Argument
An expert's point of view on a current event.

Georgia Shows Why U.S. Policy in Eurasia Is Dangerously Outdated

Unlike Washington, both China and Russia have developed continental designs for Eurasia.

By , the Richard B. Finnegan distinguished professor of political science and international relations at Stonehill College in Massachusetts, and a nonresident senior scholar in the Russia/Eurasia program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Anti-government protesters face police during mass demonstrations in central Tbilisi, Georgia, on Dec. 7.
Anti-government protesters face police during mass demonstrations in central Tbilisi, Georgia, on Dec. 7. Karen Minasyan/AFP/Getty Images

A constitutional crisis is brewing in Tbilisi, Georgia. It will quickly reach a boiling point when the newly elected, far-right pro-Russian President Mikheil Kavelashvili is inaugurated on Dec. 29. The current president, staunchly pro-European Salome Zourabichvili, refuses to step down, because she alleges that the Oct. 26 parliamentary elections were fraudulent, thus deeming Georgian Dream party’s electoral victory as illegitimate. Zourabichvili has called for new elections—a demand echoed by the European Parliament and many international observers—while trying, unsuccessfully, to challenge the Georgian Dream party in the nation’s Constitutional Court.

This looming crisis comes after mass protests in Tbilisi on Nov. 30 against the government’s decision to delay EU accession until 2028 were violently suppressed by security forces, leaving demonstrators and journalists injured. The unrest was part of a yearlong wave of protests against the government’s Kremlin-inspired “foreign agents” law, which has been criticized for targeting civic groups and undermining democratic opposition ahead of the parliamentary elections in October.

A constitutional crisis is brewing in Tbilisi, Georgia. It will quickly reach a boiling point when the newly elected, far-right pro-Russian President Mikheil Kavelashvili is inaugurated on Dec. 29. The current president, staunchly pro-European Salome Zourabichvili, refuses to step down, because she alleges that the Oct. 26 parliamentary elections were fraudulent, thus deeming Georgian Dream party’s electoral victory as illegitimate. Zourabichvili has called for new elections—a demand echoed by the European Parliament and many international observers—while trying, unsuccessfully, to challenge the Georgian Dream party in the nation’s Constitutional Court.

This looming crisis comes after mass protests in Tbilisi on Nov. 30 against the government’s decision to delay EU accession until 2028 were violently suppressed by security forces, leaving demonstrators and journalists injured. The unrest was part of a yearlong wave of protests against the government’s Kremlin-inspired “foreign agents” law, which has been criticized for targeting civic groups and undermining democratic opposition ahead of the parliamentary elections in October.

Local factors drive democratic declines, and post-election protests are common in post-Soviet regions as well as globally, but Georgia’s crisis highlights deeper failures in Euro-Atlantic policies on democratization in Eurasia.

With a rich pre-Soviet civic history, Georgia was most recently the U.S.-supported democratic trailblazer in the South Caucasus—and yet it now faces significant setbacks. What went wrong?


In the 1990s, Washington embraced Georgia as the “cause in the Caucasus.” Years of financial and political support culminated in what is now a suspended strategic partnership. Georgian elites—particularly one of the leaders of the Rose Revolution, Mikheil Saakashvili—sought Western support, claiming Georgia as a European nation. In the public imagination, Georgia’s democratic aspirations became deeply intertwined with its geopolitical orientation toward the West: striving for democracy, joining the EU.

Georgia is now deeply polarized by geopolitical divisions between Russia and the West. Should Georgia’s democratic slide continue, the rest of the South Caucasus will feel the negative impact, especially with creeping dictatorship in neighboring Azerbaijan and a challenge to democratic consolidation in neighboring Armenia. The strategic value of the Georgian-Armenian democratic dyad will be no more.

This situation demonstrates how Washington’s habit of projecting global power through regionally untethered alliances, such as Georgia in the South Caucasus, is becoming a liability. Reliant on its hub-and-spoke network of bilateral alliances, of which Georgia was one, Washington has lacked a coherent approach to the Eurasian continent since the Soviet collapse. The result is that the U.S. alliance system’s ability to withstand authoritarian coordination by China and Russia is weakening. Pivoting on specific states, without a broader continental approach and blueprints for regional integration, will only strengthen the local elites and undercut U.S. power in this challenging continent.

A fresh new approach to the world’s largest landmass is needed. Specifically, a continental strategy should involve fostering economic integration and connectivity across subregions such as the South Caucasus and Central Asia—which means promoting the creation of trade and transit routes and establishing clear rules for their operation. Such a continental vision can help Washington generate economic dividends in the various subregions. This approach would strengthen smaller states collectively, enhance U.S. influence in Eurasia, and improve Washington’s bargaining power against Sino-Russian coordination.

