() President Donald Trump met with Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev on Friday afternoon as the two countries signed a commitment to a peace agreement.
Both Pashinyan and Aliyev praised Trump for his work on resolving the conflict.
Although the signing was an agreement to work toward the conclusion of a peace deal, there are still issues to be worked through before there can be an agreement. However, Trump spoke as if a peace agreement was already a done deal.
“You two are going to have a great relationship, and if you don’t call me and I’ll straighten it out,” Trump said.
The two countries have been at odds for decades, with the conflict killing tens of thousands of people and displacing hundreds of thousands. At the center of the dispute has been the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh.
Trump said the U.S. was signing a bilateral agreement with the two countries to expand cooperation and energy, trade and technology, including artificial intelligence.
The president also said the U.S. would be lifting restrictions on defense cooperation with Azerbaijan.
Brokering peace agreements has been a focus of Trump’s since he took office, although the largest deals, those that would bring peace between Russia and Ukraine and Israel and Gaza, have eluded him.
The White House has said Trump will meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin in the “coming days,” and the president once again claimed he was closing in on a deal.
“I think we’re getting very close, and we’re going to be announcing later, and we’re going to have a meeting with Russia, will start off with Russia,” he said.
He also said Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskyy was getting what he needed to keep fighting, a change in position from the presidential campaign and early days of his second term when Trump advocated for reducing or ending aid to Ukraine.
Trump suggested that a deal might end up with some territories being exchanged between Kyiv and Moscow.
When asked about the possibility of sending the military into Latin America to combat cartels, Trump said he would say more later.
“Latin America has a lot of cartels, they’ve got a lot of drugs flowing so we want to protect our country, we have to protect our country, we have been doing it for four years and we love this country like they love their country we have to protect our country so you know we’re playing a tough game,” he said.
During the meeting, there was the suggestion that Pashinyan and Aliyev might jointly nominate Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize, an award he has openly lobbied for, noting repeatedly that President Barack Obama won a Nobel and dismissing Obama’s accomplishments while lauding his own work as president.
