With eyes on Nobel Peace Prize, Trump hosts Armenia & Azerbaijan's leaders for peace deal

With eyes on the Nobel peace prize, US President Donald Trump is hosting leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan in Washington DC on Thursday and Friday in a bid to strike a peace deal between the two countries.

Armenia and Azerbaijan have been locked in a decadeslong conflict over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, formally a part of Azerbaijan but populated by ethnic Armenians who declared it free of Armenian rule in 1990s. In 2020, they fought a war over the territory that Azerbaijan won.

Trump will host Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev on Friday at the White House, according to Washington Post.

The newspaper has reported a White House official as saying that a peace agreement could be announced between Azerbaijan and Armenia during their meeting with Trump.

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The supporters of Trump are likely to use any peace deal between Armenia and Azerbaijan to strengthen the case for a Nobel peace prize for Trump.

In 2020, Azerbaijan and Armenia fought a 44-day war over Nagorno-Karabakh that Azerbaijan decisively won. It took over most of the territory in the war. In 2023, in what was widely condemned as ethnic cleansing, Azerbaijan launched a renewed offensive and captured the entirety of the territory, forcing the flight of nearly the territory’s entire ethnic Armenian population of around 100,000.

Ahead of the 2024 presidential election, Trump had vowed to “protect persecuted Christians” — ethnic Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh are largely Christians and Azerbaijanis are largely Muslims by religion and Turkic by ethnicity.

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Trump blasted his Democratic Party opponent Kamala Harris at the time for doing “nothing as 120,000 Armenian Christians were horrifically persecuted and forcibly displaced”. He further said he would “work to stop the violence and ethnic cleansing, and we will restore peace between Armenia and Azerbaijan”.

Trump looks forward to boost role as peacemaker

With a deal between Armenia and Azerbaijan in his favour, Trump is looking forward to take credit for another peace deal and boost his self-ascribed credentials of a peacemaker in the world.

Trump has hailed himself as peacemaker despite the fact that he has failed to end the war in Ukraine that he promised to end within 24 hours of assuming office. He has also failed to broker an end to the war in the Gaza Strip.

Instead of ending these conflicts that he vowed to end, Trump plunged the United States into a new war with Iran in June.

However, Trump has got a deal signed between the warring Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). He also intervened in the Cambodia-Thailand War. Separately, Trump has also falsely claimed credit for the India-Pakistan conflict in May.

Trump and his supporters have cited these instances as the basis to demand a Nobel peace prize.