glazed with ice, is synonymous with Armenia's millennia-old civilization. Its location, just over the Turkish border amid the killing fields of the nation's most reverberating historical trauma, also makes it a symbol of Armenia's precarity.
Pivotal parliamentary elections are coming in June, and Armenia's young democracy faces a stirring test between the ghosts of its history and a hopeful bet on a stable future. For the first time in its independent history—in hundreds of years, arguably—the Armenian polity is on the precipice of peace with its longstanding rivals Turkey and Azerbaijan. To embrace that opportunity is to accept certain losses but also bet on stability and ending Armenia's strategic isolation.
A Stabilizing Infrastructure
Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, whose Civil Contract party was elevated to power in a 2018 revolution, has made a peace treaty with Azerbaijan and normalization with Turkey a centerpiece priority. But in September 2020, a destructive six-week war threatened Pashinyan's reform project and freshly stoked Armenians' strategic insecurity. Azerbaijan wrested back much of the disputed, ethnic Armenian-majority Nagorno-Karabakh region and captured expansive "buffer" zones that Armenian forces had occupied since the 1990s. The 2020 war was a strategic shock as well as a reminder of the thin veil between existence and oblivion that haunts Armenian civilization.
Nevertheless, Civil Contract preserved unexpectedly strong backing in a snap election in 2021 with a mandate of continued democratization and the pursuit of peace. Yet, in the years that followed (PDF), Armenia's hand grew still weaker. The 2020 ceasefire, brokered by Yerevan's nominal ally Russia, failed to arrest continued fighting. Azerbaijani troops made incursions beyond Nagorno-Karabakh into republic territory. With advanced arms and capabilities honed with Turkey and Israel, Azerbaijan established regional military dominance. Russia, meanwhile, signed its own alliance agreement with Azerbaijan and stood by as Azerbaijani offensives closed in. After a ten-month blockade in 2023, Azerbaijani forces, abetted by Russian troops, dispatched separatist fighters in Nagorno-Karabakh, opening lines just long enough for 120,000 Armenian civilians to flee. That humanitarian crisis amid a broader narrative of national diminution remains a powerful current in the upcoming elections.
Following that traumatic loss, Pashinyan's government initialed a peace deal with Azerbaijan in Washington last year. If ratified by Yerevan and Baku, that will lead to normalization with Turkey, which has blockaded Armenia since the 1990s in solidarity with Baku. Yet, for many Armenians, Turkey and Azerbaijan are perceived as contemporary heirs to a history of destruction: Ottoman subjugations and various massacres, early 20th-century violence culminating in the Armenian genocide, and ethnic conflicts with Azerbaijanis surrounding the Soviet period. But for the government, this makes arresting the cycle of conflict and diversifying Yerevan's foreign policy relationships all the more critical.
To that end, the Trump administration's willingness to push for peace between Baku and Yerevan was a genuine foreign policy victory. The key is the “Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity,” a transit corridor across Armenia's Syunik province connecting the Azerbaijani mainland to the exclave of Nakhichivan while ensuring Armenian sovereignty. The TRIPP corridor promises to transform Syunik into a regional hub, but there are various risks and technical mechanics to turn this framework into reality. For instance, revenue-generation models like sovereign transit fees and public-private infrastructure partnerships need clarification. A rigorous, data-driven assessment would help ensure that the economic dividends of peace are distributed fairly and sustainably.
Beyond economics, the architecture of the corridor functions as a unique instrument of regional assurance and stability. By positioning the United States as a primary broker and a nominal guarantor through commercial security oversight, TRIPP helps deter against renewed hostilities. This U.S. imprimatur, even if largely technical or commercial, changes the risk calculus of altering the status quo through force. At the same time, exploring and wargaming the specific gray zone risks and escalatory triggers inherent in such a multi-actor transit zone is critical for ensuring that the route remains a stabilizing force rather than a point of friction.
Already, Armenia is starting to open up to the wider world. Yerevan has begun to balance its collapsing relations with Moscow with a pragmatic upswing toward Washington. It started a surprising defense relationship with India as well and is showing an increasing values alignment with Europe. By any measure, Armenia's government has managed a challenging, violent regional transition as well as one could expect.
Yerevan has begun to balance its collapsing relations with Moscow with a pragmatic upswing toward Washington.
