How the Washington Accords Changed the South Caucasus and Made Armenia Safer

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The one-year anniversary of the Washington Accords was marked in Armenia by a high-level visit from Arey Lightstone, Senior Advisor of the Trump Administration who was also the main architect of the TRIPP (Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity) project. At the same time, the three countries party to the Accords released a joint statement declaring that they “remain committed to the full implementation of the August 8 Joint Declaration in both letter and spirit, as well as unlocking the extraordinary economic potential of the region.” 

Developments in the one year since the Peace Summit have been rather extraordinary for Armenia. First, Yerevan elevated its relationship to one of Comprehensive Strategic Partnership with the U.S., thus giving Yerevan access to sensitive American technology, potential integration into global supply chains, and permission to purchase U.S. weapons. Second, Yerevan laid the foundations to become a regional hub for data centers and artificial intelligence, with the U.S.-based AI company Firebird opening the largest AI factory in the post-Soviet space. Third, Armenia’s security architecture has undergone a paradigmatic shift, as America’s vested interest in Armenia’s sovereignty has produced a multiplying deterrence effect: the overtly belligerent Aliyev regime has not fired a single bullet after two decades of persistent violence. 

In its totality, the Washington Accords have achieved something Armenia was not able to secure on its own over the past two decades: peace on the ground, that is, the absence of war and violence. For any analytical treatment of the Accords, or the TRIPP project, or the multi-tiered nuances characterizing the process, one conclusion stands above the rest: the Washington Accords have made Armenia safer. 

While TRIPP remains the cornerstone of the Washington Accords, the Accords cannot simply be reduced to only a singular assessment of TRIPP. Indeed, TRIPP is and will be a gamechanger, but for Armenia, the dividends it has been able to accrue in the domain of technology, diplomatic capital, broader global reach, energy, regional integration, and security, go beyond TRIPP. The Washington Accords altered the entire geopolitical system of the South Caucasus, and by extension, produced for Armenia an environment where it can exercise an elevated degree of agency in determining its future. In more simple terms, Armenia’s state of geopolitical existence is no longer defined by a persistent survival mode. Yerevan no longer needs to be under the yoke of Russia’s authoritarian orbit, with its accompanying attributes of systemic corruption and underdevelopment, just to give itself the illusion that it is safe from predatory neighbors. What the new U.S.-led system in the South Caucasus has done is precisely alter this dynamic by adjusting the behavior of predatory neighbors, because conflict-driven demeanor contradicts the rules of the new system. 

As will be explained, it is not as if Aliyev’s ideational bellicosity suddenly evaporated; rather, he understands that the new rules of the game will make things extremely costly for him if he disrupts the norms of the system. Put simply, whereas the previous regional system, dominated by Russian hegemony, incentivized conflict-persistence and fracture, the new U.S.-led system disincentivizes such behavior, and imposes costs on actors who behave in such a way. The norms have changed. America’s restructuration has altered the incentive paradigm for the South Caucasus, and actors within the system are now incentivized to behave a certain way to reap benefits. It is this structural transformation, at the broader regional level, that the Washington Accords produced: the cost-benefit model has been altered. If Baku stood to gain in the previous system by initiating militarized violence, it stands to lose and be punished by the new system if it does the same. In this context, it is the norms of the new system that is constraining belligerence in the region, offering Armenia the necessary strategic depth to re-articulate its security architecture.        

States are generally qualified as unitary rational actors that seek to influence other actors to advance their interests. States have the same basic interests, which are intersubjective preferences: security, power, economic prowess, and sovereignty. These preferences, and the strategic initiative of achieving them, make conflict between states inevitable: the clash of interests and disparity in capability incentivize a rational actor to use force. The pursuit of national interests is generally understood to be rational. Yet the rational pursuit of one state’s interests often leads to conflict with the equally rational pursuit of another’s.

What constitutes the national interest, however, is environment-specific, meaning, you pursue your interests within the system you find yourself in. Thus, the structure of the system shapes the behavior and interactions of states within that system. Superpowers behave differently, middle powers behave differently, and small states behave differently. In the case of the latter, their system is defined by a regional scope (and not an international one like major powers operate in). Thus, units within a system function at the interstate level according to the structure of the given system, and it is the system that largely determines the form of behavior that units engage in: the system restrains, incentivizes, rewards, or punishes.

One may, for example, qualify Baku’s behavior by moralizing the Aliyev regime’s penchant for cruelty, disregard for human rights, and generally reduce the policy-preference and decision-making process to a single genesis: Aliyev is evil. But that does not tell us anything. It does not make the pursuit of its national interest any less rational, nor does it change the fact that Azerbaijan behaves as a unit according to the system in which it finds itself in. States adjust and re-strategize their policies to advance their national interest, and this adjustment is precisely done to advance those interests according to the norms and principles of the system in which such small states find themselves in. In this context, Aliyev may still be “evil,” but he is behaving a lot differently now than he was before. Why? Because the system shapes behavior. And this is precisely what the Washington Accords did, by changing the geopolitical system in the South Caucasus and initiating new norms and principles, it shaped the type of behavior that actors/units like Azerbaijan engage in.  

