BAKU, Azerbaijan, August 8. The visit of President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan to Washington, at the behest of US President Donald Trump, was more than just a diplomatic affair; it marked a pivotal moment in laying the groundwork for the new landscape of international relations in the South Caucasus. Its significance should be viewed through a multifaceted lens—both in the bilateral Baku-Washington relationship and in the grand scheme of resolving the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict, which is nearing the home stretch.
The interaction between President Ilham Aliyev and President Donald Trump has a strategic flavor to it. Notably, three months before the 2024 US election, during the Global Media Forum in Azerbaijan's Shusha, the Azerbaijani leader articulated a favorable stance regarding Trump. This was not just a passing comment; it was a green light for rolling up sleeves and getting down to brass tacks with a politician who, during his first presidential term, played it close to the vest when it came to military force and wore his heart on his sleeve for bolstering traditional values.
After Trump’s return to the White House, a golden opportunity arose to take the relationship to new heights. Telephone talks, message exchanges, and, ultimately, the visit to Washington formalized a new political and economic track. Its institutional expression was the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding, which includes the creation of a Strategic Working Group to develop the Charter on Strategic Partnership. The three-pronged structure of future cooperation covers energy, trade, and transit; economic investments in the high-tech sector, including artificial intelligence; as well as military-political cooperation and joint counter-terrorism efforts.
In a nutshell, this boils down to Azerbaijan getting its foot in the door of global technological supply chains and reeling in American capital for infrastructure and energy projects. Politically, this means strengthening mutual interdependence, with Baku gaining access to advanced technologies and investments, and Washington gaining a reliable partner in a strategically significant region, a key node in Eurasian transport and energy routes.
On this account, a pivotal political move will be President Trump’s signing of a document putting the brakes on the 907th amendment to the "Freedom Support Act." This measure, rolled out in 1992 under the guise of an alleged "blockade" of Armenia, has been wielded for decades as a stick to poke at Baku. The Biden-Blinken administration's attempt to resurrect this lever only strengthened Azerbaijan’s resolve to act more autonomously. Now, this element of US legislation has effectively lost its power as a tool for influencing Azerbaijan’s foreign policy.
The second key piece of the puzzle during the visit ties into the peace agenda between Baku and Yerevan. With Donald Trump’s mediation, a meeting between President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan and Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan of Armenia will take place, the outcome of which will be a Joint Declaration. The Azerbaijani conditions, previously considered "unacceptable" by Yerevan, have become the basis for the agreements: a joint appeal to the OSCE to dissolve the Minsk Group and constitutional reform in Armenia, excluding territorial claims against Azerbaijan.
The significance of these points cannot be overstated. The disbanding of the OSCE Minsk Group effectively puts the nail in the coffin of international mediation, which turned out to be a wild goose chase. Constitutional changes in Armenia will legally cement the recognition of Azerbaijan's territorial integrity.
A separate point of interest is the principle of uninterrupted land communication between the main territory of Azerbaijan and Nakhchivan, which was established in the declaration. The Zangezur Corridor, a bone of contention that Baku has been pushing for since the dust settled after the 2020 war, is now under the watchful eye of both regional and international guarantors. It's worth noting that the US, under Trump, is holding the reins of its launch.
The preliminary agreement of the peace treaty between the two countries is not the be-all and end-all, but it lays a sturdy groundwork for its eventual signing after a referendum on constitutional changes in Armenia in 2026. Comparing Trump’s role in this process to Jimmy Carter’s mediation at the Camp David negotiations is not an exaggeration: in both cases, we are dealing with an external arbitrator capable of fixing a balance of interests and preventing a return to confrontation.
Washington’s peace agenda is not just diplomatic rhetoric for protocol purposes; it’s a game changer that’s reshaping the whole regional landscape. President Ilham Aliyev, having already won a military victory in 2020 and restored the country's full sovereignty in 2023, was able to use the outcome of the war as a basis for politically solidifying the new realities.
This line of reasoning can be followed through the timeline of happenings. Subsequent to the conclusion of the Second Karabakh War, Baku articulated a quintet of foundational principles aimed at facilitating a peace accord with Armenia. These principles encompass the mutual acknowledgment of territorial demarcations, the abrogation of territorial assertions, the initiation of communication channels, and the establishment of diplomatic engagements. For an extended duration of approximately two years, Armenia has strategically refrained from delivering a robust response, endeavoring to reintegrate the matter concerning the Armenian demographic in Karabakh into the forefront of the discourse. Azerbaijan's stance has been consistently articulated: the domestic dynamics of the nation are not subject to inclusion within the framework of an intergovernmental accord.
The interventions by outside players - the Biden-Blinken administration and French President Macron—fell flat and didn’t bear fruit. Their attempts to apply pressure, appeal to sanctions rhetoric, and use international human rights organizations as tools of political influence led to a diplomatic deadlock. Real negotiations only began after Azerbaijan’s 2023 anti-terrorist measures, conducted within 24 hours, and culminated in the agreement on the peace treaty text in March 2025.
The Joint Declaration in Washington will be the culmination of this process. Armenia has agreed to the dissolution of the OSCE Minsk Group and constitutional changes ensuring legal recognition of the new reality. The issue of the Zangezur Corridor, once met with categorical rejection by Yerevan, has moved into the realm of implementation. So, the Washington meeting will not just jot down the agreements made but will also weave them into the fabric of international guarantees. President Ilham Aliyev’s visit has become not just a diplomatic event, but a demonstration of the maturity of Azerbaijan's foreign policy doctrine, which has managed to integrate national interests into the global agenda of key world capitals. The signing of the memorandum on strategic partnership, the suspension of the 907th amendment, and the establishment of guarantees for the Zangezur Corridor create a new geopolitical platform, on which Baku gains the opportunity for a more flexible and asymmetric foreign policy maneuver in the multipolar system of international relations.
From the perspective of international relations theory, this is a textbook case of turning the tables—taking military might and spinning it into a web of lasting political, legal, and economic connections. In political science terminology, such cases are classified as "post-conflict institutionalization," where the outcome of armed confrontation is cemented not only by force but also by a dense network of formalized agreements, mutual guarantees, and inclusion in the system of international norms (rule-based order).
The ripple effects of the talks in Washington are like a stone thrown into a pond, creating waves that reach far and wide. For Baku, it means expanded access to Western technologies and capital, increased investment attractiveness, strengthened subjectivity in regional politics, and the final consolidation of the post-war status quo ante bellum. For Washington, it sharpens the arsenal for flexing muscle in the South Caucasus, broadens the avenues for transit and energy, and pulls Azerbaijan into its strategic fold. For Yerevan, it entails inevitable adaptation to the new reality in the logic of realpolitik, where symbolic declarations no longer carry weight in the face of the material balance of power.
The fallout from the papers inked in Washington will hit hard for those whose game plan revolved around spinning a tale of animosity against Azerbaijan. For French President Emmanuel Macron, who built the Caucasus vector on Azerbaijani-phobic rhetoric and the concept of Paris’s "normative mission," this is a strategic failure. French MPs, who legally recognized a non-existent quasi-state entity, the European Parliament, human rights NGOs like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, and the Armenian lobby in the US led by ANCA, have found themselves politically marginalized. Their efforts to play hardball with "sanctions diplomacy" and isolationist tools have fallen flat, showing that the well of pressure tactics on Baku has run dry.
President Ilham Aliyev has realized a rare scenario in modern world politics: after winning a war, he was able to win peace, formalizing the outcome in the form of international agreements, strategic alliances, and legally binding guarantees that weave Azerbaijan into the fabric of global security as an independent and equal player.