Armenia was one of some 60 countries reportedly invited by Trump last week to join the new body which was originally supposed to deal with the conflict in Gaza in line with a UN Security Conflict Resolution adopted in November. Yerevan officially accepted the invitation earlier this week.
The signing ceremony took place in the Swiss town of Davos on the sidelines of the annual World Economic Forum held there. It was attended by the leaders and other senior representatives of Bahrain, Morocco, Argentina, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belgium, Bulgaria, Egypt, Hungary, Indonesia, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Mongolia, Pakistan, Paraguay, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and Uzbekistan.
None of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council other than the United States were in attendance. Other major Western nations such as Germany and Italy were also conspicuously absent from the ceremony, highlighting concerns that Trump’s initiative could undermine the work of the United Nations.
“We’ll work with many others, including the United Nations,” Trump said at the ceremony, clearly alluding to those concerns.
Trump again claimed to have ended multiple international conflicts, including the Armenian-Azerbaijani dispute, since returning to power one year ago.
The U.S. president hosted last August talks between Pashinian and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev at the White House which resulted in the finalizing of an Armenian-Azerbaijani peace treaty. Azerbaijan has since continued to make the signing of the treaty conditional on a change of Armenia’s constitution and the opening of an extraterritorial corridor to its Nakhichevan exclave.
