In this episode of Conversations on Groong, renowned economist Jeffrey Sachs joins to discuss the U.S.-brokered “TRIPP” (Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity), also known as the Zangezur Corridor. The discussion covers the risks of foreign powers imposing corridors through Armenia, the muted response from Moscow, Tehran’s strong opposition, and what this means for regional security. Sachs stresses that Armenia should not look to distant powers like the United States for security or stability, but instead pursue prudent arrangements and economic cooperation with its immediate neighbors—Russia, Iran, Turkey, Georgia, and Azerbaijan. He also gives candid advice on Armenia’s economy, its dependence on Russia, and the long-term challenges of EU aspirations.
Warning: This is a rush transcript generated automatically and may contain errors.
Asbed: Hello, and welcome to this Conversations on Groong episode. Today, we’re talking with the world-famous scholar Jeffrey Sachs, who is a renowned economist, a recognized public policy expert, and a professor of sustainable development, poverty alleviation, and global economic policy. We’ll talk about the recent twist in South Caucasus geopolitics, with the U.S. inserting itself into the region through this trip, a.k.a. Trump route, a.k.a.
Zangezur corridor, depends on who you’re asking. We’ll also ask Professor Sachs for economic advice for Armenia.
Hovik: Folks, we can’t wait to begin our conversation with Professor Sachs. But first, an obligatory request for your help. You’ve heard of these 99-year leases on corridors, but we’re not asking you for that kind of a commitment. One year at a time is good enough for us.
And why not? We’re the only independent English language podcast digging into Armenia, the South Caucasus, and global power games without any foreign funding. No petrodollars. No pipeline revenues.
And no backroom deals. and not even Oval Office photo ops. So if you’d like to help keep us peeling back the layers of these peace treaties, these so-called corridors, and booming economies that may not actually be that booming, you can help us through Patreon or Buy Me A Coffee at podcasts.groong.org.
Asbed: But hey, financial support is not for everyone. And we understand that. In which case, you can still do your share. You can still help us.
Just COMMENT, LIKE, and SHARE the show with your friends. Unlike the Trump Route, spreading the word doesn’t need anyone’s permission.
Hovik: Thanks for being with us, folks. Now let’s get on with the show.
Asbed: Professor Jeffrey Sachs, welcome back to The Groong Podcast.
Sachs: Pleasure to be with you again.
Hovik: Hello, Professor Sachs.
Sachs: Greetings. Nice to see you.
Asbed: Professor, on August 8th, Nikol Pashinyan and Ilham Aliyev met with Donald Trump in the Oval Office and initiated what’s being called a peace agreement. The details are vague, but the agreement includes some kind of an open transport link between mainland Azerbaijan and Nakhichevan through Armenia along its border with Iran. This link has been labeled TRIP, the Trump route for international peace and prosperity. So today we’re taking a trip down Zangezur Lane because it’s also known as the Zangezur Corridor by the Turkish side.
Control of this link was promised to Russia back in 2020, and now it appears to have been promised to the US in 2025. And the interesting thing is that Moscow’s reaction has been mild and Trump and Putin apparently did not raise this issue at the Alaska summit a couple of weeks back. Tehran, however, has repeated that the changes to Armenia’s border will be completely unacceptable to them. Now, you have called this trip agreement provocative and dangerous, warning that instead of securing peace, it risks drawing Armenia into a regional war.
How?
Sachs: In general, the United States likes to meddle on Russia’s borders. So this is another case of meddling. The Armenian, Georgian, Azerbaijan, South Caucasus region has been no stranger to great games and to big power meddling. The United States has long seen the South Caucasus as a way to get at both Iran and Russia, which the US views as enemies, actually.
So Armenia is walking into another great power struggle, I would advise against it, as a general matter. I have a general view. Be prudent. Connect with your neighbors, in this case, the other South Caucasus countries, of course.
So I’m not against peace with Azerbaijan, with all the tensions, and with Georgia. But I’m also not in favor of provoking Iran or Turkey or Russia by US meddling. If I were the U.S. and Russia or China and Mexico announced a corridor with a 99-year lease for Russia along the U.S.-Mexican border, I’d say, no, thank you. That’s actually not going to work.
And it wouldn’t happen. Whether it came to blows, it would not happen. So far, Russia is, I would say, quiet because I doubt that Russia believes this will ever happen. Iran isn’t so quiet.
It also has said it will never happen. I just think that there should be a little bit more prudence. Countries get used or they try to use great powers for their own local advantage. This has been no stranger to South Caucasus realities.
