PART II: Georgia Accused: Unpacking Washington’s Sudden Shift on Tbilisi
Almost immediately after Georgia Dream’s (GD) win in 2012, Georgia was faced with a dilemma of whether to establish a Truth Commission as a means to achieve closure for the crimes committed under Saakashvili. As it turned out, Georgians had wrongly hoped that under the tutelage of the Western world, political terror and truth commissions to investigate mass crimes would be a thing of the past. Thanks to Frank Fukuyama’s “end of history” they thought, it would be the American-led world order that would usher in an era of perpetual peace and security. And yet, it was none other than the US-backed government in Georgia that committed horrific acts of violations against democracy, human rights, judicial independence, and most critically, jeopardized the national security of the Georgian state that brought back the need for a truth commission. This tragic irony would not be lost on the Georgian people.
Georgians have once again been faced with the harsh reality that in relations among states, there are no loyalties. In what seemed like a convenient case of political amnesia, Washington imposed sanctions on the current members of the Georgian Dream government, as though the nine years under UNM rule had never happened. Turning a blind eye toward the past misdeeds of the UNM, Washington displayed a shocking and blatant disregard for both the Georgian state and the Georgian people.
The post-Saakashvili government under GD is accused of deviating from democracy and pivoting to Russia. The authors of these accusations are Congressman Joe WilsonRepublican of South Carolina and the former Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken. Apparently, the thirty-year dedication, commitment and loyalty of the Georgian state to become part of the American-led world order in the middle of the South Caucasus was not enough. Never mind that Georgia has been offering itself to the collective West on a silver platter throughout its early and modern history without any takers. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Georgia was at the forefront in the struggle against the Czarist and later Soviet Empires, even joining in arms with the far away Japan to resist the Czarist occupation. And yet, in the twenty-first century, it seems that Georgia’s struggle to join the west has been repaid by ” having its strategic partnership suspended” by the US “ itself.
That there is hypocrisy in the decision to impose sanctions on GD is obvious. While UNM’s autocratic regime during its nine-years received a mere slap on the wrist from Washington and Brussels, the GD, which was democratically elected for the fourth time by the Georgian people, has been subjected to sanctions.
In stark contrast to the previous government’s policies, GD effectively ended systemic torture, illegal property confiscations, and the draconian plea-bargaining system that had been central to Saakashvili’s “good governance” agenda. Furthermore, the acquittal rate has drastically increased, a remarkable change from the draconian 99% guilty verdicts seen under the previous administration.
Furthermore, the violent crackdown on protesters on November 7 , 2007 and the shocking raid by Saakashvili’s special forces on the opposition TV station Imedi during a live broadcast—aimed at shutting down the network—are now a part of the collective memory of Georgia. Nothing like that has occurred during GD’s twelve-years in power. But facts seem to matter little to political ideologues in Washington.
This raises a fundamental question: Would there be any doubt that if GD’s police forces were to raid an opposition TV station today, Washington and Brussels would swiftly condemn GD and call for the government to step down? No: There would be calls for prosecuting Ivanishvili at the Hague. However, undemocratic actions under the UNM government have been conveniently forgotten in Western power circles. Those leading the charge in Congress to overturn the results of Georgia’s democratic elections and impose unjustified sanctions on GD have clearly chosen not to bother with confronting the facts of the Saakashvili regime.
Still more, if GD is truly as horrific as they claim, why do the Georgian people continue to elect it? Perhaps they should consult with their EU counterparts in Strasbourg, France, who have thoroughly investigated and proven the crimes of their “golden boy”.
All this is not to say that GD has not made mistakes. For example, during a speech before the October 28, 2024 parliamentary elections, GD’s founder and the honorary chairman, Bidzina Ivanishvili suggested that the UNM face a “Nuremberg” style trial to finally bring justice to Georgia. This type of rhetoric only deepens the polarization within Georgia and increases distrust in Washington towards Ivanishvili and his party. Even during recent protests, it must be stated that there were instances when GD used excessive force against demonstrations.
