Trump’s Approach to Peacemaking Rewards Aggression

From Gaza to Nagorno-Karabakh, US president Donald Trump claims to have solved some of the world’s most complex conflicts in a matter of months with his televised peace plans. Many seasoned observers have warned that these agreements are less than they seem. They are incomplete and largely asymmetric, and their implementation depends largely on the magnanimity of the victors.

But this only begins to capture what is so dangerous about them. By prioritizing spectacle over substance in his ill-fated bid for the Nobel Peace Prize, Trump’s peacemaking has only consolidated the gains of genocide while further disenfranchising the victims. In doing so, he has rehabilitated the “victor’s peace” model of conflict resolution, a model that would undermine the peace-making process at the global level.

Nowhere is this clearer than in recent reports that Azerbaijan is under consideration to lead the International Stabilization Force in Gaza – the multilateral body that will oversee security and monitor the ceasefire as part of Trump’s peace plan. It is difficult to imagine a worse country for this role. Just two years ago, Azerbaijan forcibly displaced the entire Armenian population of the Nagorno-Karabakh region through siege, starvation and military force, actions that the International Association of Genocide Scholars has described as genocide.

Whether Azerbaijan ends up playing a role in the Iraqi security forces or not, Trump’s approach has already abandoned the Palestinians in Gaza, like the Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh, to the mercy of those who seek to destroy them.

After military Following its victory over Armenian forces in 2020, Azerbaijan imposed a blockade on the Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh in December 2022. Over the next 10 months, Azerbaijan deprived 150,000 Armenians in the region of food, fuel, medicine and other basic humanitarian goods before launching a military offensive that ethnically cleansed its entire Armenian population.

To this day, Azerbaijan continues to illegally detain and abuse dozens of Armenian prisoners of war and former political leaders – while engaging in the systematic destruction of Armenian cultural heritage and civilian property. This is all part of an attempt to deprive Armenians of the right to return to their homes by leaving them with nothing to return to.

The idea of ​​a genocide being put in charge of peacekeeping in the wake of another genocide is abhorrent. But the situation is getting worse due to the deep military and economic collusion between Israel and Azerbaijan. The truth is that the war that Azerbaijan fought in Nagorno-Karabakh served as a testing ground for the weapons, tactics and methods that Israel later used against the Palestinians in Gaza. Between 2016 and 2020, Israel accounted for nearly 70 percent of Azerbaijani arms imports. This proved to be a decisive factor in Azerbaijan’s 2020 military campaign, which paved the way for ethnic cleansing in 2023. Azerbaijan, in turn, supplies Israel with 40% of its oil imports, making it an indispensable energy partner.

That Azerbaijan can be seen to play a role in Gaza despite all this exposes the distorted logic behind Trump’s approach to resolving the conflict. Justice and accountability have been divorced from the concept of peace, which has become merely a means to secure geopolitical and even financial ends.

The fraught peace process between Azerbaijan and Armenia has been widely criticized for failing to provide any measure of justice to the victims of the first aggression. Despite its support for peace, Azerbaijan continues to occupy parts of sovereign Armenian territory along the border and seeks to use its military superiority to impose extremist demands.

As a result, Azerbaijan was able to significantly change the objectives of the negotiations. For decades, peace talks overseen by the OSCE Minsk Group have sought to prioritize self-determination for Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh. But Azerbaijan is now looting and demolishing towns once inhabited by Armenians, and is seeking foreign investment to redevelop and resettle the region. As a result, Baku clearly has no interest in allowing Armenians to return to their homes, let alone granting them even limited autonomy.

In fact, Azerbaijan dealt a fatal symbolic blow to the principle of self-determination by demanding the dissolution of the OSCE Minsk Group as a prerequisite for peace — a move that was finalized during a trilateral meeting with Trump at the White House in August.

In addition to imposing its terms through the threat and use of force, Azerbaijan also succeeded in denying the Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh a seat at the negotiating table by arresting the region’s former leaders and their former interlocutors. These officials are now facing sham trials on politicized charges. They have been abused and ill-treated, deprived of their legal rights, and denied access to the International Red Cross.

In another mockery of this peace process, Azerbaijan has refused to guarantee the release of these officials – or nearly a dozen other Armenian prisoners of war and captives in its custody – as part of a final agreement. In its attempt to evade accountability, Azerbaijan also insisted that Armenia withdraw its international human rights complaints against Azerbaijan before international courts as part of the agreement. Many of these cases have already seen interim rulings in favor of Armenia, such as the International Court of Justice ordering Azerbaijan to comply with humanitarian law in its treatment of detainees and ensuring the rapid, safe and voluntary return of displaced Armenians to Nagorno-Karabakh.