Georgia and the US used each other very badly, very unsuccessfully. It led to the 2008 war in Georgia that came about because Saakashvili, the Georgian leader, was incredibly imprudent. He was kind of a tool of the U.S. security state. He liked that.
It’s very flattering to have the backing of the CIA or the Pentagon or others. And so they get flattered. I listened to Saakashvili in 2008 talk about how wonderful all of this is, how Georgia is a European country. It’s going to join NATO. and so on.
He gave this in a talk in New York at the Council on Foreign Relations. I thought he was crazy. A few weeks later, the war broke out. So we may have talked about that before.
But the point is, you can look at this, a 99-year U.S. quarter in the South Caucasus? I don’t think so.
Hovik: So that is, I guess, the question that is really annoying us because the 99-year lease, as even Trump himself has admitted, Tom Barak has admitted, although I have to say the Armenian government is, I think, deliberately keeping quiet, but this is a century-long commitment from the U.S. in the South Caucasus at a time when I think that the U.S. is waning in terms of its military might, the ability to project power, both militarily and economically. And it seems to be in contradiction to the campaign promises by Trump to steer clear of endless wars.
And now we’re seeing what’s happening in terms of the U.S. involvement in Syunik, which is the southern province of Armenia, where Zangezur is, and also Gaza. At least initially, Trump was floating this idea about this Gaza Riviera or whatever it’s called. How do you explain this, Professor Sachs, and what economic consequences do you worry about from this apparent shift in terms of policy?
Sachs: Well, first of all, Trump’s attention span is maybe 99 minutes, not 99 years. So the whole idea that this is a 99 year anything in this world is completely absurd. The U.S. right now does not have strategy. It doesn’t. doesn’t really have a foreign policy.
It doesn’t have diplomacy. Remember, Trump and Putin met a couple weeks ago in Alaska. What came out of it? Who knows?
That’s ancient news. You know, we’re on to new threats, new instability. This is unfortunately the mark of the United States right now. None of this is thought out.
That’s why an announcement like this is makes you roll your eyes or what? Ninety nine year quarter of the United States. Are you kidding? So I don’t give it much credence.
It raises another interesting issue, by the way, another little bit of a mystery. Azerbaijan, by public discussion right now, but not absolute certainty, is almost effectively an ally with Israel in Israel’s war against Iran. We don’t know the extent of it, but there’s a lot of reports that Mossad, the Israeli Murder and Intelligence Service, and the Azerbaijan security services are in close alliance. There is a lot of discussion that Azerbaijan was even a staging point for the so-called 12-day war against Iran.
Oh, my God. Is that what Armenia wants to walk into right now? Seriously? In the middle of absolutely crazy, genocidal Israeli government?
I wouldn’t get anywhere close to that, frankly. And if that’s another part of this story, it’s also really shocking and disturbing. So we don’t know. I’m not just peddling rumors.
I’m talking about things that are widely discussed. But something strange is underway of Azerbaijan and Israel at a time when I find Israel’s actions abhorrent, way beyond anything justifiable or allowable under international law. And that’s yet another reason to worry that Armenia is putting itself in danger in the middle of an ongoing conflict. So Iran is a powerful neighbor.
It should be regarded as such and treated prudently in that regard. Russia is a very powerful neighbor and it should be treated prudently. Turkey is a powerful neighbor. No one could accuse Armenia of having a quiet neighborhood.
This has been thousands of years of not an easy time, but that demands a lot of prudence and smarts. The United States does not come under the rubric of prudent and smart right now. It comes under the rubric of short-sighted, manipulative, and endangering its friends. You know, I often cite Henry Kissinger’s famous adage that to be an enemy of the United States is dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal.
I would never as a sovereign country give up sovereignty over part of my territory, especially when it is such a sensitive part of the territory. I would never, never allow U.S. security operations to come in. even to, quote, protect the corridor. That’s a provocation in its own right. Suppose the U.S. says, well, this is our corridor.
Of course, we’re going to police it. Well, that means military or paramilitary presence on Iran’s border. Huh? Are you kidding?
That’s right.
Hovik: Who could want this, honestly? Professor Sachs, so this corridor is being presented in a package in terms of peace and Trump cannot miss an opportunity to say how great he is as a peacemaker. And I want to ask you actually a really tough question because I feel that this question doesn’t get enough coverage. So Armenia, obviously, Armenia lost greatly in the 2020 war.