But it can be said with confidence that these incidents are not the result of systemic terror. Neither can the reaction from the current law enforcement authorities be rationally compared to the draconian methods used when Saakashvili’s police dispersed demonstrators during the infamous November 7 riots, which is regarded as the worst political crisis in Georgia in the past decade. Or consider the brutality of Saakashvili’s response to the riots that took place on May 26, 2011.
Nevertheless, GD must conduct thorough investigations of those officers who might be responsible for applying excessive force. Yet to use GD’s political methods, including its polarizing rhetoric, as a reason to impose sanctions, with potentially devastating effects on the economic well-being of the Georgian population, lacks justification.
Essentially, what Washington has shown to Georgia and its people is that questioning the “wisdom” of liberal hegemony is off-limits. Even if one assumes that the foreign policy establishment in Washington truly cares about human rights or the allegations of electoral fraud during last year’s October 26 parliamentary elections ,they will need to do a much better job in presenting and uncovering actual evidence that the elections were indeed “fixed”.
A further testament to the fact that no significant fraud took place, is Pascal Allizard’s, the French Senator, letter to the French Foreign Minister, in which Mr. Allizard largely endorsed the elections results, after he had previously expressed criticism. Furthermore, “ OSCE/ODIHR assessed the October 26 parliamentary elections as “competitive” and “legitimate”.
While some violations did occur, the OSCE mission endorsed the overall results of the elections, and provided recommendations for the GD to follow in order to bring Georgia’s electoral standards closer to the EU’s requirements. So far, the collective west has failed to prove that the results — in which the GD received 54 percent of the vote, are based on false data. Unless the collective west shows the Georgian people that their government “fixed” the election, and that the opposition actually won, any discussion of sanctions will be viewed as politically motivated.
That Washington’s political elite are behind these baseless accusations is further evidenced by the fact that the western hostility towards GD is a rather new phenomenon. Washington and Brussels showed support for the GD government in 2012. As late as 2024, when relations were already strained between Tbilisi and Washington, The Atlantic Council’s report: “Freedom and Prosperity Around the World” rated Georgia as “free” placing it ahead of Poland and Ukraine. Leading experts on Georgia, Neil McFarlane and Stephen Jones, issued a report in which they pointed out that “Georgia, despite the immense challenges it faced, has become the strongest and most stable democracy in the former USSR (leaving aside the Baltic republics).”
In the years since GD came to power, Georgia has signed an association agreement with the European Union, Georgian citizens have been granted visa-free travel to the Schengen Area, and the country has obtained EU candidate status. However, it is important to point out that thanks to the collective effort of Georgian NGOs, largely supported by western funds, the EU did not extend membership status to Georgia back in 2002. Instead, it offered the same status to Ukraine and Moldova, claiming that Georgia required “further reform in areas of governance and justice.”” The refusal to extend membership status to Georgia in June 2022 was puzzling, given that the EU had already made a favorable “assessment” on Georgia, and even placed it ahead of Ukraine and Moldova. Even more shockingly, both the “ Corruption Perception Index and “Rule of Law Index” , respectively, placed Georgia ahead of Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary.
What all this indicates is, despite the fact that GD enjoyed political recognition from Brussels and Washington, the west continued to perceive GD and its founder as Russian stooges. It is this unwillingness of the west to tolerate any government, even a democratically elected one like GD, that does not blindly follow directives from Washington that has led to the gradual alienation of GD by turning it into a “pro-Russian” pariah.
GD refuses to open the “second front” and resists NGO onslaught
The Foundations of this rift between Tbilisi on the one hand, and Brussels and Washington on the other, can be traced back to events that unfolded in 2023, when GD claimed that certain forces associated with the former UNM egged on the government to open the second front against Russia to help Ukraine. The political scandal that followed shined a spotlight on then US Ambassador to Georgia, Kelly Degnan, who vehemently denied it. According to Petre Mamradze, a former advisor to the governments of Saakashvili and Shevardnadze, EU and the US officials openly demanded that Georgia supply old Soviet-era arms to Ukraine. It became immediately clear to the members of the GD government that if Georgia accepted such an offer, it would have yielded catastrophic results for Georgia’s statehood. Nevertheless, GD had already shown the political will to support Ukraine and its western partners. In further documenting this Mamradze stated the following:
“GD voted in the Council of Europe to stop Russia’s membership, then voted to
expel Russia from the Council of Europe in 2022, then voted in the U.N. General
Assembly to condemn Russia for the invasion. … They did even a crazy thing —
GD and 34 UNM deputies asked the ICC to start a case against Putin as a war
criminal. Neither Azerbaijan nor Armenia ever voted against Russia. They either
abstained or walked out”.
