During their campaign, President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance both cultivated the Armenian community and promised to right the wrongs inflicted on Armenians during the Biden administration.
Writing on Truth Social on October 23, 2024, Trump pledged, “I will protect persecuted Christians, I will work to stop the violence and ethnic cleansing, and we will restore PEACE between Armenia and Azerbaijan.”
Later that day, Vance echoed this commitment. “The United States should fight against the persecution of Christians all over the world.” Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio also sided with Armenia against external aggression.
The betrayal looming for Armenians may surpass that of the previous administration, which swore that the US would not tolerate ethnic cleansing only to culminate with US Ambassador to Azerbaijan Mark Libby symbolically celebrating it by participating in an Azerbaijan-sponsored propaganda tour of towns cleansed of their Armenians.
The problem is Russia. Beyond the Baltic States, no country other than Ukraine has pivotedVle further to the West than Armenia. In the 1990s, as Armenia first sought to detach itself from Russian diplomatic domination, a Russian-backed terrorist attack decapitated the government, killing the reform-minded Prime Minister Vazgen Sargsyan, National Assembly Speaker Karen Demirchyan, two deputy speakers, a minister, and three members of Parliament.
In 2018, Armenians again pivoted away from Russia as protests against Prime Minister Serzh Sargsyan’s third term culminated in a popular revolution. One reason Russia betrayed Armenia in the face of Azerbaijani aggression against both Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia proper was the Kremlin’s cynical belief that Armenians would reject the post-2018 order and pivot back to Moscow. Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan lost internal support, but Armenians continued to reject the status quo ante. Subsequent assassination and coup plots likewise backfired. Whenever Russia clumsily sought to interfere, the backlash drove a wedge further into Russia-Armenia ties.
