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Visiting Tbilisi offered a vivid reminder that American and European meddling in Georgia’s internal affairs risk repeating the same disastrous foreign policy that led to Ukraine’s devastation. I spent an intense few days in Georgia’s capital June 4–7 as part of a forum organized by the City of Tbilisi Municipality. Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze opened the conference, which brought together a range of realist thinkers, including Jeffrey Sachs, who dialed in and spoke at the opening ceremony, and the veteran U.S. diplomat Jack Matlock, who, at a spritely and irrepressible 95, made the trip all the way from Chicago.
The long-planned event took place in the shadow of the U.S. House of Representatives’ May passage of the MEGOBARI Act, which seeks to undermine the elected Georgia Dream government. This is a worrying echo of American interference in Ukrainian politics that led to the overthrow of the former president Viktor Yanukovych in 2014 and, ultimately, to war today.
Georgia Dream won a fair, democratic election in October 2024 on its economic record since 2012. The OSCE election monitoring mission reported some discrepancies, but said that voters were offered a wide choice. As the Quincy Institute has pointed out previously, “Georgian democracy would be hurt, not helped, if the West supports efforts to overturn an election result due to dissatisfaction with its outcome.” Officials that I met in Tbilisi made the point that the government’s top five priorities are all economic. Georgia’s economy grew by 9.4 percent in 2024.
Protest is, of course, a vital and healthy part of any democracy. Near Georgia’s parliament building in Tblisi on June 5, a crowd of maybe 200–300 protestors gathered with EU flags and banners bearing calls for EU membership and sanctions against Bidzina Ivanishvili, the oligarch founder of Georgia Dream. It was a pleasant evening, the mood was relaxed, and the police were present, but at a distance and in normal uniform. There was no rancor. Foreign journalists weren’t deliberately being shot with rubber bullets by uniformed police officers.
Despite this, as in Ukraine in 2014, American and European lawmakers have become obsessed by the idea that Georgia needs to be cured of Russian influence, and that a healthy injection of Western values will make that happen. Georgia, we are told, must choose between Russia and Europe.
This is manifestly a false choice. Georgia is a small country hemmed on three sides by Russia, Turkey and Iran. For its own survival, it needs to maintain healthy relations with all its neighbors. That doesn’t make it anti-American or anti-European; indeed, Sachs’s remark that “Georgia is not part of Europe” went over like a lead balloon with the local audience.
The Georgian politicians that I spoke to didn’t want to be cut off from Europe. Neither did they want to be used as an extension of disastrous Western foreign policy towards Russia in a way that would have potentially devastating consequences for their country.
A prominent business leader was extremely vexed when pointing out to me that Georgia has had no diplomatic relations with Russia since the 2008 war. Abkhazia and South Ossetia remain under separatist control. The International Criminal Court (ICC) in June 2022 issued arrest warrants against three men in South Ossetia for allegations of war crimes during the 2008 war. Georgia was one of the 39 state parties that called on the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate allegations of Russian war crimes in Ukraine on March 2, 2022.
The lack of diplomatic contact is so stark that one U.S. academic at the event was approached to explore the possibility of opening track-two dialogue between Russia and Georgia. Among significant sections of the population, there continues to be deep resentment towards Russia. Driving through Tbilisi, I saw on more than one occasion graffiti on walls with slogans such as “f*** Russia.” Still, the country is a mixed picture. I also met Georgian people who, despite the war, still feel a deep affinity with Russia, shaped by their shared history and Orthodox faith.
It was abundantly clear during the forum that the Georgia Dream party feels under extreme pressure not to be seen as siding with Russia. While they spoke from the podium of the conference, they avoided direct contact with the Western realists in attendance. A member of parliament pointed out to me her real concerns about making any statement that might present a lightning rod to the globalists in Brussels and DC.
It is a gross simplification to suggest that Georgia is pro-Russian simply on the basis that it refused to open a second front to Russia after the onset of war in Ukraine, including through the mirroring of Western sanctions. We were told that U.S. Embassy officials offered Georgia materiel should it decide to open a military front against Russia after war in Ukraine started in 2022, which is believable and terrifying.
In my remarks to the event, I asserted that Georgia’s aspiration to join NATO at the April 2008 Bucharest Summit was the spark to eventual war four months later. Indeed, the former German Chancellor Angela Merkel has argued that admission of Ukraine to NATO in 2008 would have simply brought forward the war there too. I agree.
Ukraine’s bitter experience should offer a sobering reminder, if it was needed, that NATO would not agree to admit Georgia before that country was tipped into another war with Russia, which it would lose. Ukraine is a large country with a pre-war population of 45 million. Georgia is a small country with a population of 3.8 million. Anyone who believes that Georgia could defend itself against an invasion by Russia is deluded.
Friedrich Merz, the current German chancellor, claimed during his June 6 trip to Washington, DC that Russia understands strength. And yet he refused to authorize the deployment of German Taurus cruise missiles to Ukraine when he met President Volodymyr Zelensky on May 28 in Berlin. He has not sent German troops to Ukraine, and he would not send German troops to Georgia. In a TV interview in Tbilisi, I asserted that no NATO country would send troops to Georgia in the event of another war.
While I’m philosophically pro-European, the case for Georgia to join is not persuasive. A deep and comprehensive free-trade agreement with the EU has simply seen European imports flood the market, with no noticeable increase in Georgian exports to Europe. From a population of 5.4 million when the Soviet Union collapsed, Georgia has lost one third of its people since that time to emigration. People I met expressed fears of further brain-drain from EU membership. Georgia is a small country trying to stand on its own two feet by adopting a multi-vector approach to its relations. I left absolutely convinced that it should continue to do so, and that it should resist Western efforts to guide it down that same primrose path that led to Ukraine’s devastation.