Under the previous Russian-dominated system, it was in the then-hegemon’s strategic interests to maintain frozen conflicts, conflict-persistence, managed hostility, and enduring antagonization between the units of the system. Thus, the norms of the geopolitical system under Russian preponderance incentivized and rewarded behavior that was commensurate with such norms. This induced states to maintain policies of belligerence, militarization, and the constant securitization of every facet of political life, from culture to economy. And it punished states that were not sufficiently militarized, aggressive, or conflict-seeking. Thus, in that system, this is how states pursued their national interest: it was rational behavior. So qualifying the Aliyev regime as “evil” may definitely satisfy certain emotive urges, but that is categorically an unempirical way of understanding behavior. More than anything, Aliyev is a rational actor that maximized his interests within the system of which he was a unit in. Now that the system has changed, Baku seeks interest-maximization according to the new norms of the U.S.-led order in the South Caucasus, which, as explained, incentivized Aliyev to alter his behavior in order not to be punished by the system.

The new structure of the system in the South Caucasus is based on the following norms: stabilization, normalization, interconnectivity, regional integration projects, eliminating theaters of conflict, economic interdependence, and multi-layered soft deterrence. In this system, any actor that disrupts the structural norms ends up violating the rules of the game, which will induce punishment or pertinent costs/losses (punishment or loss is not zero sum, but in the domain of competition with neighbors, it creates disadvantage). This new system dis-incentivizes aggression, conflict-seeking, and persistent antagonization. Thus, to succeed in this system, that is, to maximize one’s interests as a rational actor, units within this system behave accordingly. 

And this is why Baku’s behavior changed after the United States became the dominant actor in the region: the type of behavior that was rewarded in the previous system will actually produce losses in the current one, and as a rational actor pursuing its national interest, Aliyev strategically opted to play by the rules of the new game. From Armenia’s perspective, while the norms of the U.S.-led system is fully aligned with its needs, capabilities, and aspirations, more than anything, however, the new rules of the game offered a level of deterrence that Armenia could not, at this point, achieve by itself: restraining and curtailing Baku’s belligerence. The system did that, and Armenia must now be strategic in reaping such benefits.     

Prior to the signing of the Washington Accords, Armenia found itself in a precarious situation, as Azerbaijan was seeking every opportunity to reinitiate another incursion, while Russia had been schematically subjecting Yerevan to a wide range of hybrid warfare activities. Set up to fail by its once-ally, while struggling to re-establish its security architecture under threat of invasion, the Washington Accords fundamentally altered the entire dynamics of Armenia’s security environment. That Russia-aligned actors, from former foreign minister Vartan Oskanian to local proxy parties to Diasporan organizations such as the ANCA (Armenian National Committee of America), undertook widespread misinformation campaigns prior to and even after the signing of the Washington Accords, demonstrates the fears that the Kremlin had of the Washington Peace Summit: it was the end of Russian hegemony in the South Caucasus and the introduction of a new geopolitical system. Russian assets still remain the only cluster of political voices or organizations that oppose the Washington Accords, the broad range of MOUs signed, the TRIPP project, and the elevation of U.S.-Armenia relations to that of a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership. But the facts on the ground are irrefutable, and beyond conspiracy theories and inchoate speculations, the bottom line remains unchanged: the Republic of Armenia is safer due to the new geopolitical system that the Washington Accords ushered in.

No system is everlasting, and the future trajectory of what structural shifts the South Caucasus may be subjected to is not escaping the attention or risk-mitigation modeling of those involved. But the longevity of geopolitical systems sustain themselves at a minimum of two decades, and the assumption that Russia, for example, can return in a few years and revert the region to what it was contradicts the large body of research and scholarship on regional and sub-system studies. Assuming that in a matter of years, in the most optimistic of considerations, Russia is able to resolve the Ukraine quagmire, it will still have to allocate immense resources to that front to strengthen its posturing, while at the same time having to turn its attention to Central Asia, where “leash-slipping” by once-satellite states is becoming the norm and that region, itself, is also going through a systemic re-structuring. In the confluence of such developments, the South Caucasus’ system is becoming de-prioratized as a high-value theater of competition by Moscow, and considering the scope and depth of U.S. (and pending European) vested interests in the region, even if Moscow is somehow able to return to the region as a revisionist actor, it will have to deal with a new reality with exceedingly different configurations. This is why the Washington Accords was not simply a one-off agreement, nor TRIPP a simple transportation route—it was a structural alteration to the regional system. And Armenia stands to benefit the most, as it transitions from survival mode to development and regional integration.      

Statecraft & Governance