What if Azerbaijan seizes the Zangezur corridor by force?
Azerbaijan forcibly taking the Zangezur corridor and drawing in Iran/Russia is a Caspian-energy and defense-spend event: the actionable legs are European gas (Azeri TAP/SGC supply) and primes like Lockheed/Northrop on a re-arm read, not broad equity beta. Rhymes with the 2020 and 2023 Nagorno-Karabakh wars, which spiked regional risk but left global assets calm. Transmission: Azerbaijan supplies EU gas via the Southern Corridor; Iran opposes losing its Armenia land border. Forward: an Iran-Russia counter-move is the genuinely new escalation vector versus prior rounds.
Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.
The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 6–18 months horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a risk-off shock. Azerbaijan breaks the 2025 peace framework and invades Syunik to take the corridor militarily, drawing Iranian and Russian counter-moves. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Defense spending ▲ · Geopolitical risk ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.