Thank you to the Commission for convening this briefing, and for inviting me to speak.
The conversation we are having about Armenia today would have been unimaginable a few years ago. We’re here talking about democratic elections, with the Russians and their proxies on the backfoot. Real prospects for peace with Azerbaijan, and for the normalization of relations with Turkey. An American development corridor linking the region’s economies together, plugging them in to a larger East-West trade route. Promises of European investment after the recent EU summit in Yerevan. Armenia’s position has changed dramatically in a very short time.
Everything I just described depends on decisions not yet made, votes not yet held, treaties and laws not yet signed, and ground not yet broken. None of it happens on its own, and that is what I want to spend my time on.
The most immediate piece of that unfinished business, and the one drawing the most attention, is the parliamentary election in June. Bakhti asked me to talk about the political dynamics around that election. I will, but my main argument is that the election itself is the most predictable part of what lies ahead, and that the harder, more consequential work, by the US, Europe, Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Armenia, begins the day after, which I know Amb. Carpenter will speak about in more depth.
Armenia’s domestic politics are organized around a single question: the country’s pivot away from Russia and toward the West. On one side is Prime Minister Pashinyan and his Civil Contract party, who have tied their political futures to their ability to pull off that pivot. On the other is an opposition (remnants of the former ruling party, several wealthy oligarchs, senior figures in the Armenian Apostolic Church, and the exiled leadership of the former Nagorno-Karabakh Republic) united only by their antagonism to that pivot. The opposition speaks to a real grief, which I will return to shortly, but it has not coalesced around a credible vision of what Armenia should do instead. An opposition can run on grievance alone and still win, provided the voting public is angry enough and frightened enough. But this seems not to be the case in Armenia, and the most likely outcome in June is a Pashinyan victory. The thing to watch is not whether Pashinyan wins, but by how much. A narrow margin—revealing insufficient support for the government’s more ambitious priorities—changes everything I’m about to say.
What comes next, though, is the part a parliamentary majority cannot settle by itself. Peace on the terms presently dictated requires a change to Armenia’s constitution: the removal of language, dating to Armenia’s independence, that Azerbaijan reads as a territorial claim on Nagorno-Karabakh. A change of that kind cannot be made by parliament alone. It has to be put to a national referendum.
That is a hard question to put to Armenians. Armenia lost the 2020 war, and with it both land and soldiers. Then, three years later, within a week, more than 100,000 Armenians were displaced from Nagorno-Karabakh as Azerbaijan retook the territory. Pashinyan’s response was not only to pivot away from Russia, which had not defended Armenia. It was also to advance an argument about Armenia’s future: that the country’s security and prosperity lie in a state built within its recognized borders and at peace with its neighbors, not one embroiled in territorial claims it lacks the power to enforce. It is a logical argument. But making peace with neighbors, on their terms, means making peace with loss, and the referendum asks Armenians to make that peace finally.
A great deal rests on this referendum: the peace process, the corridor, everything I described at the outset. All of it runs through a single vote, on a single day, on a question that touches the rawest part of Armenia’s recent past.
None of this is an argument against the peace. It is an argument against staking everything on one fragile moment and treating the rest as settled. The prudent response to a narrow foundation like this is to widen it, and that is where the United States comes in.
Indeed, though the agreement itself belongs to Armenia and Azerbaijan, whether it holds or fails depends on conditions Washington can shape.
First, that means seeing TRIPP through. A corridor that exists in a signed agreement but never breaks ground delivers none of what it promises: not the commerce, not the security, not the daily evidence to ordinary Armenians that peace pays.
Second, it means helping replace what Armenia has lost in its pivot away from Russia: converting informal assurances into binding ones, the security commitments and institutional guarantees that can stand in for the frameworks Armenia gave up. Armenians are being asked to trade tangible, if imperfect, protections for the promise of better relationships. The more that promise is backed by something firm, the easier that vote becomes.
Most importantly, it means letting the benefits of peace arrive before the hardest vote, not just after. The clearest place to start is the closed border between Turkey and Armenia. Opening that border, ahead of the referendum and independent of its outcome, would give Armenians something concrete: a visible, early return on peace before they are asked to take the hardest vote. American encouragement matters here.
Taken together, that is what building peace looks like in practice, as opposed to declaring it and hoping it holds. Before I conclude: the Armenian people aren’t the only ones who need convincing. For this to work, Azerbaijanis, Turks, Europeans, and Americans all need to buy in. So here is the American case.
First, this corridor multiplies the East-West routes connecting the US to Central Asia that run through neither Russian nor Iranian territory. It is not the only such route, but every additional one matters strategically: it expands American access, political and commercial, and reduces the leverage Russia and Iran hold over how an entire region trades.
Second, this is a high-leverage opportunity with a short window. The window is open now in part because Iran is weakened and Russia is distracted; the cost of staying engaged is low, and the cost of letting the moment pass is not.
And third, the largest reason, and the one I want to end on: a peace built in this region without Moscow at the table erodes something Russia has long counted on, the assumption that the South Caucasus cannot be ordered except through Russia. A region that can settle its own affairs is a region less available for others to dominate. That is an American interest in its own right, and it is worth patience, and sustained attention, to secure. Thank you.
Laura Linderman is Senior Fellow for Eurasia and Director, Central Asia-Caucasus Institute, American Foreign Policy Council