We have a brand new working paper written by Tinatin Khidasheli. She heads Civic-IDEA, a Tbilisi-based think tank that confronts Russian propaganda and the Soviet legacy in Georgia and advocates for a sound defense and security policy and served as Georgia’s first female Minister of Defense.

Abstract

The South Caucasus, and the wider Caspian-Black Sea region beyond it, are regaining a strategic weight they have not held in decades, as new corridors, new partnerships, and renewed great-power competition converge on a space linking Europe, Central Asia, the Middle East, and Russia. At precisely that moment, the country that spent three decades as the region’s anchor of reform, democracy, and stable Western partnership is missing from the room where that future is being written, absent by its own government’s choice. Rather than serving as the connective tissue that could hold a fragile region together, Georgia today is one of its sources of instability. This paper is written in that regret, and in recognition of a Georgian society that has spent two years resisting exactly this outcome, refusing to let its government’s abdication become the opening through which Russia re-establishes itself in the one country that, for three decades, had kept it out.

For three decades, Georgia built its foreign policy around that role: the region’s only Black Sea state, NATO’s most reliable regional partner, and the indispensable partner in every serious Euro-Atlantic connectivity project in the neighborhood. This paper traces the story from that role to its collapse, starting at the peak of the U.S.-Georgia partnership, President Bush’s 2005 visit to Georgia, the 2008 Bucharest summit, and the military cooperation that continued to deepen even after 2012, before turning to the moment that exposed how far that partnership has eroded: the August 2025 signing of the TRIPP transit corridor, hailed by Washington as a South Caucasus peace deal and an essential pillar of regional stability. Washington called it a regional peace, but Georgia, the region’s own anchor state and Washington’s own oldest strategic partner, was not invited. It then examines Georgia’s parallel exclusion from the EU’s enlargement track, the domestic choices of the Georgian Dream government that produced this dead end, and its deepening ties to Beijing and Tehran. It closes with policy options for Washington, Brussels, and Georgian political and civic actors, grounded in the fact that, whatever the government’s trajectory, Georgian society itself has not moved.

Keywords: Georgia, South Caucasus, NATO enlargement, EU accession, TRIPP corridor, democratic backsliding, disinformation

You can read the the working paper HERE.