This week, US Vice President JD Vance paid visit to two capitals in the South Caucasus while snubbing a third. Nikol Pashinyan and Ilham Aliyev, the respective leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan, welcomed Vance amid a thaw in relations between their countries. For both states, this marks the highest-level visit of a US official to date.
“You know what the context of Georgian-American relations is. This context is very difficult,” admitted the prime minister of neighboring Georgia, Irakli Kobakhidze, during a press conference following the announcement of Vance’s visit.
Two decades ago, Georgia’s capital Tbilisi hosted then President George W. Bush with great ceremony, but as of late the only procession seen on its main thoroughfare, Rustaveli avenue, has been that of the anti-government protests that have continued for over a year.
The Trump administration, of course, is not averse to making overtures to autocrats, as Baku’s presence on Vance’s tour attests. But Georgia’s authoritarian course has seen the country become particularly isolated on the world stage.
Tunnel vision seems to blind the government to its mounting ostracization.
“It’s not only the US, it’s the whole West,” says Giga Bokeria, co-leader of the Federalists opposition party. In another political life, Bokeria had a prominent role in Georgia’s previous pro-Western government – the same that hosted Bush – and so feels keenly the country’s current ostracization under the ruling Georgian Dream party.
“What does it mean for us that they are isolated fundamentally from the UK, from the EU, from the US, all the important allies...? It’s a very dangerous thing – to be left alone vis-à-vis Russia in this region,” he told Kyiv Post.
Georgia’s government has been routinely accused of courting Russia, which invaded the country in 2008 and continues to occupy approximately 20 percent of its internationally recognized territory, during its drift away from the West.
But this alignment cannot be trumpeted. While the Kremlin has made some quietly complimentary gestures in Georgia’s direction – Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova praised its avoidance of a “Ukrainian or Moldovan scenario” in March – Georgian Dream must still pay lip service to a largely pro-European, anti-Russia population in order to survive politically.
The government continually relies on an arsenal of warped foreign policy talking points to shrug off their lost friendships, conceal their appeasement of their northern neighbor, and to maintain their grip on power.
“Immense gaslighting” over Europe
Despite doing everything it can to tarnish its relationship with the EU, Georgian Dream rarely pillory the bloc directly, opting instead for what George Melashvili, a Georgian civic activist and political sciences scholar, calls “rhetorical shenanigans.”
“One of the major pillars of Georgian Dream’s ability to control the country is immense gaslighting,” he told Kyiv Post. This includes an insistence that Georgia can still join the EU at the end of the decade, “a notion that simply does not stand against any critique.”
The period following the government’s suspension of EU accession talks in November 2024 – ostensibly a temporary measure – has seen violent crackdowns on protests, government critics imprisoned, and major opposition parties threatened with bans.
In recent months, Kobakhidze has given a series of interviews to pro-government media where he has claimed openness to cooperation with Europe while expressing concern, of all things, for the state of its democracy – a tactic that Melashvili calls “mirroring.”
“We sometimes joke that whatever Georgian Dream actually is itself, they’re trying to project on others,” he adds.
For an insight into Georgian Dream’s unfiltered feelings about Europe, Melashvili considers its satellite parties an “excellent place” to look. Last week one of these, United Neutral Georgia, called for pro-government broadcasters to host debates on the “harmful process of EU integration.”
Russia’s “natural ally”
Following Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia and subsequent recognition of its two breakaway regions – Abkhazia and South Ossetia – as independent states, Georgia severed and has not renewed diplomatic relations with its neighbor. Critics argue, however, that an under-the-table relationship has taken root under Georgian Dream.
Much of the blame for this is directed at one man: while Kobakhidze heads the government officially, billionaire oligarch and Georgian Dream founder Bidzina Ivanishvili is widely regarded as Georgia’s de-facto ruler. He made his fortune in Russia in the years after the Soviet Union’s collapse.
Melashvili is convinced that Ivanishvili’s Russia alignment, if not projected openly, is clear in substance: “I cannot say whether or not Ivanishvili or Kobakhidze are receiving folders with orders from the Kremlin or the [FSB headquarters] Lubyanka, but what we can do is evaluate the results... Georgia’s economic dependency on Russia has increased. Georgia’s political dependency on Russia has also increased.”
Bokeria agrees that the presence or absence of direct Russian orders is beside the point: “The nature of [Ivanishvili’s] rule, his regime, the instincts he plays on... make him a natural ally of Russia.”
“He’s a guy from the 90s in Moscow,” he told Kyiv Post, “that’s where his mentality was shaped and formed.”
The rhetoric this produces, again, is indirect. “The main purpose of GD [Georgian Dream] propaganda is not to portray Russia as the good guys. They know it is impossible,” says Melashvili, instead they “gaslight the Georgian public into believing that the European Union is equally [as bad] or even worse than Russia.”
Russia’s war on Ukraine, Bokeria notes, has gifted Georgian Dream further rhetorical cover for its Kremlin appeasement. “Fear of change is connected with the fear of war in the propaganda of GD,” he explains.
Last year Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry condemned a Georgian Dream campaign ad that placed images of Russia’s war alongside the slogan “Choose peace!”
A bad balancing act
For all its multifarious duplicity, this foreign policy rhetoric is less a masterplan than a desperate gambit.
“All that they care about... it’s not Georgia’s long-term interest or strategy, it’s to sustain the absolute power that they have right now,” Melashvili affirms.
This tunnel vision seems to blind the government to its mounting ostracization. Before Vance landed in Armenia, there were no invites for Georgia to the WEF meeting in Davos, nor to Trump’s recently conceived “Board of Peace.”
Moreover, the president’s “Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity,” set to commercially reconcile Armenia and Azerbaijan, threatens to harm Georgia’s strategic importance in the so-called “Middle Corridor.”
“Georgian Dream would absolutely love to be participating in all those meetings and events,” says Melashvili, but “if the cost is to give away even small parts of their power, they will never concede such actions.”
Georgian Dream’s appeals to the Trump administration, both in professed ideological kinship and in calls to lift Biden-era sanctions on government officials, have gone unanswered.
While Georgia’s president Mikheil Kavelashvili claimed Vance expressed a desire for renewed relations when they met at the Winter Olympics in Milan last week, any significant practical steps in this regard are yet to be taken.
If Trump provides a model for playing both sides of the divide between Europe and Russia, then Georgian Dream has been thus far incapable of emulating it. “If we’re talking about a balancing act, then Georgian Dream is doing a horrible job,” says Melashvili. “[They have] not been able to balance Russia with the West or with China or with the United States. They have simply been putting more and more coins on the scales of Russia.”
But the Georgian people have proved more difficult to back into a corner than their government. “We’re not yet in the situation of Belarus, even though we’re getting very close to it,” Melashvili says. “The Georgian public continues to fight.”
Georgian Dream’s press officer did not respond to a request for comment.