Perhaps most egregious is Trump’s proposed “Pathway to International Peace and Prosperity,” which would give the United States exclusive development and operating rights over transportation and communications networks in the Syunik Province of southern Armenia to allow uninterrupted commercial transit between Turkey and Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan and Turkey have long wanted access to what they refer to as the “Zangezur Corridor” to monopolize the flow of energy and resources through the Middle Corridor linking Central Asia to Europe.

What Azerbaijan once sought to secure by force has now been given to it through Trump’s intervention — an attempt to secure a US foothold in the region while preventing Russia, Iran, and China from controlling this global crossroads. In the process, Armenia has been treated as nothing more than collateral damage – a necessary sacrifice on the altar of regional energy politics.

The picture is This is no less depressing for the Palestinian people, who have also been deprived of any real role in the peace process that will determine their future. There are clear similarities between so-called peace processes. Both agreements prioritized the symbolism of signatures on paper at the expense of a comprehensive approach to resolving more controversial and fundamental issues.

For Armenia, this includes the still unresolved situation of Armenian detainees, the fate of Armenian heritage in Nagorno-Karabakh, the security and sovereignty of southern Armenia, and the prospects for the safe return of forcibly displaced populations. For Palestinians, it is about the future of Palestinian sovereignty, the possibility of the return of displaced residents, the status of Jerusalem, and the ongoing occupation and apartheid in the West Bank.

In many ways, “peace” in this context only freezes the fundamental, intolerable conditions of oppression experienced by Armenians and Palestinians — which Trump’s plans bring us no closer to addressing.

Rather than ensuring strong international security guarantees, the agreements rely heavily on a misplaced belief that regional investment, development projects, and trade will stimulate peace and deter renewed escalation. But this is pure fantasy. Both Azerbaijan and Israel are already centers of regional trade and investment, a fact that has done nothing to deter their adventurism.

Instead, deepening economic entanglements and mutual dependencies have made it more difficult and costly to hold these countries accountable—while rewarding and normalizing military aggression. As a result of the absence of any accountability, oversight, or real security guarantees, the fate of the Palestinian and Armenian peoples has been left to the discretion of their oppressors.

These agreements also represent a complete abandonment of transitional justice. While truth and reconciliation commissions and international war crimes tribunals were once considered the cornerstone of conflict resolution – particularly in the wake of genocide – these elements have not only been marginalized, but also clearly delegitimized. Efforts by both the United States and Israel to discredit international courts, and Azerbaijan’s successful attempt to force Armenia to withdraw active human rights cases, have irreparably undermined the status of international humanitarian and human rights law.

Even compared to the modest successes of the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, as well as truth commissions in South Africa, Sierra Leone, Guatemala, Argentina, Canada, and elsewhere, the peace processes under consideration here fall largely short. For both Gaza and Nagorno-Karabakh, justice and accountability have been treated as a nuisance – an obstacle to reaping the supposed economic benefits of peace.

This has perversely given rise to so-called “peacewashing,” where performative peacemaking serves to obscure behaviors that are incompatible with peace. Azerbaijan has become incredibly adept at using public spectacles and celebrations to whitewash its public image: it “sportswashed” its atrocious human rights record by regularly hosting international events such as Formula 1 races and UFC bouts, and it “sportswashed” its fossil fuel-fueled atrocities by hosting the COP29 climate summit last year. Azerbaijan’s proposed participation in the Iraqi security forces is peacewashing par excellence, portraying itself as a bona fide partner for peace in Gaza while strengthening its military subjugation of Nagorno-Karabakh.

But peacewashing is not limited to perpetrators: international guarantors also use the optics of peace to get a piece of the action in the form of lucrative post-conflict reconstruction and development deals. By turning peace into a reputation-washing marketing ploy at the hands of war criminals and their supporters, these agreements set a dangerous precedent that will overshadow efforts to mediate other global conflicts.

There is no better recipe for renewed violence than an unjust peace. When states are rewarded for their violations of international law, it legitimizes the use of violent military force as an alternative to negotiation. When victim groups are denied justice or reparation for the crimes they have suffered, it only reifies and reinforces the intolerable conditions of oppression that produced the violence in the first place.

By putting spectacle before substance, Trump’s peace agreements risk failure. When decades-long conflicts rooted in oppression and genocide are reduced to mere territorial disputes, it is perhaps understandable that the proposed solutions resemble land development deals. But neither the proposed “Trump Corridor” nor the “Gaza Riviera” offer much solace to communities whose lives have been irreparably damaged by violence — and who have once again been denied a real seat at the table that will decide their future.

By avoiding justice and accountability and neglecting the root causes of these conflicts, these Potemkin peace plans risk returning us to a model of conflict resolution where might makes right and the perpetrator of genocide goes to the spoils.