Still, this pro-Ukrainian effort on the part of GD was not enough to satisfy the warmongers in Washington and Brussels.
But it was GD’s introduction of the law On Registration of Foreign Agents that eventually paved the way towards sanctions. In his comprehensive report on Georgia titled, “The West and Georgia’s Crises” Anatol Lieven of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, provides a detailed account of the controversial law, which resulted in mass protests. According to Lieven, protestors and their western supporters did not have “substantive” claims that the law was indeed adopted from Russia’s anti foreign agent law. Lieven, and his co-authors, Almut Rochanowski and Artin DerSimonian, argue that the West almost immediately picked up and ran with the “moniker” that the opposition slapped on it, the “Russian Law”. Lieven et al, present strong evidence that the reason the GD proposed the law harks back to the beginning of the early days of Georgia’s independence from the Soviet Union.
Post-Soviet Georgia had become a breeding ground for the Western-funded NGO industry. Gradually, the NGO sector became so powerful that it created conditions to overthrowthe government by influencing electoral outcomes in Georgia. In addition to this, there has also been a deeply entrenched financial incentive to keep the foreign agents law from passing. Those who “succeed” in the NGO sector in Georgia, get a chance to study in the west. Simply put, in poor countries such as Georgia NGOs on the ground with their western donor partners have created opportunities for upward social mobility. However, this has hardly helped to create a well-functioning civil society in Georgia. Unlike in western countries, where NGOs face checks and balances to keep them from interfering in politics , the Georgian NGO sector has been enjoying an unfettered infusion of money and political support from its western partners, providing it with outsized influence over domestic politics in Georgia. What has contributed to the hollowing out of Georgian state institutions has been the neoliberal state policy which in turn has created a breeding ground for the unchecked proliferation of the NGO and non-profit sector in Georgia. Here, a few more points are in order: According to the Asian Development bank survey 2017 public opinion survey,” 23 percent of the Georgian population trusted CSOs, 10 percent fully distrusted them, and 39 percent did not express any opinion one way or the other”. Moreover, Stephen Jones points out, “Civil society in Georgia is both strong and weak. It’s very visible, and we hear it in the West — that’s important. On the other hand, it doesn’t have that much support in Georgian society as a whole.
Lastly, the hypocrisy of the western supporters of Georgia’s NGO sector becomes clear when considering the context in which local NGOs in Georgia are being encouraged to participate in mass protests against the government’s proposed ‘foreign agent’ law. While these protests were taking place, it was reported that the European Union was preparing its own version of a foreign agent law, which would, among other things, target NGOs. Additionally, both the UK and Canada were working on similar bills.
Georgia’s economy also came under pressure. Much to the chagrin of US and EU officials, GD refused to impose sanctions on Russia. Considering the steady economic growth in Georgia during the GD government , this decision should be hardly surprising for any sensible policy maker either in Washington or in Brussels. According to Ian Proud, the former British diplomat, Georgia’s economy has grown by 5.2%, 6.2%; GDP per capita has increased by 79%. According to the World Bank, poverty decreased from 70.6% to 40.1% between 2010 and 2023. Furthermore, Georgia has proven that it can achieve economic growth domestically, thus defying the commonly held view that its economic growth could only be guaranteed with massive influx of western capital. More broadly, this is also a sign that Georgia is unwilling to wait on promises of investments from its American partners. One telling example of this is the failed investment in the Black Sea port of Anaklia. Much to the chagrin of the US, and more specifically to the then secretary state, Mike Pompeo, after years of seeking western investors and resulting legal battles, GD decided to bring in China as a major investor in the development of this strategically important port.
