Caucasus transit corridor renamed for the President; the development rights run 99 years.

The President of Armenia and the President of Azerbaijan came to the White House on Friday and initialed a peace declaration intended to formally end one of the longest active conflicts on the European periphery. This is, to be clear, a real and serious thing. Three decades of war over Nagorno-Karabakh. Tens of thousands of dead. The U.S. mediation that produced this signing is a credit, narrowly, to the diplomatic team that produced it.

The corridor connecting mainland Azerbaijan to its Nakhchivan exclave, across a strip of southern Armenia, has now been formally renamed the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity. It is, the State Department release confirms, abbreviated TRIPP. The development rights are guaranteed to the United States for 99 years.

This is the structural part. We are now naming foreign infrastructure after the sitting president, in writing, in joint declarations co-signed by the heads of state of two foreign countries, and the press release goes out under the seal of the United States Department of State.

There is no precedent for this. The closest analogue would be the renaming of foreign places after Stalin during his lifetime, which is the analogue we will now have to keep mentioning every time the topic comes up, because the analogue exists.

A serious country, with a serious diplomatic tradition, signs a serious peace agreement and names the road after a saint, a poet, or the river it crosses. A serious country does not allow the language of its own State Department to read like the bottom of a casino brochure. The name will outlast this administration. It will be embarrassing in 2032. It will be embarrassing in 2055. The 99-year clock has started.

The peace, narrowly, is good. The branding is permanent.

Calmly documenting the decline.