From Gaza to Nagorno-Karabakh, U.S. President Donald Trump claims to have resolved a few of the world’s most intractable conflicts in a matter of months along with his made-for-TV peace plans. Many seasoned observers have warned that these agreements are lower than they appear. They’re incomplete and deeply uneven, with implementation largely reliant on the magnanimity of the victors.
However that solely begins to seize what’s so harmful about them. In prioritizing spectacle over substance in his ill-fated bid to safe a Nobel Peace Prize, Trump’s peacemaking has solely served to consolidate genocidal good points whereas additional disenfranchising victims. In doing so, he has rehabilitated a “victor’s peace” mannequin of battle decision that may undermine peacemaking globally.
Nowhere is that this extra obvious than in latest stories that Azerbaijan is into account to guide the worldwide stabilization pressure (ISF) in Gaza—the multilateral physique that might oversee safety and cease-fire monitoring as a part of Trump’s peace plan. It’s troublesome to think about a worse nation for this function. Solely two years in the past, Azerbaijan forcibly displaced your entire Armenian inhabitants of the Nagorno-Karabakh area via blockade, hunger, and navy pressure—measures that the Worldwide Affiliation of Genocide Students have described as genocidal.
Whether or not or not Azerbaijan finally ends up enjoying a job within the ISF, Trump’s method has already deserted the Palestinians of Gaza, just like the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh, to the mercy of those that search to destroy them.
Following a navy victory towards Armenian forces in 2020, Azerbaijan imposed a blockade towards the Armenian inhabitants of Nagorno-Karabakh in December 2022. For the following 10 months, Azerbaijan disadvantaged the area’s 150,000 Armenians of meals, gasoline, medication, and different important humanitarian items earlier than launching a navy assault that resulted within the ethnic cleaning of its complete Armenian inhabitants.
To today, Azerbaijan continues to unlawfully detain and abuse dozens of Armenian prisoners of conflict and former political leaders—whereas participating within the systematic destruction of Armenian cultural heritage and civilian property. That is all a part of an try and deny Armenians the appropriate to return to their houses by leaving them with nothing to return to.
The thought of placing one genocide perpetrator answerable for peacekeeping within the aftermath of one other genocide is repugnant. However the state of affairs is made even worse by the deep navy and financial collusion between Israel and Azerbaijan. Certainly, Azerbaijan’s conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh served as a testing floor for the weapons, techniques, and strategies that Israel later deployed towards Gaza’s Palestinians. Between 2016 and 2020, Israel accounted for practically 70 % of Azerbaijan’s arms imports. This proved to be a decisive consider Azerbaijan’s 2020 navy marketing campaign, which set the stage for the ethnic cleaning in 2023. Azerbaijan, in flip, provides Israel with 40 % of its oil imports, making it an indispensable power companion.
That Azerbaijan may very well be thought of for a job in Gaza regardless of all this lays naked the distorted logic behind Trump’s method to battle decision. Justice and accountability have been divorced from the idea of peace, which has change into merely a method of securing geopolitical and even monetary ends.
Azerbaijan’s personal fraught peace course of with Armenia has been extensively rebuked for failing to supply any measure of justice for the victims of the previous’s aggression. Regardless of paying lip service to peace, Azerbaijan continues to occupy parts of sovereign Armenian territory alongside the border and seeks to make use of its navy benefit to impose maximalist calls for.
Because of this, Azerbaijan has been in a position to dramatically transfer the goalposts of negotiations. For many years, the peace talks overseen by the Group for Safety and Cooperation’s Minsk Group sought to prioritize the appropriate to self-determination for Nagorno-Karabakh’s Armenians. However Azerbaijan is now ransacking and demolishing cities as soon as populated by Armenians and solicting overseas funding for the redevelopment and resettlement of the area. Because of this, it’s clear Baku has no real interest in permitting for the return of Armenians to their houses, not to mention granting them even essentially the most restricted autonomy.
The truth is, Azerbaijan struck a symbolic dying blow towards the precept of self-determination by demanding the dissolution of the OSCE Minsk Group as a prerequisite for peace—a transfer that was finalized throughout a trilateral assembly with Trump on the White Home in August.
Along with imposing its phrases by way of the menace and use of pressure, Azerbaijan has additionally efficiently denied Nagorno-Karabakh’s Armenians a seat on the negotiating desk by arresting the area’s former leaders and its onetime interlocutors. These officers now face present trials on politicized prices. They’ve been topic to abuse and mistreatment, disadvantaged of their authorized rights, and denied entry to the Worldwide Pink Cross.
And in an additional mockery of this peace course of, Azerbaijan has refused to ensure the discharge of those officers—or the roughly dozen different Armenian prisoners of conflict and captives in its detention—as a part of a last deal. In its try and evade accountability, Azerbaijan has additionally insisted that Armenia withdraw its worldwide human rights complaints towards Azerbaijan earlier than worldwide courts as a part of the settlement. Many of those circumstances had already seen provisional judgements in Armenia’s favor, such because the Worldwide Courtroom of Justice ordering Azerbaijan to adjust to humanitarian regulation in its therapy of detainees and make sure the expedited, protected, and voluntary return of displaced Armenians to Nagorno-Karabakh.