Finally, given Georgia’s small and fragile economy, no amount of sanctions would have made a dent on Russia’s ability to conduct its “special military operation” Ukraine. Even worse, Georgia was hardly the only country in the region who had refused to impose sanctions on Russia. Turkey also maintained a firm neutrality policy between the west and Russia by refusing to impose sanctions. The following is a quote from the then Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili that captured the political mood at the time:
“The European Union trades with Russia in just four days, as much as we trade in a year. Where is the logic when we are called to introduce sanctions against Russia? Did anyone impose sanctions on Russia because of our war? No one in the world made a formal reaction. Where is the logic of, ‘Our war is not a war’ but in Ukraine it is”?
Garibashvili’s clear allusion to Georgia’s 2008 war with Russia underscores the prevalent sense of war-weariness within Georgia as a whole. It further highlights a significant shift: just as the West conveniently overlooked the ‘Five-Day War’ or the ‘August War’—a conflict that nearly ended Georgia’s statehood—this time, GD government chose not to fall into the same trap set by the West.
Everything returns to its rightful place
The great irony of the neoconservative project in Georgia is the fact that neoconservatism in America has intellectual ties with Trotskyism. Making this historic fact a part of the social discourse in the US would most certainly serve as an irritant to the neocon gospel, especially given its political alliance with the conservative religious-philosophic outlookin the American body politic.
Fortunately, the Georgian body politic does not suffer from the same limitations when discussing the roots of neoconservatism. In Georgia, the fact that the “neo-con” ideology traces its roots to Trotskyism is frequently discussed. Although delving deeper into this issue is outside the scope of this report, it is briefly worth mentioning that the neoconservative movement would have had a better chance for establishing a lasting presence in Georgia if it had considered the fact that Georgia is a conservative, Orthodox Christian nation. By contrast, one of the key reasons for Donald Trump’s popularity in Georgia is that he is perceived as the president who has reduced the neoconservative and neoliberal establishment’s influence within Georgia. For Georgian conservatives, Trump is seen as the president who reclaimed conservatism from Washington’s neoconservative claque, by reconnecting it to the socio-cultural fabric of everyday Americans.
More broadly, to Georgian citizens, Trump is the guardian of Christianity and conservative social values that they feel have been under assault from the liberal-leftist “woke” and globalist powers. For them, it makes little political difference whether it is Latin/Roman or Protestant Christianity that stands firm against this assault. Hence, even though George W. Bush’s Republican party was profoundly Christian, and had the support of the traditional evangelical base, the Georgian conservative establishment perceived it as having been hijacked by the “neoconservative international” with its strict adherence to militarist and universalist dogma of the Wolfowitz Doctrine.
Noam Chomsky captured this dogmatic marriage of Christian faith with the US foreign policy when he provided a detailed account of a conversation between the then French President Jacques Chirac and Bush, during which Bush discussed an obscure passage from the Bible of “Gog and Magog” to imply that god would soon be at war with his enemies in Iraq. The implication of Chomsky’s story was to describe Bush’s desire to “cleanse” Iraq of evil, and to demonstrate the profound dangers of such thinking.
The point here is not that there was a scarcity of Christianity in the Bush White House, or that Georgian society would not have gobbled it all up if Bush had only shrewdly applied it to his relations with Saakashvili, but that the Bush foreign policy team applied a neoconservative internationalism that combined strong social engineering, universalism and militarism that evoked visceral feelings among Georgians that this was neither a democratic nor a Christian conservatism. It seemed instead a concerted effort to turn Georgia into a regional base for Trotskyist style permanent révolution against Russia. If Trump manages to insulate his administration from neoconservative universalism and militarism, even partially, then Georgia’s relationship with the US will stand a better chance of improving.