And there is one thought that after the war in Karabakh, after the loss, Pashinyan basically decided to cut his own political losses. And by completely ceding and capitulating on Karabakh, he could flip over to the U.S. orbit. Now, that’s all fine and dandy, but this is all being used, being couched in the language of peace. But I want to remind our listeners and ask your opinion, because 150,000 Armenians from Karabakh have been driven out.
They cannot go back. The 17-point document, which they were initialed in the White House, has no mention about their right of return to their homes. I have many personal friends whose family graves are there. And to think that without any kind of security guarantees, without any kind of international presence, that Armenians can go to Azerbaijan, which we use all of them as criminals, at least anyone who has any male who has participated any military-aged male would be viewed as a criminal by Azerbaijan.
So going there without any security guarantees is out of question. And Pashinyan says that even raising this issue about the right of collective return, the right of security guarantees, the right of cultural heritage of Armenians in Artsakh is a threat to Armenia’s security. That is actually the language he’s using. He’s saying that that is a threat And this so-called corridor also serves Azerbaijan and Turkey.
Armenia does not have any east-west trade. It has north and south trade. So it’d be great if we had a corridor, a better corridor, better access north and south, but none of that is being offered to Armenia. So this is all basically concessions all the way down when you look at it from Armenia’s perspective.
And now we’re even being forced, or at least Azerbaijan is saying, we’re not going to sign any peace deal without Armenians changing their constitution, which is I would say without complete military victory, without Azerbaijani tanks rolling down the streets of Yerevan, I don’t think Armenians would go to the polling booth to change their constitution to Aliyev’s wishes. So I want to ask you, is peace even possible?
And what is the risk when international media commentators all talk about this in terms of, yeah, let’s have peace, let’s negotiate, but in reality, in the absence of any guarantees, in the absence of any international community or forum where peace can be negotiated fairly, I don’t see how that’s possible. What are your thoughts on this?
Sachs: Well, of course, there are many issues that I’m not at all qualified to discuss in detail because I don’t know all of the deep background. What I can say categorically is there’s no such thing as Armenia finding its security by the U.S. The U.S. is thousands of miles away. Armenia counts for nothing in the U.S. political scene.
Of course, there are Armenian Americans. I don’t mean to denigrate Armenia, but I want it to be very plain. This is not a big deal. We fully agree with you.
Well, just to say from an American point of view, This doesn’t even hit the radar screen in the first section of the news, so you wouldn’t find it anywhere. And in this sense, Armenia will not find security from the U.S. That’s a tough statement because Armenia doesn’t have easy options, period. It’s in a contested region.
Three big powers are neighbors, Iran, Turkey, and Russia. None of them is an easy neighbor, I have to say. And your immediate neighbor, Azerbaijan, is not an easy neighbor. There are lots of problems.
My only point is… both from history and my own personal experience over many decades, is to solve this will require actually direct diplomacy of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, because Georgia has a big, involvement in this also plus turkey iran and russia and one of the points is that turkey iran and russia do not want any of the other two to gain any kind of decisive advantage in this neighborhood so there’s a fragile equilibrium in which the major powers say, let’s leave well enough alone. We would like stability in the South Caucasus. And it’s important for us in both the North-South Corridor and the East-West Corridor.
And just because of that, there is actually an opportunity to, to have an economic understanding and a security understanding because your powerful and difficult neighbors don’t want to make things more difficult for themselves vis-a-vis the other powers. the united states in my view has no role to play in that i look at a map and i believe that neighborhoods matter a lot if you live next to a difficult neighbor and you’ve got another difficult neighbor across the street Well, OK, you’re in a tough neighborhood, but you don’t expect the person living six miles away to give you the protection that you want.
You try to find an arrangement that’s going to make your neighborhood workable, maybe some streetlights, maybe some understanding that your backyard should be safe because that’s going to be to the whole advantage of the neighborhood and so on. But you don’t expect that. the help to come from halfway around the world. Of course, it’s very flattering that Pashinyan sat with Donald Trump in the White House. How wonderful is that?
But completely meaningless from the real story of Armenia day to day, where the U.S. means nothing in terms of the balance of power of the regional powers. And as you rightly pointed out, You know, the east-west corridor can be helpful for Armenia, but for Armenia, the north-south corridor is also helpful. And if one cancels the other, you’ve just made an absolutely fundamental mistake. So all of this… strikes me as wrongheaded, the way that it’s discussed, the way that it’s going.