Unlike Washington, both China and Russia have developed continental designs for Eurasia. For the Kremlin, Eurasianismthe idea that Russia is not exclusively part of Europe or Asia, but rather the center of gravity of a Eurasian civilization—has become a guiding political doctrine. Initially motivated to resurrect aspects of the multinational Soviet Union across its successor states, Eurasianism has now evolved for Moscow into a civilizational, anti-Western, anti-liberal precept. It has been bombastic, territorial, aggressive, and exclusive, culminating in the establishment of Russia-centric regional organizations such as the Eurasian Economic Union and the Collective Security Treaty Organization, as well as in its invasion in Ukraine.

And now, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is causing trade disruptions and shifting trade routes in Eurasia and beyond. The Kremlin’s loss of geopolitical and strategic leverage over Eurasian connectivityinfrastructural and political—is a development of historical proportions.

China’s continentalism, on the other hand, advances unchallenged. In contrast to Russia, China is advancing its influence over this landmass largely through its infrastructural power: The Belt and Road Initiative and its network of pipelines and power lines. It is through this infrastructural power that China is reshaping existing regional orders in Russia’s peripheries, with Central Asia as a key front line. And Beijing’s approach is ambiguous, nontransparent, and nonterritorial, allowing China to advance through Russia’s periphery without confrontation.

Early visions and designs of a continental approach to Eurasia started to emerge during the Biden administration. Outgoing U.S. President Joe Biden has tried to close the gap with China’s massive infrastructural advancement by investing in infrastructure, revitalizing partnerships, and building “connective tissue” between allies on the continent, as explained in essays by the U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan.

In 2023, Sullivan emphasized boosting connectivity between Europe and the Indo-Pacific  to strengthen U.S. alliances and burden-sharing. In response to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, the United States has revamped its hub-and-spoke approach to Eurasia in recent years with initiatives such as AUKUS; the Quad; and the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor, which would link Asia, the Persian Gulf, and Europe.

Yet this approach remains dangerously outdated, having changed little since the end of the Second World War. Its strategic thinking still compartmentalizes Eurasia into disjointed subregions, within each relying on a so-called pivot state to exercise U.S. power and protect Washington’s interests. Some examples include Japan, Turkey, India, and South Korea.

Influence projected in this way is what political scientist Peter Katzenstein and others have called the “American imperium”: various territorial and nonterritorial mechanisms used to penetrate a region, often through a single state designated as a regional intermediary, for purposes of sustained influence and global hegemony.

Approaching this vast continent via bilateral alliance politics rather than a continental vision has weakened the United States in identifiable ways.

First, it diluted Washington’s bargaining power relative to smaller states, such as Georgia, and middle powers, including Turkey. In Georgia, for example, Washington ended up enhancing the bargaining power of the increasingly authoritarian government, which was able to centralize power and capture the state institutions. These trends only further polarized society. Despite losing influence in the region since its invasion in Ukraine, Moscow can now snatch victory from the jaws of defeat in the South Caucasus.

In the aftermath of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union, as more Eurasian subregions were taking shape—such as Central Asia, the Baltic states, the South Caucasus, and the Balkans—this strategy has become a liability. These subregions are frontier spaces between larger geopolitical powers, and the political elites in their pivot states quickly learned to play off Washington, Moscow, and Beijing against one another.

Second, this approach created regional conditions that are unfavorable to democratic breakthroughs and conducive to authoritarian durability. The fractured geopolitics of Eurasia pose an immediate threat to the rules-based order nurtured under U.S. hegemony—perhaps even more than the rise of China.

In continuing to focus on pivot states across Eurasia, the United States has, since the end of the Cold War, inadvertently created or exacerbated geopolitical cleavages there. Such cleavages have weakened regional markets, making it hard for nascent democracies to produce economic dividends. State fragility in these regions crystallized into a condition, keeping regions stuck in armed conflicts of various severity. In the Caucasus, with its singular alliance with Georgia, Washington has contributed to economic fracture.

Georgia emerged as the short-term beneficiary of poorly connected regional markets. This then enhanced the bargaining power of the Georgia Dream, relative to Washington. Indeed, Tbilisi continues to play off China, Russia, and the West against one another.

Despite—or perhaps because of—the severe political crisis in Georgia, the South Caucasus is where a diplomatic push for broader continental approach by the incoming Trump administration could deliver quick dividends for Washington’s influence in Eurasia.


Unlike its policies in Indo-Pacific, where the Biden administration succeeded in deepening principles of open regionalism and rules-based free trade, Washington is still playing defense in the South Caucasus. Azerbaijan, a tiny, declining, and autocratic petrostate has succeeded in keeping the West out and Russia in. President Ilham Aliyev’s repeated threats to carve an extraterritorial Zangezur corridor in Armenia’s south aim to create a sanctions-proof, overland Middle Corridor.