However, a change that will most certainly guarantee better relations between Tbilisi and Washington, would be President Trump’s embrace of a realist foreign policy to navigate our new multipolar world. The shift from unipolarity to multipolarity has affected the regional geopolitics of the South Caucasus. Trump’s campaign promise and his current efforts as president to end the Russo-Ukrainian war, as well as his reluctance to pursue traditional American adventurism in the Middle East [Lasha, he seems now to be threatening to return to Middle East adventurism with the bombing of Yemen and threats against Iran—which is worrying], make it manifestly clear that Trump recognizes that the multipolar world order has returned. Accordingly, Trump sees China as a possible bridge between the US and Russia in negotiations over Ukraine. Considering that the Trump administration is engaged in a trade war with China, the possibility of launching a fruitful dialogue with Beijing to resolve the Russo-Ukrainian war is slim to none. However, what this shows is that Trump might be willing to exercise pragmatism if it may create realistic chances to bring the conflict to an end. . At the very least he is attempting to marginalize the sinister neocon influence on American statecraft.
That the conditions for sustaining the liberal international order led by the US are no longer conducive to maintaining American primacy of the post-Cold War era will soon be apparent in the new geopolitical order being shaped by the US and Russia in ending the war in Ukraine. In this new arrangement, Ukraine will be the main loser, as it faces a division of its territory by a hostile power. Its national economic wealth is up for grabs as leverage for negotiations between Russia and America. In other words, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022 ended the sovereignty of that country as the world has known it since the collapse of the USSR in 1991. Simply put, after a decades-long struggle to become a member of the western political and economic architecture, Ukraine has nothing to show for it except for its destruction. It now has no prospects of becoming a member of NATO.
Europe too has been relegated to the margins as a result of the above shift in the international system. Although the US will continue to guarantee Europe’s security, the “old continent” is no longer the geopolitical centerpiece that it once was during the Cold War, mainly because the strategic threat to the continent has disappeared with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Nevertheless, America’s continuous search for strategic relevance for NATO resulted in disasters for Georgia with the five day war in 2008, and, on a much larger scale, for Ukraine in 2022. Lurking behind these disasters has always been the deep-seated interest of the collective west to weaken Russia on its own turf: The Eurasian Heartland. However, the west once again failed to achieve their goal. With an ideologically-driven foreign policy, the collective west manufactured baseless accusations that Russia would invade Europe, after it had finished off Ukraine. Ironically, this western chimera to double down on Russia, resulted in the strengthening of Russia on the Eurasian continent. According to NATO SACEUR Christopher Cavoli, the Russian army is now larger than it was on February 24, 2022. In other words, Using Ukraine to weaken Russia, might have accelerated the return of multipolarity, thus shortening the longevity of America’s primacy in the unipolar world.
The thrust of this shift in the international system is also felt in the sub-region of the Eurasian heartland-The South Caucasus. With the strengthening of the Russian Federation in Eurasia, the South Caucasian region will experience less, not more insecurity. According to Saul Cohen, an eminent geopolitical theorist, if the west succeeds in penetrating the “convergence zone” of Eurasia, which entails the South Caucasus, it will cause emergence of “shatter zones”. The question then becomes, will the West’s failure to penetrate the convergence zone mitigate the further deterioration of conditions in the current shattered zone of the South Caucasus? The effects on the South Caucasus of the current shift in the international system indicates that the less successful the west is in indulging in its adventurism in the region, the better the chances are for Georgia to establish pragmatic relations with Moscow, thus mitigating the negative effects of its location in this shatter zone.
Georgia’s Future
The history of the past thirty years has shown that Georgia’s foreign policy of idealism, heavily dependent on by the United States, has been delusional. As with Ukraine, the US does not have vital national security interests in the region, and therefore its meddling hardly demonstrates a true geo-strategic commitment, the likes of which Washington has made towards western Europe, Japan, South Korea and the Middle East, during and after the Cold War. Moreover, throughout the long sweep of history, Russia has committed to maintain its influence in the South Caucasus, precisely because it sees it as a “soft Under Belly” from which the west has tried to weaken and divide Russia. In other words, the geopolitical space of the South Caucasus represents a vital national security interest for Russia. Hence, it will go to great lengths to prevent the emergence of a western-led security architecture in the region. Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008 was a clear manifestation of this strategy in action. Therefore, Georgia, as a small state in the international system, must continue to craft its foreign policy with a strict adherence to the principles of geopolitics, and the national security interests of the regional powers.
