When the White House published Donald Trump’s 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS), most attention focused, understandably, on Europe and the Western Hemisphere. And although the South Caucasus was only mentioned in reference to the Trump-brokered Azerbaijan-Armenia peace agreement, there are nonetheless several important implications for both regions that can be inferred from the strategy.

The 2025 NSS, as such, is less a regional roadmap than a statement of method: a reset of how, where, and with whom the U.S. intends to engage. And, for the South Caucasus and Central Asia, regions traditionally shaped by indirect U.S. involvement and a lack of sustained strategic attention, this foreign policy shift is more consequential than appears at first glance. 

The central premise of the new NSS is hierarchy. Not all regions are of equal strategic value, and U.S. resources - political, diplomatic, and economic- are to be concentrated where engagement produces visible returns. Partnerships are, thus, evaluated less on shared values or institutional alignment and more on functionality: supply chains secured, corridors opened, deals signed. For the South Caucasus and Central Asia, regions rich in energy resources and transit infrastructure, this recalibration creates both opportunity and risk.

Within this context, Azerbaijan emerges as the most compatible partner for a strategy built on commercial diplomacy and transactional engagement. As a transcontinental state bridging Western Asia and Eastern Europe, Azerbaijan is the only regional state bordering both Russia and Iran, placing it at the core of two key American geopolitical challenges.

This logic has translated into a noticeable uptick in U.S.–Azerbaijan engagement over recent months. In December, Azerbaijan’s Minister of Energy, Parviz Shahbazov, held meetings in Washington with members of the U.S. House of Representatives and representatives of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, underscoring Baku’s role in energy security and transit connectivity. These discussions were not symbolic; they reflected a convergence between Azerbaijan’s long-standing positioning as a transit state and the NSS’s renewed focus on commercially viable partnerships.

Recent congressional activity reinforces this trend. On December 9, 2025, Republican Representative Anna Paulina Luna introduced H.R. 6534, a bill in the U.S. House of Representatives to repeal longstanding restrictions on direct U.S. assistance to Azerbaijan, including the prohibition originally codified in Section 907 of the Freedom Support Act and temporarily waived by President Trump earlier this year.

Luna’s bill, now before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, would align U.S. law with the administration’s broader push toward practical cooperation with Baku. 
Georgia’s position illustrates the other side of this logic. Where earlier U.S. strategies treated democratic alignment as a reason for persistence even amid political instability, the 2025 strategy offers no such cushion. In a system that ranks partners by performance and cost, internal political divergence becomes a liability. The risk for Georgia is diminished relevance. While U.S-Georgian relations have already begun to deteriorate following the introduction of the controversial Foreign Agent Law, the Trump administration has made clear that it has little appetite for repairing partnerships that no longer produce clear, strategic returns. 
Armenia, moreover, cannot be sidelined to the same extent as Georgia: the size and influence of the Armenian diaspora in the United States ensure sustained political attention, regardless of broader U.S. disengagement from the region.

As Georgia’s standing erodes, Washington has shifted its attention to Azerbaijan and Armenia, where there is clearer diplomatic payoff, particularly in light of the peace deal brokered by Trump in August. The strategy explicitly argues that “seeking peace deals… even in regions and countries peripheral to our immediate core interests” is an efficient way to realign regions toward U.S. interests and open new economic and strategic opportunities. It also plays into Trump’s long-standing goal of winning the Nobel Peace Prize.  

The embodiment of the new Trumpian era strategy in the region, is however, the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP) - effectively the long-debated Zangezur Corridor under U.S. auspices. Under the August 8, 2025 agreement, Armenia agreed to grant the U.S. exclusive development rights for 99 years to a strategic transit corridor through its Syunik (Zangezur) region linking mainland Azerbaijan to its Nakhchivan exclave.

TRIPP reflects the 2025 National Security Strategy’s core logic: using peace deals to secure strategic access and long-term leverage in regions that fall outside the U.S.’ primary security focus. 

Central Asia, although entirely omitted from the NSS, is evidently being elevated to a region of strategic importance for the U.S. On November 6, 2025, Trump hosted the first-ever C5+1 presidential summit at the White House, bringing all five Central Asian leaders into a format that had previously struggled to break out of ministerial and UN-week choreography. The summit marked a decade of cooperation under the C5+1 framework and followed the Biden administration’s launch of the B5+1 initiative.

It also came after Trump’s earlier, deal-heavy outreach to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, an order of engagement that says a lot about what Washington now rewards: scale and governments that can sign quickly. 

What made the summit more significant was its political add-on: Kazakhstan’s announcement that it would join the Abraham Accords, which is Trump’s preferred branding for “strategic alignment” without institutional obligations. In the same week, the region absorbed a less friendly signal - new U.S. tariffs, with Kazakhstan hit hardest, yet the net effect was not estrangement. And despite persistent rhetoric about untapped potential, Washington has yet to deliver an economic project in Central Asia on the scale of China’s Belt and Road investments or Russia’s recent nuclear energy initiatives in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

All in all, the 2025 NSS creates a strategic environment for regional partners to expand cooperation with the U.S., provided they can deliver concrete outcomes - peace agreements, transit access, or strategic alignment.