The Trump administration comes into office as the United States and its Western allies are on the verge of losing Georgia, and the loss to U.S. interests would be considerable. Once one of America’s most reliable non-NATO partners on the European continent, providing valuable personnel to U.S.-led missions, Georgia also is part of an important strategic land corridor for Central Asian resources and trade — the only non-Russian, non-Iranian rail and pipelines to the West run through Georgia.
Georgia’s ruling party has aligned with authoritarian powers like Russia and China, even Iran, and against the West, contrary to the pro-Western views of most Georgians. The incoming Trump administration has an opportunity to affect Georgia’s antidemocratic, anti-Western trajectory. While it will have a lot on its plate on day one, it should immediately press for new parliamentary elections and impose targeted sanctions on those responsible for Georgia’s worrying turn. By doing so, it can demonstrate support for the Georgian people, something the outgoing Biden administration failed to do adequately, and avoid losing Georgia to Russian, Chinese or even Iranian influence.
The primary culprit in this about-face after decades of Georgia’s pro-Western progress is Bidzina Ivanishvili, an oligarch who returned to his homeland to establish the Georgian Dream party after earning billions of dollars in Russia. He and his party, in power since 2012, once embraced a broad program of cooperation with the West. They signed an association agreement with the European Union, arranging for free trade and visa-free travel for Georgians. With the United States, they cooperated on a broad reform program, including a $140 million Millennium Challenge account to modernize and develop Georgia’s educational system.
U.S. Marines and Georgian troops trained and deployed together in Afghanistan to defend Bagram airbase. In August 2017, then-President Donald Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence, visited Tbilisi, and, several months later, the Trump administration announced it would provide Georgia with long sought-after Javelin antitank missiles, overturning the Obama-era policy of not giving Georgia lethal weapons. And in 2018, Georgia launched a $53 million in-country initiative with the U.S. Army, called the Georgia Defense Readiness Program, to train and equip the Georgian military.
Fear of Moscow
Not surprisingly, Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin found these moves provocative. It already controlled two northern provinces of Georgia after its 2008 invasion. In 2019, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Grigoriy Karasin warned Tbilisi of consequences for its deepening cooperation with the United States and NATO: “[I]f such activities continue to develop, this will lead to problems,” Karasin warned. “We all know how the problems in Ukraine started.”
Soon after that, no doubt to appease the Kremlin, Georgian Dream invited a Russian Duma member to address an assembly held in parliament. That triggered mass demonstrations protesting the Georgian Dream.
Fearing Moscow would apply the “Ukraine approach” to Georgia, as Karasin not-so-subtly hinted, the ruling party began to halt or unwind other high-profile programs of cooperation with the United States. Also in 2019, it canceled an agreement, opposed by the Kremlin, with a Western consortium to build a deep-water port in Anaklia on the Black Sea. The deal would have brought in U.S. and European companies to create a maritime hub for East-West transit and trade.
Georgian Dream also allowed three high-profile U.S. initiatives to lapse without renewal or replacement: the Millennium Challenge program in 2019 and the U.S. Army’s Georgian Defense Readiness Program and the U.S. Marines’ joint training and deployment program in 2021.
But after Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Georgia’s ruling party began to fear that mere appeasement wasn’t enough. Having already thrust aside Western cooperation and investment, it began a full-throated anti-Western campaign.
In conspiratorial tones, Georgian Dream officials falsely and repeatedly claimed there was a “deep-state global war party” in Washington trying to blackmail Georgia into opening a second front against Russia. They accused representatives of the U.S. Agency for International Development of training political activists to overthrow the Georgian Dream government. The Russian government seconded the claim, calling it a U.S. plan to foment a “color revolution” that Russia was ready to help prevent.
Not content with cozying up to Moscow, the Georgian Dream government also reached out to Beijing, establishing a “strategic partnership” with the government there and offering a Chinese-led group a contract to build and manage the Anaklia port, once earmarked to be run by U.S. company SSA Marine. And the prime minister, Georgian Dream’s Irakli Kobakhidze, attended the inauguration of Iran’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian, and had a side meeting with him.
Wresting Control of Government, Intimidating Civil Society
Ivanishvili’s Georgian Dream party has gained control of most of the levers of government in the more than 12 years it’s been in power. The remaining checks on its executive power include still-independent media and civil society organizations.
