Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze flew to Yerevan in May, shook hands with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy after years of poisonous relations, and spoke about the Middle Corridor transport and energy route.
Weeks earlier, the ruling Georgian Dream party had announced the first, belated arrests of law-enforcement officers tied to the brutal 2024-2025 protest crackdowns; an act the regime had previously refused despite extensive video evidence and sustained public outrage.
The regime also attempted to create an opening with the US administration. A Rubio-Kobakhidze call in March, the announcement of a Trump Tower Tbilisi in April, and a visit by Deputy Assistant Secretary Sonata Coulter in May followed. Georgian Dream has framed the engagement as a chance to renew the US-Georgia strategic partnership “from a clean slate.”
Some have read these moves as a westward pivot by a government broadly regarded as toxic by the European Union (EU) and its institutions. But this is not a westward pivot. Instead, it reflects the failure of Georgian Dream to build a better relationship with Russia (which still occupies 20% of Georgian territory) and an attempt by Bidzina Ivanishvili — Georgia’s richest man and de facto ruler — to redirect the same transactional survival tactics toward the West.
Ivanishvili built his fortune in Moscow in the 1990s, successfully navigating the perilous world of post-Soviet Russian capitalism. His intuitions about how power works, who has it, and what accommodation looks like were forged there. When he looked at Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia, his worldview supplied the lesson: Russia acted, the West talked, Russia won.
External events seemed to confirm this assessment. The 2008 Bucharest NATO summit promised Georgia an eventual route to membership, yet when Russia invaded months later, it faced no decisive Western response. EU enlargement fatigue was already palpable. Reading the West as structurally declining and Russia as ascendant, Ivanishvili pivoted toward Moscow almost immediately after taking power in 2012. The reading hardened after the 2014 annexation of Crimea and again after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Georgian Dream’s behavior in that period was consistent with an implicit bet: Russia would win quickly, Ukraine would collapse, Western responses would prove hollow, and Moscow’s dominance over the post-Soviet space would be consolidated. With Russian forces stationed just 30 km (19 miles) from Tbilisi and no alliance membership in sight, the regime stoked war fears at home and waited for the regional tide to turn.
None of those assumptions has held. Ukraine not only survived but significantly degraded Russian military capacity, while the Kremlin’s position across the South Caucasus has steadily eroded.
Armenia, long considered Moscow’s most dependent client, has moved visibly away since Azerbaijan’s 2023 takeover of Nagorno-Karabakh exposed the limits of Russian protection. In May, Yerevan hosted both a European Political Community summit and a bilateral EU-Armenia summit, drawing dozens of European leaders and producing a new €200m EU aid package. The US-backed Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP), if realized, would reintroduce American influence and meaningfully reduce regional dependence on Moscow.
The geopolitical order Ivanishvili bet on has not materialized, and neither has the personalized political model he tried to import. Ivanishvili’s attempt to position himself as a South Caucasian Viktor Orbán has suffered a particularly striking defeat. While Orbán bargained from inside the EU and NATO, Ivanishvili tried to replicate the model from outside the Western system, and misread Moscow’s logic in the bargain. When Russia sees a state as part of its sphere of influence and lacking strong external backers, it seeks to subjugate rather than negotiate. Concessions are not rewarded because Moscow assumes such states have no legitimate independent interests.
Russian statements have made this explicit. For example, in April, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova warned that if Georgia joined the EU, Russia would have to place it on its list of “unfriendly” countries and apply retaliatory economic measures — the same coercive logic Moscow deployed against Ukraine under Viktor Yanukovych and that it has also threatened against Armenia. After years of accommodation, even a fully deferential regime in Tbilisi was denied the pretense of strategic autonomy.
The domestic costs have compounded the strategic ones. Surveys consistently show a strong majority support for EU membership among Georgians, while the regime has moved in the opposite direction. This divergence culminated in the 2024-2025 protests, which became the largest sustained democratic challenge to Georgian Dream’s authority since it came to power. Repression has contained the movement for now, but it has not resolved the crisis.
It is against this backdrop of cascading failures that Ivanishvili appears to be reaching for what might be called the Rodríguez model after Venezuela’s acting President: the transactional bargain that she struck with Washington, in which the Maduro regime offered selective deliverables (access to oil, prisoner releases, migration cooperation) in exchange for limited sanctions relief, without democratic concessions. The Trump Tower branding, the Rubio call, and Georgia’s connectivity framing all fit the same logic: advertise value, signal readiness to deliver, and invite Washington to name its price.
But Ivanishvili holds far fewer cards. Delcy Rodríguez had oil and a state apparatus that Washington had reasons to manage. Ivanishvili has Georgia’s geography, and that is not personally his to trade. Any Western-oriented Georgian government could offer Middle Corridor cooperation, distance from Iran, and an intelligence partnership. This would come without Ivanishvili’s sanctions exposure, without the Anaklia deep-sea port debacle that handed strategic ground on Georgia’s Black Sea coast to Chinese-linked actors, and without Georgian Dream’s pro-Tehran posture that has become a strong liability.
The deeper flaw in Ivanishvili’s approach is his habit of borrowing accommodation models while ignoring the structural conditions that made them viable. His Russia policy imitated Ostpolitik without the NATO floor or Helsinki framework that sustained it. Now his Western overture imitates Rodríguez without the oil leverage that made her bargain possible. A bilateral reset with Washington that bypasses the EU would also intensify, rather than solve, Ivanishvili’s European problem — particularly if it endangered visa-free travel, one of the few tangible benefits still linking Georgian society to Europe.
This points to a clear conclusion for US policy. Washington can now demand that Georgian Dream reverse its pro-Tehran course — including the open tolerance of Iranian-affiliated companies and IRGC-linked operations on Georgian soil — and end its tolerance of Russian aircraft using Georgian airspace en route to Iran. The China test is equally concrete and verifiable: cancel the Chinese-led Anaklia contract, re-tender to Western partners, and this time actually build it.
If the regime cannot deliver on either front, that answer is itself decisive. Any renewed American engagement should be framed explicitly as a partnership with Georgia and its people, not with the regime, which will prevent Ivanishvili from using it for personal political rehabilitation.
A Georgia that stops serving Iranian influence networks, removes Chinese-linked operators from strategic infrastructure, and begins a credible democratic transition would be a more durable American partner than a sanctioned regime with a major legitimacy crisis.
Ivanishvili will not lead that change, because it would dismantle the system protecting his wealth and his impunity. It will come from inside Georgia, from the democratic pressure his regime has for now contained but not defeated.
Irina Arabidze is a Non-resident Fellow with the Democratic Resilience Program at CEPA and a visiting lecturer at the Caucasus University in Tbilisi. A Fulbright scholar, she holds a master’s degree in International Affairs from the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University and a graduate degree in International Relations and European Studies from the Central European University.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