And I’m worried because I see it in the context of the unending games that the CIA and others play to basically annoy Russia and Iran. And when I say annoy, I mean something worse than just picking on emotions. I mean, provoking conflicts.
Asbed: Professor, for our last topic, I wanted to talk a little bit about the Armenian economy because for a country that lost a devastating war in 2020, the economy in Armenia has surprised many observers. The GDP has grown close to double digits pretty much every year. Remittances have poured into the country, tech sector booming. And until this year, earlier this year, the important trade sector had soared through the so-called re-export component.
This is the component which really relied on The Ukraine war, sanction busting, trade in and out of Russia, basically through Armenia. Of course, this is going away now because the Ukraine war has sort of run its course. Yet even so, 40% of Armenia’s economy is directly tied to Russia, even as the Armenian government is dreaming about the EU, joining the EU membership. How sustainable is this growth?
Is Armenia’s economy truly stable? And what risks do you see ahead? We’re looking for some kind of advice as to how to put Armenia’s economy on a good level for its citizens.
Sachs: First, I’m again sorry to say, and I don’t mean to be a bearer of bad news or just negative, but I think it is such a long shot that Armenia would ever join the European Union. If you’re a classical geographer, it’s actually the case that Armenia is in Asia, and so is Georgia, and so is Azerbaijan, because the divide between Europe and Asia is the ridge of the Great Caucasus’ range. And so this isn’t even geographic Europe. If you look at the European Union, Oh, my God.
It’s really pathetic now in terms of the lack of strategy, clarity. What are they doing? You’re going to join so you can raise military spending to 5% of GDP? It’s crazy.
Europe is stagnant and in a completely confused surly state of affairs. So just to say that I don’t believe that the EU membership is part of this. The South Caucasus is a remarkable region. First, very beautiful, very touristic.
It has many great natural attributes. It also is and has been for thousands of years the gateway between Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, and Eastern Asia. And that’s not a bad place to be in peace. It’s a terrible place to be in war.
And so the point is peace and using the combination of Armenia’s own economic endowments, which start with its people, its culture, its natural beauty, its agriculture resources, its other resources and its geography as a gateway east, west and north, south. Those are the basic attributes for economic development. Naturally, countries trade with their neighbors. This is called the gravity principle in economic trade, like the physical force of gravity.
So Armenia is going to trade with Russia. It’s going to trade with Turkey. It’s going to trade with Iran, as well as trading more broadly in the world. It’s going to have tourists who are going to come to see Armenia and its great history and culture. and to see georgia and to see azerbaijan and other places in the neighborhood so all of this is to say an accurate assessment is first of all not based on uh not not based on um the peculiarities and vagaries of the Ukraine war and smuggling and sanctions or whatever.
It’s actually based on human skills, on culture, on the physical geography, on trade and finance with the neighbors, and on the long-term development of the basically Eurasia. And by Eurasia, of course, I mean both Europe and the vast expanse of Asia. China will play a big role in Armenia’s future economically, not in a dedicated corridor with security, but economically.
India will play a surprisingly large role because India will be the most populous country and a very large economy at least the third largest in the world if not someday overtaking the united states and becoming the second largest in the next 30 or 40 years so that’s the basic answer which is invest in high skills then you’ll have the high tech invest in the north south and east west corridors invest in peace in the neighborhood good relations with the neighbors and a lot of good things can happen
Asbed: Okay. Well, I don’t think we have better advice to finish on. So thank you so much for joining us today and for your time and your insight. We love having you on this show.
Thank you, sir.
Sachs: Always, always a pleasure. See you again soon, I hope.
Asbed: Talk to you again.
Hovik: Thank you, Professor Sachs.
Sachs: Thanks a lot. Bye-bye.
Asbed: That’s our show today. This episode was recorded on August 28, 2025. We’ve been talking with Professor Jeffrey Sachs, who is the president of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University. He is the author of many bestselling books, including The End of Poverty and The Ages of Globalization, For more, you can see his page on our website, podcasts.groong.org / episode-number and follow the links.
Hovik: And before we bid you farewell, I would like to ask you for one small request. Hundreds of you listen to us on various platforms such as Substack, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. If you use those platforms, please make sure that you subscribe to us on those platforms specifically. Subscribing helps push our episodes to more people and allows us to grow on those platforms.
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Asbed: We really appreciate your support. It helps us keep the show going and growing. Thank you very much. I’m Asbed Bedrossian in Los Angeles.
Hovik: And I’m Hovik Manucharyan in Yerevan. We’ll talk to you soon. Take care.