A plan is taking shape in which the United States would back a joint venture to build and operate a transit corridor along Armenia’s border with Iran, tying together railways, pipelines, power and communications lines for 99 years, with Azerbaijan granted uninterrupted commercial access. Armenia insists the deal preserves its territorial integrity and does not entail ceding land, while the US would oversee security through arrangements with top private operators, leaving Armenian authorities with ways to respond to incidents. The arrangement sits amid broader Turkish infrastructure ambitions, connects to Iran and the Azerbaijani exclave of Nakhchivan, and is described as reducing dependence on Russia even as Moscow remains physically present on Armenia’s borders. Skepticism about Washington’s grasp of local realities lingers, but after months of talks and a White House ceremony for initial signings, the sides appear closer to a formal peace process, even as details remain murky and Armenian fears of further concessions persist amid ongoing pro-war propaganda.

From a hardcore libertarian vantage, this is a telling test case of how state power seeks to map complex, fragile peace into a marketable security-umbrella held together by a distant guarantor. The core irony is that the more explicit the aim is to minimize direct state coercion in daily economic life, the more the plan requires a state-backed security architecture and cross-border consent that essentially externalizes sovereignty to a multinational, government-anchored project. Hayek reminds us that knowledge about local conditions, incentives, risks, and cultural nuances is dispersed and cannot be centrally assembled by a distant authority. The blueprint pretends to harness the efficiencies of private operation within a carefully designed security net, but the underlying reality is a sophisticated coordination problem that only a decentralized, price-driven tapestry of voluntary exchanges and local experimentation can solve. A 99-year lease of strategic corridors, even if couched as a private-public partnership, embeds a long horizon into the hands of political actors who can rewrite terms, re-allocate risk, or pull political strings in moments of crisis. The lesson from Hayek is clear: planless markets, not grand schemes, tend to adapt better to shifting realities; the temptation to “secure” peace through a comprehensive infrastructure contract is precisely the kind of centralized planning that Hayek warned against.

Nozick would push this further toward a test of legitimacy grounded in individual rights and voluntary transfer. If Armenia and Azerbaijan enter into a mutual agreement that they both freely consent to, one could argue that kinds of private property exchanges and contractual arrangements are within the ambit of voluntary choice. But once the arrangement relies on the state to oversee security and to negotiate terms on behalf of others, it crosses into the territory of coercive operations that Nozick treats as part and parcel of a minimal state’s monopoly on force. The 99-year frame almost certainly undermines a clean, future restitution of rights or a clean reversion to a truly self-governing order. Nozick’s utopia emphasizes rights-respecting, voluntary exchanges and a “night-watchman” state that protects those rights without founding itself on long-standing commitments that can be weaponized by political actors. By leaning on a powerful sponsor—the United States—to enforce safety and to arbitrate disputes, the plan risks turning private enterprise into a derivative of state power, not a genuinely private trust that protects individuals’ liberties against coercion.

Rand’s lens would insist on an even stricter boundary between legitimate rights protection and state coercion. She would likely critique the plan as a camouflage for a proto-empire of intervention, where security arrangements become tools of political influence and where cross-border commerce is tethered to the capabilities and agendas of a hegemonic actor. In Rand’s view, the rightful domain of the state is the protection of individual rights, not the management of cross-border infrastructure through a security framework that depends on preventive force, negotiated privileges, and the use of national power to alter outcomes in a fragment of a region. The implication is not simply a critique of a particular deal, but a warning about how even seemingly “limited” state involvement corrodes the moral primacy of rights-claimants and incentivizes rent-seeking, crony arrangements, and propaganda-driven rationales for expansive state presence. Rand would want to strip the enterprise of any coercive scaffolding and insist on voluntary, mutually beneficial arrangements governed by private institutions, arbitration, and the rule of law—without a standing foreign guarantor.

Taken together, the libertarian triad of Hayek-Nozick-Rand suggests a skeptical verdict: a plan that seeks to reduce one geopolitical power’s sway by tying a region to another through a 99-year security-laden corridor is likely to slide toward a state-managed, rent-seeking arrangement rather than a pure expression of voluntary cooperation and private property rights. The broader longing for regional stability is legitimate, but the price is sovereignty eroded through a politics of guarantees and guardians. The preferable path, from this libertarian standpoint, would be to foster free association, private defense and arbitration, and a framework that minimizes coercive state involvement while maximizing voluntary, competitive coordination among Armenians, Azerbaijanis, Iranians, and private actors—so that peace, when it comes, rests on the quiet, robust order that emerges from the free choices of individuals rather than the grand promises of a security structure backed by a distant power.