By Linda Gayle, Spring 2026 Marcellus Policy Fellow

Under the Trump administration, unilateral peacemaking has increasingly emerged as a tool of U.S. foreign policy, and the 2025 U.S.-brokered peace deal between Armenia and Azerbaijan offers a key example of these dynamics and possible consequences for U.S. national interests. The South Caucasus, though often regarded as the periphery of U.S. national interest, sits at the intersection of Russian, Chinese, Turkish, and Iranian influence and is strategically positioned as a key transit point for critical minerals and energy. Therefore, understanding whether the recent peace deal supports U.S. national interests in this context or increases risk carries major implications for changing approaches to U.S. diplomacy overall.

This paper argues that the Trump administration’s approach to peacemaking in the South Caucasus — marked by a shift toward unilateral, transactional diplomacy — offers some possible benefits to U.S. interests, mainly in critical mineral access and technological development opportunities, but risks strategic geopolitical overextension and unnecessary friction with regional powers. The more explicitly interest-aligned diplomacy behind this peace deal could potentially advance U.S. interests in opening transit routes for critical minerals essential to national security and leveraging opportunities in the South Caucasus for semiconductor supply chain resilience in the AI race, but other interests promoted in the peace deal are more closely aligned with private economic priorities rather than national security strategy. Further, among the intersecting interests of regional actors, emerging U.S. bilateral leadership in these peace negotiations creates the greatest tension with Iran, which perceives development in U.S. interests in the South Caucasus as a direct security threat, adding tension to an already charged relationship with a major rival.