Armenia Has No Plan B if TRIPP Fails
The fault of Armenian authorities is that they don't have a plan B. Zero plan B, nothing is planned. Not with Europe, not with Russia or Iran, nobody.
Since Washington floated the idea in May 2025, Pashinyan’s government has pursued TRIPP (the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity) as a cornerstone of its economic and geopolitical strategy. The project promises to connect Central Asian resources to European markets through Armenia’s territory, offering potential transit fees and strategic leverage. Yet this singular focus on TRIPP contains a critical vulnerability: Armenia has developed no credible Plan B if the U.S.-backed project fails.
Geopolitical analyst Suren Sargsyan identifies this absence of contingency planning as a fundamental strategic failure. If political upheaval in Washington disrupts TRIPP, or if Iran’s opposition to an American presence near its border becomes an insurmountable barrier, Armenia faces catastrophic alternatives with no prepared response. The most immediate risk is that Azerbaijan will demand its version of the corridor-the “Zangezur Corridor”-without TRIPP’s U.S. framework. Another scenario involves Russia invoking the November 9, 2020 agreement to deploy its special forces into southern Armenia to manage transit flows. A third scenario Sargsyan raises is Iran telling Yerevan that if Armenia cannot secure Syunik itself, it should hand the region to Tehran rather than to Azerbaijan or Turkey. Yet Armenia’s government appears to have prepared none of these scenarios with alternative strategies.
Sargsyan’s concern is deepened by uncertainty within Washington itself. Congress has not fully institutionalized TRIPP support, meaning future administrations may lack the political will to sustain it. As analyst Christine Arakelian noted in related discussions, TRIPP lacks the deep Congressional buy-in that would guarantee continuity beyond Trump. For Armenia observers and regional specialists, this moment illuminates a profound strategic risk: a small nation betting its geopolitical future on a single external project without preparing alternatives represents a dangerous concentration of risk. It leaves Armenia vulnerable not only to the project’s failure, but to the chaos that failure might unleash.
Transcript
Suren Sargsyan: This is one of the scenarios that Armenia, and the fault of Armenian authorities is that they don't have a plan B.
Asbed Bedrossian: Mm-hmm.
Suren Sargsyan: Just zero plan B, nothing is planned. Not with the European Union, nothing with, I don't know, Russians or Iranians, nobody. Let's say Trump is impeached tomorrow and everything is, Washington is a mess. Nothing is going to happen. I don't know. It's really hard to say because there's no plan B.
Asbed Bedrossian: Yeah, it's not necessarily going to happen in the next year in the United States, but after Trump is gone, we don't know who's going to come to power, and I don't know exactly what the level of interest or engagement is going to be on the part of greater Washington, let's say. Because we've talked to Christine A. Arakelian, who knows Washington a little bit, and she said that there hasn't been the kind of buy-in about TRIPP from Congress, for example, to be a completely institutionalized project.
Suren Sargsyan: She's right. She's right. I do agree with her.
Asbed Bedrossian: So we know the next two years for TRIPP, but we don't know beyond that.
Suren Sargsyan: Yeah, she's right. But besides that, Asbed, I'll tell you something else.
Asbed Bedrossian: And we have to...
Suren Sargsyan: As I mentioned before, all the administration were trying to do something like that. So it's not a Trump interest. It's an American interest to be involved in this region and to have some significant presence in the South Caucasus region. And this is one of the most successful things they've ever done before.