Armenia in Iran’s Foreign Economic Policy amid US–Iran confrontation

Iran is “entrenching” itself in Armenia through forging an alternative Eurasian transit corridor and increasing trade turnover to counter American pressure and attempts at isolation, rival projects in the Caucasus, and to bolster Armenia’s sovereignty over its southern regions.

Samyar Rostami

Following the inauguration of Iran’s Consulate General in the Armenian city of Kapan, in the southern Syunik province, in October 2022, bilateral engagement between Tehran and Yerevan intensified. Official visits at both high and mid-levels became more frequent, while military and strategic-defence cooperation between Iran and Armenia noticeably strengthened.

The US-Israeli conflict with Iran during 2025–2026 further sharpened Tehran’s strategic focus on its northern borders. Thus, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s participation in the farewell ceremony for Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in July 2026 and his subsequent meeting with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, unfolded amidst Tehran underscoring the necessity of insulating bilateral ties from extra-regional interference, particularly from NATO and its allies.

Iran’s presence in southern Armenia through the construction of the new tunnel is also a matter of preserving Armenian sovereignty, beyond purely economic and logistical issues

Key Aspects of Current Iran-Armenia Cooperation

One element of the US anti-Iran strategy involves undermining Iran’s logistics infrastructure and marginalizing its role in regional transit networks. This reinforces the importance of Iran’s cooperation with friendly nations in cross-border logistics infrastructure, above all the Aras Corridor and the International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC), implemented by Iran jointly with India and Russia.

In this regard, in June 2026, the head of Iran’s state planning and budget organization, Seyed Hamid Pourmohammadi, paid a visit to Armenia, during which the parties discussed modernizing border infrastructure, in particular, the Norduz terminal; resolving outstanding customs bottlenecks; and eliminating existing obstructions along regional transport routes.

Serving these objectives are the construction works initiated in June 2026 by engineers and specialists of the Iranian company Ariana on the 7.2-kilometre Kajaran Tunnel. By bypassing the treacherous mountain passes and severe winter weather of the traditional route (it is precisely the mountainous terrain and challenging climatic conditions that make Syunik province, where the town of Kajaran, which gives the tunnel its name, is located, one of the country’s most difficult regions in terms of the throughput – ed.), the new tunnel will eliminate a major logistical bottleneck. This will significantly improve the speed and security of transit between Iran and Armenia, thereby paving the way for expanding daily throughput from the current 200 to as many as 1,000 trucks. And since conflict-related disruptions are affecting Iran’s southern maritime gateways, reinforcing the northern overland routes through Armenia by expanding throughput capacity across the Armenian-Iranian border will be of decisive importance for sustaining the continuity of Iran’s foreign trade and enhancing the country’s overall economic resilience.

The construction of the Kajaran Tunnel also furthers Tehran’s ambition, mentioned at the outset of the article, to minimize third-party interference in its bilateral relations, since the tunnel directly connects the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman to the Black Sea and the ports of Eastern Europe. This offers a strategically alternative route, first, that bypasses the Turkish territory, with Turkey being a key transport hub and simultaneously an important NATO member situated in close geographical proximity both to the South Caucasus and to Iran per se; and second, that substitutes for the increasingly popular “Trump Corridor” (also known as the Zangezur Corridor) in the South Caucasus, i.e. Donald Trump’s project to connect Azerbaijan to its Nakhichevan exclave directly through Armenian territory.

Another structural element of Washington’s policy to “strangle” Iran consists of active attempts to isolate the Iranian economy by means of imposing coercive sanctions. Nevertheless, despite the bids, in the first half of 2026, trade turnover between Tehran and Yerevan grew by 8.4 per cent to $371.4 million. Building on this momentum, both governments are implementing targeted measures designed to increase current bilateral trade from $768 million to an ambitious threshold of $3 billion.

The joint Armenian-Iranian energy projects are particularly directed towards achieving these goals. In 2026, negotiations are actively underway to operationalize the Turkmenistan-Iran-Armenia gas swap arrangement, which would allow Turkmen gas to be supplied to Armenia through Iran’s pipeline network.