Maybe most egregious, nonetheless, is the proposed “Trump Route for Worldwide Peace and Prosperity,” which might grant america unique growth and operational rights over transportation and communication networks in Armenia’s southern province of Syunik to permit uninterrupted industrial transit between Turkey and Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan and Turkey have lengthy coveted entry to what they consult with because the “Zangezur hall” to monopolize the circulate of power and assets by way of the center hall connecting Central Asia to Europe.
What Azerbaijan as soon as sought to safe by way of pressure has now been awarded to it by way of Trump’s intervention—in an effort to safe a U.S. foothold within the area whereas stopping Russia, Iran, and China from dominating this international crossroad. Within the course of, Armenia has been handled as little greater than collateral injury—a needed sacrifice on the altar of regional power politics.
The image is no much less grim for the Palestinian individuals, who’ve additionally been denied any actual company in a peace course of that may decide their future. There are clear similarities between these so-called peace processes. Each agreements have prioritized the symbolism of signatures on paper over a complete method to resolving extra contentious and elementary points.
For Armenia, this contains the unresolved standing of Armenian detainees, the destiny of Nagorno-Karabakh’s Armenian heritage, the safety and sovereignty of southern Armenia, and the prospects of a protected and safe return for forcibly displaced populations. For Palestinians, it entails the way forward for Palestinian sovereignty, the potential of return for displaced populations, the standing of Jerusalem, and the continuing occupation and apartheid within the West Financial institution.
In some ways, “peace” on this context merely freezes the insupportable underlying situations of oppression that Armenians and Palestinians have been struggling—and which Trump’s plans carry us no nearer to addressing.
Moderately than guaranteeing sturdy worldwide safety ensures, the agreements each rely closely on the misplaced perception that regional funding, growth initiatives, and commerce will serve to incentivize peace and deter renewed escalation. However that is pure fantasy. Each Azerbaijan and Israel are already hubs of regional commerce and funding, a incontrovertible fact that has accomplished nothing to discourage their adventurism.
As a substitute, deepening financial entanglements and mutual dependencies have solely made it tougher and expensive to carry these nations accountable—whereas rewarding and normalizing navy aggression. Because of this absence of any actual accountability, oversight, or safety ensures, the fates of the Palestinian and Armenian individuals have been left to the discretion of their oppressors.
These agreements additionally signify a whole abandonment of transitional justice. The place reality and reconciliation commissions and worldwide conflict crimes tribunals have been as soon as thought of the cornerstones of battle decision—notably within the aftermath of genocide—these components haven’t solely been sidelined but additionally explicitly delegitimized. The efforts of each america and Israel to discredit worldwide courts, and Azerbaijan’s profitable bid to pressure Armenia to withdraw lively human rights circumstances, have irreparably undermined the standing of worldwide humanitarian regulation and worldwide human rights regulation.
Even measured towards the admittedly modest successes of the worldwide prison tribunals for the previous Yugoslavia and Rwanda in addition to the reality commissions for South Africa, Sierra Leone, Guatemala, Argentina, Canada, and elsewhere, the peace processes into account right here fall drastically brief. For each Gaza and Nagorno-Karabakh, justice and accountability have been handled as an inconvenience—obstacles to reaping the supposed financial dividends of peace.
This has perversely led to the emergence of “peacewashing,” the place performative peacemaking has served to obfuscate conduct that’s in any other case incompatible with peace. Azerbaijan has change into extremely proficient at utilizing public spectacles and ceremonies to whitewash its public picture: It has “sportswashed” its egregious human rights document by often internet hosting worldwide occasions akin to System 1 racing and UFC matches, and it “greenwashed” its fossil-fueled atrocities by internet hosting the COP29 local weather summit final yr. Azerbaijan’s proposed participation within the ISF is peacewashing par excellence—portraying itself as good-faith companion for peace in Gaza whereas consolidating its navy subjugation of Nagorno-Karabakh.
However peacewashing isn’t just restricted to perpetrators: Worldwide guarantors additionally use the optics of peace to get a piece of the motion within the type of profitable post-conflict reconstruction and growth offers. By decreasing peace to a advertising and marketing stunt for popularity laundering by conflict criminals and their enablers, these agreements set a harmful precedent that may solid a shadow over efforts to mediate different international conflicts.
There isn’t a higher recipe for renewed violence than an unjust peace. When states are rewarded for his or her violations of worldwide regulation, it legitimizes the usage of violent navy pressure as a substitute for negotiation. And when sufferer teams are denied justice or restitution for the crimes that they’ve suffered, it solely serves to reify and reinforce the insupportable situations of oppression that produced violence within the first place.
By placing spectacle earlier than substance, Trump’s peace offers are arrange for failure. Whenever you scale back decades-long conflicts rooted in subjugation and genocide to mere territorial disputes, it’s maybe comprehensible that the proposed options resemble land growth offers. However neither the proposed “Trump hall” nor the “Gaza Riviera” supply a lot in the best way of solace for the communities whose lives have been irreparably scarred by violence—and who’ve as soon as once more been denied an actual seat on the desk that may resolve their future.
In eschewing justice and accountability and neglecting the basis causes of those conflicts, these Potemkin peace plans threat returning us to a mannequin of battle decision the place may makes proper and to the genocidaire go the spoils.
