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WASHINGTON — President Trump hosted the leaders of longtime enemies Armenia and Azerbaijan at the White House on Friday to sign a peace accord built around a new railway in the region — with the formerly at-war leaders vowing to jointly recommend the US president for the Nobel Peace Prize.
The US-developed transit initiative — dubbed the “Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity” — will transect the sparsely populated south of Armenia, the world’s oldest Christian nation, while linking Azerbaijan’s capital, Baku, on the Caspian Sea to its Nakhchivan exclave touching Turkey.
Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev appeared at-ease at an afternoon press appearance where they signed the documents — united in lavishing praise on the Trump after he volunteered to mediate any future issues between the former Soviet republics.
“I think President Trump deserves to have a Nobel Peace Prize,” Pashinyan gushed. “Hopefully you will invite us [to the ceremony].”
“Front row!” Trump replied at the signing event. “You’ll be front row!”
“Can I have a suggestion?” injected Aliyev.
“Maybe we agree with Prime Minister Pashinyan to send a joint appeal to the Nobel committee to award President Trump with a Nobel Peace Prize.”
“From the leaders of the countries that were at war for more than three decades, having this signature here really means a lot,” Aliyev said of the peace accord, which is vague but establishes a path toward resolution of outstanding matters.
“This is a tangible result of President Trump’s leadership,” added Aliyev, who worked in an apparent dig at former President Barack Obama.
“I don’t want to go into the history of some very strange decisions of the Nobel prize committee to award the prize for somebody who didn’t do anything at all. But President Trump in 6 months did a miracle,” he said. “We hope that he will invite us to the ceremony.”
Scrambling to meet Aliyev’s effusive praise, Pashinyan chimed in: “Do we have a draft to sign now?”
The peace initiative was a strategic coup from Washington — with both Armenia and Azerbaijan historically being under Moscow’s influence.
Trump, playing host, hailed the two leaders and expressed interest in them maintaining a warm personal relationship — offering to pick up the phone if they ever need him.
When Aliyev, the pro-western strongman of his majority-Muslim country, mentioned he has been in power 22 years, Trump said it was evidence he was “tough and smart.”
Earlier, a Trump administration official said approval of the rail corridor gives Armenia an “enormous strategic commercial partner” in the US while handing Azerbaijan a long-sought connection between the country’s two geographic components.
The passageway could eventually emerge as a major route to Europe for fossil fuels from energy-rich Azerbaijan and Central Asia.
Trump’s deal inserts the US in a leadership position historically occupied by Russia, which provided peacekeeping troops to the former Armenian-populated Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, which Aliyev reconquered for Azerbaijan in 2023, ending 32 years of de facto independence.
It’s unclear if Nagorno-Karabakh’s roughly 120,000 displaced residents will be allowed to return to their mountainous homeland.
Neither leader answered that question when asked by a Post journalist during a Q&A session.
Trump officials described the pact as the start of a longer process that would resolve details in the conflict between the former Soviet states — with talks beginning next week on setting up the route named for Trump, which US officials said was done at Armenia’s urging.
“This isn’t charity. This is a highly investable entity,” a Trump administration official told reporters.
“I received calls from nine different operators and was pleased to see three different American operators,” the official said.
“We’re going to find the most first-class operating system that we can, not because it brings peace, although that’s a fantastic thing, but it’s also going to bring commercial prosperity, which will ensure peace beyond just today’s signing ceremony.”
US officials unveiled the breakthrough between Yerevan and Baku as the president’s aides continue to argue he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize, which will be awarded Oct. 10 — in light of his prior role brokering peace between India and Pakistan, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo and Cambodia and Thailand, as well as ending this year’s Israeli-Iran conflict with a decisive US bombing raid on Tehran’s nuclear facilities.
Administration officials also presented the South Caucasus deal as a strategic win for Washington while Moscow remains mired in conflict with Ukraine and Tehran reels from recent Israeli and US airstrikes.
“If you look at the flow from the Caucasus region into Europe, everything either goes through Russia or through Iran,” an official said. “If you were just looking at it objectively, you would say, ‘Why is it this way?’ And the answer would be, ‘Well, because politics got in the way.’94
“What President Trump has done is he’s taken the politics out of the picture and made common sense prevail. What this will do for American businesses, and frankly, for energy resources across Europe will be enormously powerful. The losers here are China, Russia and Iran. The winners here are the West.”
The Trump aide added: “When you look at what signal this sends, it sends that the one superpower in the world is acting like the one superpower in the world.”
