As the Zengezur Corridor Opens

The opening of the Zengezur Corridor—a transit route passing through Armenia’s border with Iran, which will ensure Azerbaijan’s territorial integrity and directly connect Türkiye with the Turkistan region—has entered a new phase with the memorandum of understanding signed by Azerbaijani President Aliyev, Armenian President Pashinyan, and U.S. President Trump. The text, which envisions the Armenian section of the corridor being opened under the control of American private military contractors, undoubtedly represents both a turning point in Caucasian geopolitics and a significant step taken by the U.S. to maintain its dominance over intra-Eurasian powers within Eurasian geopolitics. The opening of the corridor is therefore of a significance that necessitates assessment in terms of the geopolitical agendas pursued by the U.S., Russia, Iran, China, and Israel, particularly Türkiye and Azerbaijan.

The Caucasus, where the Zengezur Corridor is located, is classified geopolitically as a land strait.

As is well known, straits are waterways that emerge where landmasses narrow. Land straits, on the other hand, are landmasses and transit routes situated between important bodies of water, providing passage between them. The Caucasus, located between the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea and containing steep mountain passes, is in this regard a land strait. The northern boundary of this land strait is the Taman Peninsula, located in the Sea of Azov; its southern boundary is the Caspian Sea; to the east is also the Caspian Sea; and to the west lie the Black Sea (including Artvin and Rize) and the mountain range stretching between the Erzurum–Kars plateau and Erzincan. Thus, the Caucasus, with its mountain ranges and passes, constitutes the natural transit route between the Black Sea in the north, and the lands of Anatolia beginning west of the Euphrates River and Mesopotamia beginning south of the Euphrates in the west. From a geopolitical perspective, it is, along with Anatolia—which is itself a land strait located between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean—a geographical barrier between Asia, the main continent, and Europe, which is not a separate continent but rather a peninsula extending from Asia, and a cultural boundary formed around this barrier. For this reason, throughout history, major powers seeking to move in the North-South and East-West directions have felt the necessity of first gaining control over either the Anatolian or Caucasian land straits, depending on their intended course. Many historical events—from the Scythians’ westward expansion, to the Iranian–Greek and Roman–Iranian wars, from the Turks’ arrival in Anatolia, to the Russians’ drive towards the warm seas in the south, and the Ottoman–Safavid wars—have taken place within this geopolitical framework. The region’s geopolitics historically led to Russia, through the Treaties of Turkmenchay and Gulistan, separating the North and South Caucasus and Azerbaijani territories from Iran by establishing the Aras River as the border, and to the drawing of the Soviet–Turkish border through this area. Within this geopolitical reality, Iran and Armenia were created by Britain and Russia as a wall between Turkistan and Anatolia. Following the capture of Karabakh, which commands the strategic mountain passes between North and South Caucasia, the opening of the Zengezur Corridor signifies the creation of a serious, substantial, and irreversible breach in this wall.

The main strategy of the United States/Anglo-Saxons, who represent maritime geopolitics, since the end of the Cold War has been to prevent the rise of powers dominant in continental geopolitics within Eurasia and to obstruct their formation of alliances with one another. As China caught up with the U.S. in many areas and began to establish secure land and sea routes for itself through the Belt and Road Initiative, this strategy came to be supported by an additional one: rendering these transportation routes unusable through the instigation of armed conflicts and the deployment of U.S. forces along them. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine served as a significant example of how these two strategies could be implemented simultaneously. Through the invasion of Ukraine, the U.S./Anglo-Saxons not only destroyed the rapidly developing alliance between China, Russia, and Germany—in line with Brzezinski’s strategy of preventing potential alliances among intra-Eurasian powers—but also blocked China’s overland route through Russia to the Port of Hamburg and the Baltic Sea. The United States, through a process that began with Gerhard Schröder and continued under Angela Merkel, gradually reasserted Germany’s dependence on itself by reversing the country’s economic independence that had been achieved through access to cheap energy supplied by Russia and trade relations established with Russia and China. As an example of new-generation colonialism, acquiring the rights to exploit valuable minerals in Ukraine and deploying private military companies there for their protection constitutes a key implementation of the aforementioned strategy.

The developments regarding the Zengezur Corridor are, in fact, merely a new instance of the same playbook applied in Ukraine. The agreement primarily signifies that, with the blockage of the Ukrainian route, the United States has established a presence—through private military companies—over the land bottleneck situated along the historical Silk Road, which is the only remaining overland route from China to Europe. Considering its military presence in Georgia as well, this implies that the U.S. has established significant military control over the Caucasian land bottleneck. This move is undoubtedly aimed not only at China but also at balancing the efforts of the three major regional powers—Türkiye, Russia, and Iran—that have historically competed for dominance in the Caucasus.