Moreover, in July 2026, Yerevan and Teheran agreed on expanding the longstanding barter Armenian-Iranian program of “gas in exchange for electricity,” which would come in handy to Yerevan in its attempts to diversify the natural gas supply sources, hence softening Russia’s supremacy as a supplier to Armenia. Iranian gas, however, is roughly 2.5 times more expensive than its Russian “counterpart,” which, upon reaching corresponding agreements, would also contribute to increasing the volume of bilateral trade between Iran and Armenia.

Armenian-Iranian Cooperation: Geopolitical, Economic, and Logistical Benefits for Yerevan

Having examined the cooperation between Yerevan and Tehran from the Iranian perspective, it is necessary to trace what positive aspects this particular interaction also holds for Yerevan. Three factors of a geopolitical, economic, and logistical nature can be identified.

First and foremost, Tehran’s approach to functioning as a secure and cost-effective transit bridge, connecting the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman directly to the Black Sea through southern Armenia, aligns with Yerevan’s growing strategic imperatives, sending an unmistakable signal of Iran’s commitment to preserving Armenia’s territorial sovereignty over its southern province of Syunik.

The completion of the Kajaran Tunnel as a strategic alternative to the initiative proposed (or rather merely revived) by Donald Trump – the “Trump Corridor” – would eliminate the situation in which, in the words of former Armenian Foreign Minister Vartan Oskanian, Washington legitimized Azerbaijan’s idea of the Zangezur Corridor, which originally violated Armenia’s territorial integrity, with Armenia having essentially agreed to “temporarily or permanently cede sovereignty over its own territory in Syunik, regardless of how the transit route would be controlled.” Therefore, Iran’s presence in southern Armenia through the construction of the new tunnel is also a matter of preserving Armenian sovereignty, beyond purely economic and logistical issues.

Second, in terms of “economic connectivity,” Yerevan perceives Iran as its primary gateway to South Asia and the Middle East, since nearly 20% of Armenia’s international trade already transits through Iranian territory. From this perspective, the completion of the Kajaran Tunnel and the modern highway to Yerevan would create a high-speed direct transport artery connecting Iran to Black Sea ports and Eastern Europe, offering a strategic alternative that bypasses Turkey.

Last but not least, by actively modernizing Iranian-Armenian border infrastructure, Iran provides for the development of Armenia’s transport system as a whole. Central to this is the initiative, which presupposes connecting the Iranian and Armenian railway networks through the construction of a pivotal 240-kilometre Meghri-Marand railway line.

Assessment of the Prospects for Armenian-Iranian Cooperation

The current five-year program, 2026–2031, of Nikol Pashinyan’s government explicitly prioritizes deepened partnership with Tehran, while the ongoing deliberations on a comprehensive Iran-Armenia strategic treaty are expected to establish a legally binding framework for long-term bilateral and geoeconomic cooperation.

Nevertheless, the prospects for the sustainability of Iran’s positions in southern Armenia hinge on geopolitical developments in the region, competition from alternative corridors, and Iran’s internal capacity.

Although the complete realisation of the Iran-Armenia-Georgia transit axis and the construction of the Kajaran Tunnel face serious obstacles – formidable alpine terrain, substantial capital requirements, and restrictive US sanctions in particular – Tehran remains firmly committed to developing the Armenian route as a vital guarantee of its broader access to Eurasia

Samyar Rostami, а political observer and senior researcher in international relations

Chris Hedges: The Next Election May Be Our Last

Donald Trump is determined to subvert the midterms. All that can save us, if he succeeds, is a national strike.

Speechless — by Mr Fish

By Chris Hedges

ScheerPost

The Trump White House has put into place a series of mechanisms to fix or invalidate the midterm elections. Congress will not save us. The courts will not save us. Our only hope — should the election be rigged or stolen — is nationwide strikes. Our only hope is to cripple the machinery of commerce and government, although this militancy will be met with savage state repression.

Otherwise, we are doomed. There will be no exit.

If the measures advocated by the Trump administration are implemented, emergency powers will be invoked to assert unprecedented federal control over voting. Federal agents will seize election materials. They have already seized ballots from previous elections.

The U.S. Postal Service will only send ballots to those included on federally approved eligibility lists drawn from state voter rolls. These rolls, subject to citizenship checks, will deny election-mail services entirely in states that refuse the administration’s demands for voter data.