Vectors of Opposition
Detractors, however, remain unconvinced. Opposition voices are tapping into disaffection from Armenia's strategic reversals. Former President Robert Kocharian, as well as political movements led by Russian-Armenian oligarch Samvel Karapetyan and local tycoon Gagik Tsarukyan, are officially agnostic to a U.S.-brokered deal. But all are generally thought to be essentially opposed and Kremlin-backed. This opposition has found a potent symbol in the Armenian Apostolic Church, where a feud between Pashinyan and the Catholicos has sharply divided the clergy and serves as a rich vector for hybrid attacks by those casting the prime minister as an enemy of national tradition. In their competing narrative, 2020 and 2024 defeats were not due so much to Azerbaijani power or Russian disinterest, but Pashinyan's abdications. Pashinyan is accused of indifference (or hostility) toward Armenia's traditional alliance with Russia, which resulted in Moscow's drift. Similarly, Pashinyan's anticorruption policies and democratic aims were incompatible with maintaining the country's deterrent against Azerbaijan. That narrative is appealing to many but belies the degraded state of Armenia's largely Russian aligned and equipped military the government inherited, and assigns Pashinyan outsized unilateral agency while largely ignoring Baku and Moscow's.
Some liberals are skeptical of Pashinyan's government as well. Certain elements say the current government is too insular and that reliably liberal but critical voices in civil society have been frozen out. They voice legitimate concerns over the government's strident way of pushing a binary narrative about peace over war, and democracy over authoritarianism, while inserting loyalists into key institutions and sectors. Pashinyan's allies would say, however, that they are in an existential hybrid war, which is hard to deny given Russia's covert and overt backing for illiberal elements.
Into the Unknown
Popular dissatisfaction is also tied to another aspect of Armenia's existential precarity. From a longue durée perspective, one could defensibly describe Armenian history as gradual but unmistakable dismemberment and diminution. A historical Armenia that once stretched from Nagorno-Karabakh deep into present-day Anatolia in Turkey has been reduced over time to a militarily weakened, and geopolitically isolated state. So, although TRIPP and normalizations represent an authentic and historic opportunity for peace, they can also seem like the best of bad options.
Even for Pashinyan's supporters, it is much to accept. Nagorno-Karabakh is gone and its centuries-old ethnic Armenian population made refugees. Conceding to wholesale, strategic accommodation with Azerbaijan and Turkey, its historical tormenters. Armenia's security remains hardly guaranteed and at the forbearance of others. Its erstwhile diplomatic and security ballast in Moscow is gone. Meanwhile, Washington and Brussels are far away and actual commitment untested. Beyond the upcoming parliamentary elections, an announced referendum to change the constitution to remove perceived Armenian claims to Nagorno-Karabakh (a relatively recent Azerbaijani stipulation) could serve as a greater, if perhaps underrated, vector for hybrid attacks and instability.
Armenia's security remains hardly guaranteed and at the forbearance of others.
TRIPP and the peace deals are a leap into the unknown. But they are also the only viable solution within realistic, near-term reach. Yes, Turkey's economic power is widely regarded as a threat; Armenians whisper the parable of neighbor Georgia's once heralded local tomatoes that gradually disappeared from stores and were replaced with mass-produced Turkish ones conveyed through a lopsided free trade agreement. But Turkey, and by extension the EU Customs Union of which it is a part, is also a far richer and more dynamic market than Armenia has ever had access to.
Armenia's hopes for a more modernized and capable military, in doctrine, training, and equipment, also become more viable. Regional normalization and a settled conflict facilitate stability while allowing for greater defense production and trade, and more options for national security and resilience. Meanwhile, TRIPP elevates Yerevan regionally and represents opportunities for stability, trade, and interstate cooperation that it has not experienced since independence.
Furthermore, this moment is an opportunity to reinvigorate diplomatic inertia that has plagued bilateral U.S. relations with both Yerevan and Baku. For years, bilateral cooperation has been held hostage by the various iterations of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. TRIPP could unlock these stalled portfolios, allowing Washington to engage with the South Caucasus as a region with its own strategic persona.
Mt. Ararat's apex is said to be the final resting place of Noah's ark, a place of sanctuary and recovery for humanity after the world-destroying flood in the Bible story. In Armenia, too, peace and rest finally seem within reach after a long, tempestuous era. A new world awaits after the horrifying destruction of the old. For Armenia's people, who have been conditioned by history to be wary of uncertainty, surely this feels like a time of great danger—but it's possibly the best chance their independent republic has ever had.