If successful, this plan would turn Armenia’s south into a gray-zone entrepôt, overseen militarily by Russia and Azerbaijan. Opaque to the United States, this would connect Russia and Iran, giving China a new route to its Anaklia deep-water port facility, which is under construction on Georgia’s Black Sea coast. In addition to sabotaging Washington’s diplomacy directed at opening trade and transit routes in the region, Baku also derides the EU civilian monitors on Armenia’s borders. Aliyev and Russian President Vladimir Putin also champion regional formats of engagement that are specifically designed to exclude the Euro-Atlantic powers.

Indeed, Russia is likely to compensate its losses in the Middle East by pushing harder in the South Caucasus, where it has been losing ground since the start of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

James C. O’Brien, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, emphasized in a June interview that Washington’s supports a peace agreement between Armenia and Azerbaijan, highlighting its potential to foster regional prosperity by creating a trade route from Central Asia to the Mediterranean.

In the short term, U.S. President-elect Donald Trump can continue Biden’s policies of open regionalism and continental connectivity. This entails deepening the currently limited U.S. support to Armenia’s Crossroads for Peace initiative, an effort to enhance broad-based regional connectivity. This promises to generate economic benefits to the South Caucasus while reducing Russia’s influence over the region.

This initiative can also turn the United States into a key player in Eurasian connectivity, giving Washington transparent and diversified access to Central and South Asia. To this end, leaning on Turkey to open its border with Armenia—to date an ongoing but unsuccessful diplomatic engagement between Ankara and Yerevan—could have far-reaching regional and continental effects, diminishing Russia’s control over trade and transit routes.

In the long term, the U.S. president-elect can rewrite the forms of democratic assistance to countries in such regions. Allocating funding designed specifically for building cross-border collaboration or cultivating professional networks across the region can address the problem of regional fracture in Eurasia. And just as importantly, offering political and financial support for trilateral governance between Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, under the U.S. umbrella, will allow Washington to have predictable connectivity to Central Asia and South Asia—perennial goals for successive administrations since the end of the Cold War. Washington has done it in the postwar Balkans and can do so again in postwar Caucasus.

But none of these goals will be possible if the threat of war and aggression continues to shape regional politics in the Caucasus. Euro-Atlantic powers are uniquely positioned to strengthen the norms against conquest and aggression—the very norms that Russia-backed Azerbaijan has been trying to undermine in the region. With its rapidly declining oil revenues, Azerbaijan is set to lose its regional leverage, making Baku more amenable to Trump’s much-touted strategy of “peace through strength.”

Washington’s continental approach to Eurasia can help to reverse the growing authoritarian tide in the South Caucasus. Georgia’s hope for a European future can be restarted by pushing back against authoritarian actors in the region, of which the Georgian Dream is just one of many.

Anna Ohanyan is the Richard B. Finnegan distinguished professor of political science and international relations at Stonehill College in Massachusetts, and a nonresident senior scholar in the Russia/Eurasia program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Her latest book is The Neighborhood Effect: The Imperial Roots of Regional Fracture in Eurasia, published by Stanford University Press in 2022. X: @AnnaOhanyan03

Join the Conversation

Commenting on this and other recent articles is just one benefit of a Foreign Policy subscription.

Already a subscriber? .

Join the Conversation

Join the conversation on this and other recent Foreign Policy articles when you subscribe now.

Not your account?

Join the Conversation

Please follow our comment guidelines, stay on topic, and be civil, courteous, and respectful of others’ beliefs.

You are commenting as .

More from Foreign Policy

  • U.S. President Joe Biden meets employees of the Lobito Atlantic Railway at the Port of Lobito in Lobito, Angola, on Dec. 4.

    Is the U.S. Answer to China’s Belt and Road Working?

    The International Development Finance Corporation has put the United States more on the map, but China remains king of global infrastructure.

  • Taliban fighters ride on a U.S.-made Humvee to celebrate the first anniversary of their return to power in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Aug. 15, 2022.

    Who Lost More Weapons—Russia in Syria or America in Afghanistan?

    After the collapse of their client states, both patrons left behind a trove of military equipment.

  • People dance and sing as they take part in victory celebrations in Damascus, Syria, on Dec. 13.

    How Post-Assad Syria Could Unleash a New Regional Order

    Turkey can calm Arab nations fearful of an Islamist takeover by inviting Syria’s neighbors and the Gulf states to play a central role in the political transition.

  • A map wearing a hat looks at a computer screen with a protest crowd image on it. On the walls above him are posters and photos.

    AI Is Bad News for the Global South

    The coming wave of technology is set to worsen global inequality.