Trump-backed mid-decade gerrymandering has already dismantled Democratic-held districts and created new ones for the Republicans.

Federal ID and citizenship-document requirements will disenfranchise millions of eligible voters, including lower-income Americans who lack access to the required documents and married women whose current names do not match those on their citizenship records.

Federal troops and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — with $113.5 billion in additional funding allocated by Congress through September 2029 — will be deployed to or near polling stations which have a traditional Democratic Party majority. Those branded as “anti-capitalist” and “anti-Christian” or charged with belonging to antifa will be intimidated or blocked from voting.

The Republican majority in the House — regardless of the vote — will use its authority to certify election results to retain power, gaming the Electoral College and refusing to seat newly elected members of the opposition.

Overseeing the massive election fraud will be loyalists seeded by the Trump administration across state and federal election offices.

Early voting in Cleveland, Ohio, Oct. 16, 2020. (THD3 / CC BY-SA 4.0 / Wikimedia Commons)

Trump — who attempted to overturn the 2020 election results and said he would refuse to accept the outcome of the 2024 election if he lost — ruminates about defying the Constitution in order to serve a third term. He has also floated the idea of canceling the upcoming election, telling Reuters “when you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.”

When Volodymyr Zelensky — whose presidential term ended in May 2024 — informed Trump that elections would not be held in Ukraine because of the war, Trump responded, “So you’re saying, during the war you can’t have elections… So, let me just say, three and a half years from now, so you mean if we happen to be in a war with somebody, no more elections? Oh, that’s good.”

Trump told The New York Times in January he regretted not directing the National Guard to seize voting machines after the 2020 election. Trump not only wants to abolish mail-in ballots — Democrats vote by mail in higher numbers than Republicans — but voting machines and tabulators which allow election boards to post results on election night.

Trump laid the groundwork for federal interference in his national address in July on election fraud, charging that the elections are dangerously exposed to “hacking, exploitation, and foreign interference.”

This assault has been decades in the making. It did not begin with Trump.

I warned about the Christian nationalist movement and its latent fascism in my book American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. These Christian fascists are enemies of an open society. They seek to disenfranchise huge segments of the public, demand the deregulation of industry and the elimination of all social services, including public education, public health programs and consumer protection. The only proper tasks for the federal government, they believe, are tax collection, war and domestic security.

These goals are laid out in numbing technical detail in Project 2025.

Power — as in all dictatorships — is to be permanent. It will be configured to enrich the inner circle of Trump and his family, who have made at least $2.3 billion from their crypto currency ventures during Trump’s first year since returning to the presidency. The billionaire class and corporations will continue to pay little or no income tax. They will have no external restraints or oversight as they exploit the citizenry and pollute and poison the earth.

Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, with Trump in Osaka, Japan, June 2019. (White House / Shealah Craighead)

The rest of us, under constant state surveillance and denied legal redress, will be reduced to the status of serfs.

Dissent will be criminalized. The media will be an echo chamber for the dictatorship. Education — from kindergarten to graduate school — will be indoctrination. 

Culture will be reduced to its lowest common denominator: sentimental kitsch. Christian tropes, iconography and symbols will be employed to sacralize white supremacy, capitalism, endless war and empire, while demonizing those on the margins of society.

Trump has already been handed absolute power. In 2024, the Supreme Court granted Trump immunity from prosecution for acts within his “conclusive and preclusive” constitutional authority. In her dissenting opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor charged that as a result of the court’s decision “[i]n every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.”

Trump and his supporters in Silicon Valley are acutely aware that the level of their corruption and disdain for democracy — unlike anything seen in U.S. history — makes them vulnerable if they lose power. They have no intention of allowing this to happen no matter how egregious the constitutional violations. They seek to extinguish the last vestiges of democracy. 

They believe, as PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel wrote in 2009, that “freedom and democracy” are not “compatible.”

Thiel speaking with attendees at the 2022 Converge Tech Summit at The Waste Management Phoenix Open at the Skybar at TPC Scottsdale in Scottsdale, Arizona, in February 2022. (Gage Skidmore / Flickr / CC BY-SA 2.0)

Thiel is sweeping up all our information gleaned from government tax, medical and law enforcement records. This information is being delivered to databases that can be exploited for state control and profit. Thiel and his coterie of technocratic billionaires are implementing the agenda he envisioned 16 years ago: to make technology an “alternative to politics.”