But in May of last year, the ruling party borrowed Putin’s method of discrediting and eventually dismantling civil society opponents by passing a Russian-style Foreign Agents law. It requires nongovernmental organizations that receive 20 percent or more of their funding from abroad to officially register themselves as “pursuing the interests of a foreign power.” Amid a paucity of domestic funding sources, 90 percent of Georgian NGOs and independent media receive Western grants. Refusal to register will likely mean onerous fines and even potential forced closing.
Push came to shove in the conduct of the Georgia’s parliamentary elections on Oct. 26. Although pre-election polling indicated a close race, it also showed Georgian Dream wouldn’t come close to winning a majority. And yet Georgian Dream claimed it won an outright victory on election day, with 54 percent of the vote, a tally that few observers found credible. The opposition, pointing to the many electoral violations noted by domestic and international observers, refused to accept the results, boycotted parliament, and called for new elections. Neither the Biden administration nor the EU called for new elections, however, though some EU member States – Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, for example — have done so.
The disputed results prompted street protests, which grew in size and energy after the government announced it was suspending accession talks with the EU despite opinion polls showing about 80 percent of Georgians want to join the bloc. These protests have continued for more than 50 days straight, and the government has responded brutally, arresting peaceful protestors, beating and torturing many of those detained — including opposition and civil society figures as well as journalists — and using intimidation to discourage turnout.
Yet the protests of the pro-Western opposition and the international community didn’t stop Georgian Dream from taking its seats in parliament while all other elected representatives from opposition parties boycotted. It went on to pass repressive laws to intimidate the protestors, and illegitimately manipulated a new Electoral College system that includes members of parliament to replace the pro-Western President Salome Zourabichvili with a new, anti-Western president who is a puppet of Ivanishvili and Moscow.
Risks of One-Party Rule
Deeply undemocratic and not content with a simple majority in parliament, Georgian Dream now aspires to one-party rule. Even before the elections, it made its intentions clear by announcing a “Nuremberg process” to abolish and imprison the opposition, a grotesque reference to trials in which German Nazis were put on trial after World War II.
The Biden administration did impose sanctions on Ivanishvili and his chief of police, Vakhtang Gomelauri, but it failed to impose similar measures against Prime Minister Kobakhidze, another acolyte of Ivanishvili, or on the speaker of the parliament, Shalva Papuashvili. Doing so would make clear that the United States views the current Georgian Dream government and parliament as illegitimate. Members of the U.S. Congress in both parties have urged such steps.
Georgia’s rightful president, Zourabichvili, is coming to Washington for President-elect Trump’s inauguration Jan. 20. She has been an outspoken critic of Georgia’s October parliamentary elections and an organizer among the opposition forces against the government. Neither the newly named president, Mikheil Kavelashvili, nor the rest of the Georgian Dream government should be recognized as legitimate. Zourabichvili’s visit to the United States is an opportunity for the Congress and the Trump administration to clearly stand with her and the Georgian people.
Such a show of solidarity with Zourabichvili, accompanied by targeted sanctions, would be a huge boost to the hundreds of thousands of demonstrators who are pressing for a democratic, pro-Western, stable future for their country. As for the EU, while a few member States have imposed such sanctions on their own, the EU as a whole has not, unable to find consensus among its 27 members. The prime minister of EU member Hungary, Viktor Orban, visited Tbilisi after the parliamentary elections to congratulate Georgian Dream on its “overwhelming victory.”
Georgian Dream, by its actions and rhetoric, has lost legitimacy in the eyes of the Georgian people. The only peaceful solution to the impasse is new, internationally monitored elections. But Georgian Dream hasn’t shown any signs it will agree to that; nor is it apparent that the opposition will let up. Absent new elections, the government will stay in power using all the repressive levers available to an unchecked, nondemocratic regime, including violence and imprisonment.
To avoid this, the incoming Trump administration can pressure the ruling party into accepting new elections through additional sanctions, together with allies, picking up where the outgoing administration left the job unfinished.
Key members of Congress – most notably U.S. Rep Joe Wilson of South Carolina, the Republican chair of the U.S. Helsinki Commission, and U.S. Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, have urged the Biden administration in vain to do more in its final days in office.
This provides an opportunity for the Trump administration to step in. A failure to act will likely mean another hotspot of long-term instability in Eastern Europe – and the loss of a longtime friend and dependable ally. The only ones to gain will be Russia, China, and probably Iran.