Transport corridors are increasingly discussed in the language of large numbers: five million tonnes, ten million, fifteen million. Maps are drawn, agreements are signed, new names enter the political vocabulary, and expected cargo volumes are sometimes announced long before the first commercial shipment has tested whether the route actually works. My years in transport logistics taught me to begin from a different point: is there a real cargo that has an economic reason to use this route? That simple question remains, in my view, one of the best tests of whether we are looking at a genuine commercial corridor or merely at infrastructure with strategic potential.
A case from my own professional experience still shapes the way I look at the transport geography of the Caucasus today.
Tabriz ? Georgia ? Ukraine
In 2016, we were working on the transportation of polymer products, including polypropylene, from Iran to the Ukrainian market. The cargo originated in the Tabriz area, while the client already had an established logistics scheme relying on the Turkish direction and Turkish ports for onward movement toward Ukraine. Our task was not geopolitical and had nothing to do with proving that one country was preferable to another. It was a normal commercial problem: redesign the chain, calculate the full cost and determine whether a more efficient solution existed.
On the map, the Turkish option appeared logical. It was geographically shorter and operationally familiar. Yet when we calculated the entire chain, including waiting time and the costs generated by bottlenecks along the existing route, the result changed. We developed a Georgian solution in which the cargo moved from Tabriz via Trkiye and Batumi to Tbilisi, where transloading took place, before continuing toward Ukraine. The route involved more kilometres and an additional logistics operation, but the total transportation cost was still approximately 35-40% lower than under the previous Turkish-port scheme.
That difference is important because it shows what maps often fail to capture. Distance is only one component of logistics economics. Waiting time, border performance, transit charges, administrative restrictions, carrier availability, customs procedures, transloading, insurance, backhaul possibilities and predictability can easily outweigh several hundred kilometres of additional road. In our case, the geographically shorter option contained a bottleneck whose cost accumulated not only in money but also in time. Once the entire chain was measured rather than simply the distance, the longer route became the better route.
The detailed mechanics of this shipment are described in my book Digital Logistics (Transport) in the case ‘Transit: Iran-Ukraine,’ beginning on page 163. But the principle is more important than the exact calculation: a transport corridor cannot be evaluated with a ruler; it must be evaluated through the total performance of the logistics chain.
The same case later demonstrated something even more valuable. One continuation of the Georgian route relied on Upper Lars and transit through Russia toward Ukraine. When that option became problematic, the logic of moving the cargo through Georgia did not disappear. Instead, the continuation changed: Georgia’s Black Sea access provided another possibility, with Poti and Batumi becoming part of the maritime geography through which cargo could continue toward Ukraine.
This transformed what had initially been a cost-optimisation exercise into a lesson about optionality and resilience. A strong transport system is not simply one that works efficiently under normal conditions. Its deeper value becomes visible when a border becomes congested, a transit regime changes, waiting times grow, a political risk materialises or one transport leg becomes commercially unattractive. The relevant question then becomes whether cargo can move to another option without destroying the economics of the entire shipment.
That is where geography begins to become resilience. The Georgian route proved useful not because it represented one perfect line from origin to destination, but because once cargo entered the Georgian logistics space it could be redirected. The value was therefore not merely in transit, but in the possibility of reorganising the chain when circumstances changed.
This is also why I think Georgia’s strategic position should be understood more broadly than its location on any individual corridor. A cargo entering Georgia can, depending on commercial and geopolitical conditions, continue north toward Russia, west across the Black Sea toward Ukraine and European markets, southwest through Trkiye, east through Azerbaijan and the Caspian toward Central Asia, or south through Armenia toward Iran, the Persian Gulf, Iraq and the wider Middle East. Not every direction will be commercially viable for every commodity, and it does not need to be. The value of a hub lies precisely in having several realistic choices.
In the Tabriz case, Tbilisi performed this function on a relatively small scale. Cargo arrived from the south, an operational intervention took place, and the chain could then be reorganised according to cost, accessibility and the conditions of the moment. Georgia was therefore providing more than kilometres of transit territory; it was providing a point at which logistics could be redistributed.
A corridor connects points.
That distinction matters because Georgia’s strongest long-term position may not be to maximise its dependence on one named corridor, but to increase the number of commercially viable connections available from its territory.
The Caucasus Was Never a Single Line
There is also a historical reason to look at the region through this network logic. The work of historian Emil Avdaliani is particularly useful because it challenges the simplified representation of the Silk Roads as one continuous East-West route. In his analysis of Georgia and the Silk Roads, Avdaliani notes that trade routes through Georgia operated both North-South, continuing toward Armenia and Iran, and East-West.
His later academic work describes a much broader regional network linking Dvin, Barda, Ganja, Tbilisi, Ani, Trebizond, Ahlat, Tabriz and other major commercial centres. His book The Caucasian Silk Roads and Eurasian Connectivity, 500-1405, presents the Caucasus as an important connectivity space linking the Eurasian steppes with the Middle East and the Black Sea with Inner Asia.
This historical perspective suggests that the familiar question – is the Caucasus primarily East-West or North-South? – may itself be too restrictive. Historically, the region’s strength was multivectoral. Routes intersected, competed, disappeared, returned and changed according to security, politics and commercial incentives. In modern logistics language, that resembles a network far more than a single corridor.
This matters for today’s infrastructure debate because a network is inherently more valuable when it creates alternatives. The strategic advantage of a country located inside such a system is not to place all of its expectations on one line, but to expand the number of economically functioning connections around it.