“The populists get the MAGA anti-woke hymn book,” write Mark Medish and Joel McCleary in their “Dancing in the Dark” series in The Spectator on the upcoming elections:

“The lords of the cloud get the contracts and the deregulation; the President gets the adulation, the money, tools to destroy his enemies, and dominance of all forms of media. Each of the partners believes it is cleverly using the others. All of them need the marriage to survive this November and to further consolidate power.”

F.B.I. agents seized original 2020 ballots, ballot images and voter rolls in Georgia. The Justice Department seized 2024 ballots from Michigan. And Chad Bianco, the Sheriff in Riverside County, California, as Medish and McCleary point out, in March “seized some 650,000 ballots on a complaint from a local “election integrity” group that is organizing to replicate the maneuver in a half-dozen more counties this cycle.”

This is a foretaste, I expect, of the widespread seizures of ballots in November.

Presidential Emergency Action Documents (PEADs) which are “pre-drafted emergency orders in case of an attack on the homeland,” await “only a decision and a signature to become operative law by necessity,” Medish and McCleary note, giving Trump unilateral power to suspend civil liberties in a domestic crisis.

First created under President Dwight Eisenhower, the secret directives have since been periodically revised and expanded under successive administrations.

“At least fifty-six of these PEADs exist, by the last credible count,” Medish and McCleary continue. “None has ever been published, leaked, invoked, reviewed by Congress, or tested in any court. Their reported subject matter includes suspension of habeas corpus, martial law, censorship, the detention of citizens ‘considered dangerous,’ [and] the seizure of property.”

The feebleness of legislative and judicial branches of government, coupled with the transformation of federal agencies into appendages of the Trump White House — including the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security — make these institutions unreliable.

We can only save ourselves.

This means shutting the country down.

Millions of us must be prepared to take the streets or the iron doors of fascism will slam shut.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and NPR.  He is the host of show The Chris Hedges Report.

Caitlin Johnstone: 3 Major Gaza Revelations in Israel

New information shows that the public was lied to about the Gaza holocaust, just as it was lied to about every other act of mass-military slaughter in which the U.S. involves itself.

A house in the Be’eri Kibbutz in Israel, destroyed on Oct. 7, 2023. (Kobi Gideon / Government Press Office of Israel / CC BY-SA 3.0)

By Caitlin Johnstone
Caitlin’s Newsletter

The Israeli press has published three significant revelations about the Gaza holocaust, reporting (1) that Benjamin Netanyahu concealed advanced knowledge of the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, (2) that Israel rejected a Hamas offer to release all civilian hostages immediately after Oct. 7, and (3) that according to an IDF drone operator, the Israeli military was intentionally firing on civilians throughout Gaza during its operations in the Palestinian territory.

The first two come from a Haaretz article titled “Revealed: Netanyahu Received an Explicit Warning Days Before Oct. 7. He Didn’t Brief Israel’s Security Chiefs,” which was released ahead of an upcoming Haaretz book about the hostage standoff in Gaza.

Haaretz describes a call between Netanyahu and UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed, citing three foreign senior sources:

“A week and a half before October 7, 2023 the Emirati ruler called Netanyahu from the Presidential Palace in Abu Dhabi and spoke with him for 45 minutes. In that conversation, bin Zayed warned that Hamas’ leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, was planning a major operation against Israel. Bin Zayed expressed concern that the event in question would not only lead to bloodshed but also destabilize the entire region and undermine the Abraham Accords.”

Haaretz reports that rather than pass these warnings on to Israeli national security officials, Netanyahu chose to sit on information which an unnamed Shin Bet official said could have “changed our entire assessment picture.”

Haaretz also notes that Israel had received similar warnings about a coming Hamas attack from Egyptian intelligence, which had been reported earlier.

These are just two items in the mountains upon mountains upon mountains of evidence indicating that powerful people in Israel knowingly allowed Hamas to inflict as much damage as possible on Oct. 7, 2023, in order to advance the murderous ethnic cleansing objectives we’ve seen rolled out in the years since.

