Trump’s Azerbaijan-Armenia ‘peace deal’ won’t hold: Why the Caucasus needs Indian peacekeepers now

On August 8, 2025, Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan met US President Donald Trump in the Oval Office. According to the White House press release, the three leaders “signed a historic joint declaration for peace after decades of bitter conflict and scores of lives lost — a landmark achievement for international diplomacy that only President Trump could deliver”.

In reality, peace remains distant. Whether his Gaza peace plan, the peace between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, or his much-ballyhooed claim that he ended the “1,000-year-old” India-Pakistan conflict in a mere 24 hours, the reality is that Trump’s declarations of peace are akin to holding a grand opening ribbon-cutting for a building whose foundation is not even completely dug.

Trump’s antics can cost lives. Ilham Aliyev, Azerbaijan’s pro-Turkey dictator, uses the mantle of peace to launder his image, but he appears to be prepping for war. To drive along the Armenia-Azerbaijan border, adjusted after the Nagorno-Karabakh War, is to witness not an embrace of peace but preparations for war. While Armenia constructs simple two-story border posts — the ground floor for passport and customs processing and the second floor as lodging for officials assigned to those sometimes-remote areas — Azerbaijani posts less than a kilometre away come with helicopter landing pads, soldiers’ dormitories, and mortar emplacements. Despite border demarcation using Soviet maps, Azerbaijan still occupies more than 200 kilometres of Armenian land. Azerbaijan has shown hostile intent with cross-border sniping and artillery attacks, sometimes even targeting American investment projects and wounding Indian workers.

To protect itself from further Azerbaijani encroachment, Armenia invited European Union observers to monitor its borders and document Azerbaijani violations. In Kapan, capital of the Syunik province, the monitors observe the landing and take-off of aircraft at the airport which abuts the province, lest Azerbaijan shoot down a passenger plane, claiming it strayed a meter or two into its airspace.

The presence of observers there has likely saved dozens of lives and prevented an incident that could have quickly become a pretext for war. Nevertheless, Aliyev has complained that such border and air traffic monitoring missions are illegal because they occur without his approval, but this just shows his disdain for Armenian sovereignty. After all, why should Armenia seek Azerbaijan’s permission for unarmed activity that occurs within its sovereign territory? Nevertheless, Aliyev has demanded Pashinyan remove European monitors as a condition for peace.

Here, India can play a role befitting its readily coalescing status as a global diplomatic and economic superpower. If European monitors must depart, Delhi should send Indian peacekeepers in their place. No United Nations mandate is necessary. Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi deployed the Indian Peace Keeping Force to Sri Lanka in 1987 solely with the agreement of Sri Lankan President J.R. Jayewardene.

Perhaps the most successful peacekeeping force of the late 20th and early 21st centuries has been the Multinational Force of Observers in the Sinai Peninsula, monitoring the 1978 Camp David Accords that cemented peace between Israel and Egypt. This too had no United Nations mandate due to the recognition at the time that a UN mandate would require involving the Soviet Union in the peace, and that, in the Cold War context, Moscow was more likely to act as a spoiler.

India would be a natural partner for observation. Indians are among the most capable and practiced peacekeepers on earth. India fields approximately 5,400 peacekeepers in UN missions at any given time, making it the fourth-largest contributor of UN peacekeepers, after Nepal, Rwanda, and Bangladesh. Alongside Nepalese, Indians are best suited for Armenia’s mountainous terrain. Patrolling the Armenia-Azerbaijan border is remarkably similar to the India-Pakistan frontier and would be easy for those accustomed to even higher altitudes alongside India’s Line of Actual Control with China.

Diplomatically, Indians alone can win trust in a region of conflicting superpower interests. While Trump, rather hypocritically, can castigate Prime Minister Narendra Modi for India’s trade with Russia, the fact remains that India is one of the few countries whose presence in Armenia does not and will not upset Russia. Indeed, India is already increasingly involved in Armenia’s military supply, a trade for which it has both US and Russian support.

Azerbaijan and Turkey, of course, will complain, but they should not. A desire for peace does not motivate Turkey’s growing involvement with Pakistan in the run-up to the Pahalgam massacre. Pakistan, meanwhile, did not ask Armenia’s permission as it began training Azerbaijani forces. Indeed, Pakistan is the only country in the world that does not recognize Armenia’s statehood.

From its days leading the Non-Aligned Movement until today, India has long viewed itself as a force for peace in the world, and it has proven a willingness to bleed for that goal. Augmenting or even taking charge of an Armenia peace mission would promote peace more than Trump’s empty ceremonies, bolster India’s diplomatic influence, and further cement its markets as its influence grows in Armenia, which itself has long been the crossroads between empires and a civilisational state in its own right.

(Michael Rubin is director of policy analysis at the Middle East Forum and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)