In a significant concept paper, the rector of the Sokhumi State University (Tbilisi, Georgia) professor Zurab Khonelidze, has presented the idea that the South Caucasus is a single geopolitical space. In the book titled, “Georgian Paradigm of Peace, Khonelidze dedicates the chapter to the concept called, “The South Caucasus, Geopolitical Space- New Format for Regional Cooperation”. It offers piercing analyses of the function and the role of the South Caucasus in the international system.
Khonelidze challenges the mistaken approach of the collective west, and particularly of the US, which singles out Georgia as an exclusive candidate for membership in the western economic, political and security architecture. The author sees this as a policy that narrows and limits the functionality/operability of the entire geopolitical space for regional and outside powers. The experience of the last thirty years has shown that western attempts to carve out specific spheres of influence in the region by singling out Georgia, has been countered by Russia with military means—all at the expense of Georgia’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. Instead, the proposed alternative is to widen the regional interests of the great powers without pinning their respective interests against each other at the expense of Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia. The idea being, that if neither of the three republics can be singled out from its geopolitical core, which is the South Caucasus, then the geopolitical space the region offers can be widened for outside powers to implement their respective geopolitical and geo-economic interests, without subjecting the region or any individual state in the South Caucasus to proxy wars against Russia. Although the process that could consolidate this vision is complex, there is evidence to suggest that in the long run, the region is manifesting political signs that are conducive to its geopolitics and respective interests of its three members.
Conclusion
Despite its longing for the future in the west, Georgia continues to find itself at the mercy of great power politics. Nevertheless, recent months and years have shown that there is a way for Georgia to survive as a small state. The Georgian Dream government has managed to correctly identify fundamental changes taking places in the international system, and has adjusted Georgia’s foreign policy to those dynamics—and against enormous challenges put up by the US and EU. This has allowed GD to avoid repeating the tragedy of the war with Russia in 2008 thereby saving Georgia’s statehood. While the current diplomatic conflict with Washington and Brussels is certainly unprecedented and unnecessary, Georgia’s western partners must understand that Georgia will stay committed to its chosen western path, but not at the expense of its national security. So far, Georgia has been able to establish and keep the correct balance between its northern neighbor and its western partners (not without challenges) and it must continue to do so.
More broadly, the non-Western world seems to be moving on from the “dogmatic slumber” the West had put it under for the last thirty years. Washington too has expressed its desire to get back to realism and end its obsession with going to faraway lands “in search of monsters to destroy”. However, even though Donald Trump’s White House seems to be an island of pragmatism in a sea of brittle dogmatism, the current president will continue to face challenges in creating a more stable world order.
Neoconservative and neoliberal ideologues are running out of options, but still hold to their dreams of hegemony. Energized by a visceral hatred of Russia, they continue to fume as they watch president Trump slowly dismantle Ukraine – a tragedy of their own making-in his negotiations with Vladimir Putin.
As the night falls on the neoconservative era, it has all but disappeared as the “only game in town” in Tbilisi (and other capitals of Europe). Imposition of sanctions on the current GD government is more revealing of their failed strategic thinking-much like on Ukraine- than the possibility of destroying GD, or causing yet another color revolution. Those days are simply gone.
The question now facing them is how they will sustain the fervor of their permanent revolution in Georgia against Russia, should Tbilisi find a way to restore its sovereignty with Moscow. For the neoconservative and neoliberal factions in Washington, trapped in their absolutism, finding answers to this question will remain a formidable challenge.
About the Author:
Giorgi (Lasha) Kasradze is an international relations analyst with a focus on the states of the former Soviet Union. He concentrates on the South Caucasus and the Black Sea regional affairs. As a keen observer of regional affairs, he has discussed conflicting geopolitical interests between the West and regional powers. Lasha has shared his analyses on the geopolitical podcast of the Stratfor/Rene company- a geopolitical analysis firm as well on YouTube platforms.
His articles have appeared in the National Interest, The New Eastern Europe and Neutrality Studies.
He holds degrees in international relations from Rollins College and The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.