Armenia: An Existing North-South Logic
This brings us naturally to Armenia. Much of today’s political discussion is focused on East-West connectivity and particularly on TRIPP. The Armenia-U.S. Implementation Framework published in January 2026 describes multimodal connectivity across Armenian territory linking mainland Azerbaijan with the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic and creating a link in the wider Trans-Caspian Trade Route. The document also speaks about strengthening Armenia’s position as a regional transit and economic hub.
TRIPP is therefore an important regional initiative. But the current attention surrounding it can create the impression that Armenia’s transport geography is being invented from the beginning. It is not. Long before the present TRIPP configuration, Armenia had already developed a clear North-South vision centred on connectivity between Iran, Armenia, Georgia and the Black Sea.
In April 2021, the Armenian Ministry of Foreign Affairs hosted the fifth expert meeting on the draft agreement establishing the Persian Gulf-Black Sea International Transport and Transit Corridor, with participation from Armenia, Iran, Georgia, Bulgaria and Greece. The same broader logic later appeared in Armenia’s Crossroads of Peace concept, which envisages greater transport capacity between the Black Sea and the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman through Armenia while simultaneously supporting East-West connectivity. Significantly, the official Armenian formulation itself speaks of the region as a potential transit hub between East and West, North and South.
That wording deserves attention because it is much broader than any single corridor. It reflects essentially the same multivector logic visible in the historical Caucasus and familiar from practical logistics: the stronger system is not necessarily the one with one dominant route, but the one in which several directions can function at the same time.
TRIPP as One Vector Within a Larger System
The distinction, therefore, is not between TRIPP and North-South as mutually exclusive choices. TRIPP represents a relatively new institutional and geopolitical configuration; the North-South logic does not. Connecting Iran with Armenia, Georgia, and the Black Sea has existed in Armenian transport policy and regional diplomacy for years, and the infrastructure supporting that axis continues to develop. In June 2026, Armenia was still advancing the Kajaran Tunnel and the Sisian-Kajaran section of the North-South Road Corridor, both critical elements of the country’s southern transport axis.
The more interesting strategic question for Armenia is therefore whether East-West and North-South connectivity can reinforce one another instead of competing for attention. TRIPP can potentially strengthen Armenia’s East-West role, while the axis Iran ? Armenia ? Georgia ? Black Sea offers another function: access to part of the Iranian market and a potential connection between the Persian Gulf region and the Black Sea.
This should not necessarily be framed as an alternative to TRIPP. It is strategically more useful to understand it as another vector inside a wider network. For a relatively small transit economy, that distinction is fundamental. Being one section of a cargo flow generated by other economies can certainly create value; being connected to several independent directions creates additional strategic flexibility and resilience.
There is, however, a qualification that applies equally to TRIPP, North-South, the Middle Corridor and almost every other transport initiative in the region: infrastructure itself does not create a commercial corridor. A road can be completed, a tunnel opened and an international agreement signed, but none of these guarantees that cargo will actually arrive.
The Iran-Armenia-Georgia-Black Sea hypothesis should therefore be tested in the most practical possible way. Take a real commodity and a real producer in Iran. Calculate the movement through Armenia and Georgia, including both borders, customs procedures, carrier cost, transit charges, insurance, waiting time, possible transloading and the Black Sea leg. Then compare the resulting total logistics cost, transit time, reliability and predictability with the available alternatives through Trkiye, Azerbaijan or other routes. Repeat the same calculation for another cargo and then another.
Only after those exercises do forecasts of five, ten or fifteen million tonnes become meaningful.
Cargo does not move because a corridor has acquired a political name. It moves because somebody calculates cost, time, reliability, predictability and alternatives and decides that one chain is better than another.
Our Tabriz case demonstrated precisely that logic. The Turkish route was geographically shorter, yet waiting time and bottlenecks changed its actual economics. The Georgian route involved more kilometres and transloading, yet reduced transportation costs by roughly 35-40%. When the Russian continuation became problematic, a Black Sea continuation remained available. What made the system valuable was not the perfection of one route, but the existence of alternatives.
The Caucasus as a Network
That is why I believe the Caucasus should increasingly be analysed not as a competition between individual lines on a map, but as an interconnected logistics system. For Georgia, the strategic opportunity lies in deepening its function as a distribution and logistics hub connecting the Black Sea, Russia, Trkiye, the Caspian, Central Asia, Armenia, Iran and the wider Middle East. For Armenia, the opportunity is to ensure that new East-West projects do not push an older and potentially equally important North-South function out of strategic focus. For the region as a whole, resilience may ultimately depend less on discovering one dominant corridor than on maintaining several commercially viable routes capable of supporting or substituting for one another as conditions change.
This is also why the historical experience of the Caucasus remains relevant. The Silk Roads were never one road; they were networks that changed as political and economic conditions changed. Modern logistics follows the same basic logic. Road and rail, land and sea, East-West and North-South, primary routes and alternatives are not necessarily competitors. Their combined value lies in the options they create.
TRIPP can be one element of that system. It does not have to become the system itself.
The stronger model for the Caucasus is multivectoral: a geography in which cargo can enter, be redistributed and continue through several commercially rational directions. Ultimately, that is what transforms infrastructure into connectivity and transit territory into a logistics hub.
And perhaps the simplest test remains the one with which this article began: not how many millions of tonnes a map promises, but whether a real cargo, facing real costs and real bottlenecks, chooses the route.