Vice President JD Vance’s trip to Armenia and Azerbaijan this week was the highest-ranking visit by a U.S. official to the Caucasus in decades. He appeared with Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan in Armenia on 9 February, and then the next day with President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan; both leaders called the moment “historic” and beamed as Vance described the strengthening partnership between their countries. The visit followed an unexpected but momentous intervention by the Trump administration into the normalisation efforts between the two longtime foes, and raised speculation about a bigger U.S. push into a region where Russia is the traditional hegemon.

Trump’s direct involvement in the dispute dates from August 2025, when he brought the leaders of the two countries together for a meeting at the White House. At that point, the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict, which had effectively ended in 2023 when Azerbaijan took back the last of its remaining territory from Armenian control, appeared to represent low-hanging fruit for his peacemaking ambitions. Armenia and Azerbaijan had already done much of the work themselves, finalising a text of a peace agreement a few months earlier. But the two sides were still at odds over the sensitive question of how to open a route from Azerbaijan across Armenia to the Azerbaijani exclave of Nakhchivan. Trump’s solution was to allow a private U.S. company to operate the transportation routes. It was a repackaging of previous proposals, but now with a presidential blessing, along with a new name: the “Trump Route”.

The White House meeting proved a catalyst, and since then the normalisation process has picked up pace. In January, the U.S. and Armenia rolled out a framework agreement for the Trump Route. Vance’s visit, meanwhile, offers the most visible signal yet that Washington is committed to seeing the peace process through to the end.

That said, little new about the Trump Route was announced during Vance’s visit, which was instead dominated by side deals: U.S. nuclear power plants, surveillance drones, and AI data centres for Armenia; patrol boats for Azerbaijan. But beyond the specifics, the significance of the visit lay in its symbolism. President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan told Vance: “the level of our relations is higher than ever”.

Does this mean the U.S. is a big player now in Armenia and Azerbaijan? There are worries in Russia – the Caucasus’s traditional hegemon – that that is the case. Russia’s war in Ukraine has sapped its resources in the region, and Moscow has suffered a number of tactical setbacks, of which the U.S. lead on the “Trump Route” is only the latest. One Russian newspaper reported that Vance’s visit occasioned “disappointment, annoyance, and a sense of helplessness” in Moscow. But while U.S. involvement in the region has deepened, it is not broad. Washington has otherwise largely been ignoring the Caucasus, and shows little interest in confronting Russia or staking a strong claim across the region.