The agreement, of course, carries other potential consequences as well. First and foremost, the process led by the United States marks the beginning of Russia’s complete withdrawal from the South Caucasus. Although the agreement regarding the Zengezur Corridor ostensibly refers to the opening of a logistics route on paper, politically, it also signifies that Armenia—a Russian satellite state—will resolve its territorial disputes with the Turks and join the Western bloc under the protection of the U.S. and France in the Caucasus. It heralds a new era for Armenia, in which its most important political and economic allies will be the U.S., France, Türkiye, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Iran, and India. Secondly, it means that Azerbaijan has effectively reached the end of the process that began with its establishment in 1918 as a result of military operations by the Caucasian Islamic Army, and its return to Russian control in 1922 under the Transcaucasian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic led by Soviet Russia. It has now declared its de facto independence. Although Azerbaijan is the heir to states such as the Seljuk, Akkoyunlu, and Safavid empires, it is a state without an independent historical foundation in terms of its current borders. Its existence is the result of the Treaties of Gulistan and Turkmenchay, which separated the northern part of historical Azerbaijan from the southern part and incorporated it into Russia. For Azerbaijan, the Karabakh War was, in the true sense of the word, a war of liberation. Its victory in this war paved the way for de facto independence for both itself and Armenia. Today, Azerbaijan and Armenia are achieving independence from Russia through mutual cooperation. The recent increase in tensions in Azerbaijan’s relations with Russia, and its initiation of the process to leave the CIS, are direct consequences of this situation. It is clear that Armenia—now part of the Western bloc following the establishment of diplomatic relations with Türkiye and the opening of borders—will follow suit and also leave the CIS. In this way, Russia will lose its dominance over Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia, significantly diminishing its control and influence in the South Caucasus. The fact that this outcome is largely the result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—an attempt to revive the Soviet Union that turned into a strategic failure—will be recorded as a historic defeat for Russia.

The dominance that the United States is attempting to establish over the Zengezur Corridor undoubtedly has implications for Türkiye as well. Above all, the agreement significantly addresses one of the most critical geopolitical issues inherited from the Ottoman period by Türkiye, the successor to the Ottoman Empire: the problem of the Turkistan connection. One of the main reasons for the Ottoman Empire’s decline was the severing of its connection to Turkistan due to the rise of Russia and Iran (the Safavids). This was also the fundamental reasoning behind the post–World War I plans of Russia and Britain to design Armenia and Iran as buffer states. Thus, through the current agreement, Türkiye is significantly freeing itself from one of its historical geopolitical burdens. Secondly, the agreement makes it possible for the long-standing historical animosity between Türkiye and Armenia to evolve into reasonable diplomatic relations based on mutual interest, thereby allowing Türkiye to eliminate a major foreign policy issue that has long weighed it down. The agreement supports Türkiye’s efforts to become a logistics corridor and energy hub, thus reinforcing its aspirations to become a regional and global power. Additionally, it will compel Russia and Iran to pursue more moderate policies toward Türkiye. The foremost risk this agreement poses for Türkiye lies in the fact that the corridor in question will be under the control of U.S. contracted forces. However, considering that the original version of the agreement envisaged the corridor being controlled by Russia’s domestic intelligence agency, the FSB, it is clear that this is not an escalation of risk for Türkiye, but rather a shift in the balance of power. It is evident that the diplomatic flexibility and influence Türkiye would gain through normalization with Armenia far outweigh the risks posed by the agreement. The true geopolitical risk for Türkiye within the context of this agreement lies in Israel’s strategic orientation. Israel’s policy of attempting to redraw borders in the Middle East through its doctrine of “Greater Israel” and its unlimited war strategy has been openly expressed by its highest-level officials. A less widely recognized aspect of this policy is its effort to establish control over Spykman’s rimland—stretching from Cyprus and the Aegean islands across the Eastern Mediterranean, the geographical heartland of history, and continuing through Suez, Palestine, Jordan, Eastern Syria, Northern Iraq, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Ukraine, and Poland, ultimately reaching the historical Caspian region and the Baltic Sea. This constitutes the “Lebensraum” that Zionism, rooted in Central and Eastern Europe, seeks to create for itself.