Nothing will turn you into a conspiracy theorist faster than learning basic facts about what happened on Oct. 7. But even without knowing those facts it already strains credulity to believe Israel had no advance knowledge of a complex attack which would require extensive open-air training in one of the most heavily surveilled strips of land on our planet. Especially when you look at all the pre-existing military agendas Israel was able to push forward in the aftermath.

Later in that same article, Haaretz quotes a Palestinian politician named Samir Mashharawi describing what Hamas leadership told him during his mediation efforts between Israel and Hamas after Oct. 7:

“’He told me that in the first stage, they had no problem releasing all civilians without anything in return,’ Mashharawi recounts. ‘I swear, those were his exact words: all civilians, without anything in return. They had only one condition: They wanted us to bring in an agreed-upon mediator as quickly as possible, so that negotiations could immediately begin over everything else.’ ”

Mashharawi said Israel rejected the offer. A senior Israeli defense official corroborated this, telling Haaretz:

“The release of the hostages did not even enter the list of war objectives formulated by the government on the night of Oct. 7. Could the proposal have been properly discussed and a decision reached? In substantive terms, the answer is yes. But the prevailing mood was like after Pearl Harbor: We had just suffered a brutal blow, we were in the midst of war, who had the bandwidth to talk about stopping the fighting and starting negotiations now, even if it was to save the lives of dozens of people, whose final number was still unknown?”

So all that hasbara about the hostages and the Bibas kids and how Hamas needed to be destroyed because they were refusing to release innocent civilian captives was complete bunk from the very beginning. Hamas offered to release them with no conditions but the opening of communication lines. Israel refused, because what they wanted was to steal more Palestinian land. It was never about the hostages, and anyone who said it was is a liar.

Netanyahu with photo of Bibas baby. (Israeli PM Office/Screenshot)

Lastly, a separate report in Hebrew from Haaretz quotes an Israeli air force reserve major describing how IDF policies and culture ensured the deaths of large numbers of civilians. Here are a few quotes, translated by Israeli-American political analyst Shaiel Ben-Ephraim:

“1) He was involved in the March 23, 2025 paramedic killings in Tel al-Sultan, Rafah and said, ‘You could clearly tell these were rescue vehicles even as fire was opened on them from the ground. For no apparent reason, the force on the ground charged the convoy. They shot the first vehicle, the medical personnel got out, hid behind the ambulances and begged for their lives, and the soldiers shot them one after another.’

2) On how the yellow line was used as an excuse to kill innocent people: ‘The Palestinians didn’t know it existed, and the Air Force wasn’t always updated either. From the perspective of a farmer walking onto his own land — he has no idea he’s stepping into an area the IDF suddenly decided is a fire zone. And then all kinds of retroactive justifications started coming up. “He came for an arms deal.” “He touched the ground, maybe he’s planting an explosive.” To me it looked like they were trying to incriminate people with no intelligence and no proof.’ ”

3) On how all morals were lost in Gaza: ‘The feeling was that something tore, everyone had already become cynical about death, you can’t understand it from the outside. It’s not just fatigue, it’s an erosion of morality, of responsibility, of the sense that someone is still managing the event. Very quickly this whole business of “collateral damage” disappeared from the considerations. They fire on anyone they see. The atmosphere started to be like the stands at a soccer match. The way you shout at a player, “Yalla, score,” that’s how they shout at a soldier, ‘Kill him, strike him.’”

Like the other revelations, this report further discredits the lies the public was sold about Israel’s reasons for its atrocities in Gaza. All those lies about how Israel is taking extraordinary measures to protect civilian life in Gaza and only kills civilians because Hamas “hides behind human shields” has been thoroughly discredited by copious amounts of evidence that Israel was going out of its way to kill noncombatants throughout the course of the onslaught.

The world was lied to about the Gaza holocaust, just like it was lied to about every other act of mass military slaughter that the U.S. involves itself in. Please carry these lessons into the future.

Caitlin Johnstone’s work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following her on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud, YouTube, or throwing some money into her tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy her books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff she publishes is to subscribe to the mailing list at her website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything she publishes.  For more info on who she is, where she stands and what she’s trying to do with her platform, click here. All works are co-authored with her American husband Tim Foley.