From Promise to Punishment: How Washington Turned on The Republic of Georgia
After Hubris, Comes Nemesis
The scene was downtown Tbilisi. The year 2005. And the 43rd President of the United States, George W. Bush proclaimed that before the winds of freedom blew from Baghdad to Beirut, it was Georgia’s Rose Revolution that inspired freedom-loving folks across the region. The president’s bouts of messianic fervor were imbued with religious and philosophical undertones. With a spirit of Christian militancy, Mr. Bush espoused a teleological determinism that freedom would one day guide Georgia to its emancipation from Russian captivity. However, what stuck in the collective psyche of Georgian society since the president’s visit, was not the ideological and philosophic underpinnings of his speech, but a more simplistic one-liner: “ Georgia is a beacon of liberty for this region and the world”.
Sharing the stage with the president, was of course his “golden boy” Mikheil Saakashvili (Misha, as he was popularly known). Young, energetic and western-educated, Saakashvili had become a useful idiot for the neoconservative elite in Washington. From Bush to Cheney, to the long line of usual suspects in the neoconservative and neoliberal think tank establishment, he was their lapdog whose purpose was to create a political environment in Georgia perpetually hostile to Russia. Anyone who questioned the wisdom of this radical and foolish policy was labeled pro-Russian, backward and anti-western in Misha’s political system.
In all fairness, Saakashvili and his United National Movement (UNM) did implement some effective and necessary reforms immediately after coming to power as a result of the Rose Revolution in 2003. Police reform was perhaps his most successful achievement, along with the fight against corruption. Importantly, Saakashvili implemented tax reform, which for the first since independence allowed the Georgian government to collect taxes from its citizens, filling the coffers of the treasury. Simply put, the UNM, backed by the west, and particularly Washington, was starting to look like a poster-boy for liberal internationalism. Yet, little did they know that the fanfare would be short-lived, and Georgian society would soon face the specter of state terror which would evoke memories of the Soviet past.
Nevertheless, what made Saakashvili’s government politically attractive during its first few years was the exhaustion and disenchantment that Georgians felt toward the previous government. That government, headed by the former Soviet Foreign Secretary, Eduard Shevardnadze, had fallen from grace. Once considered the savior of Georgia’s statehood in the aftermath of the Georgian civil war during the early nineties, by 2003 he had all but squandered his political capital. Shevardnadze’s enormous political talents and international reputation could not sustain his presidency, which oversaw a notoriously corrupt government. Even his close friend and fellow diplomat, James Baker, had to warnShevardnadze “in no uncertain terms” that Washington would not take well to “tampering” with elections.
Even so, Baker must have felt a sense of guilt in the recesses of his soul for abandoning his friend – “Silver Fox”, – as Shevardnadze was often called. After all this was the man who had played a key role in ending The Cold War. During my conversation with the former US Ambassador to the Soviet Union, Jack Matlock, Dr. Matlock alluded to what might be perceived as the intersubjective code of honor among older generation of statesmen, when he pointed out that Shevardnadze was not treated fairly, perhaps implying that Shevardnadze deserved more dignified treatment from his political counterparts after a lifetime of service.
And so, in 2003, a new era of politics in Georgia commenced. Having come to power as a result of the Rose Revolution, the brood of Young-Hegelians took over the project of social, cultural and economic engineering on a massive scale. To his credit, Shevardnadze did warn the public that Saakashvili was “dangerous.” His warning turned out to be prescient. Saakasvhili’s foot soldiers, the newly-minted, soulless technocrats would indeed pose a danger to the Georgian statehood. However, by that time it was already too late: the neo-bolshevism had arrived.
With the passage of time, nothing has encapsulated the shallowness of describing Saakashvili’s Georgia as a beacon of liberty, more in the minds of Georgian citizens than the political terror they had to endure under the government of Mikhail Saakashvili and his UNM. An inseparable part of this project was the draconian economic policy, which had to be brought into strict alignment with politics. A much harsher neoliberal economic policy had already been implemented in Russia and had played a key role in bringing post-Soviet Russia’s economy to its knees; Moscow was put at the mercy of Washington—something Russia’s elites have, quite understandably, yet to forget.
Once the UNM created its political and economic vision, it was time to sell it to Georgian society. With political sensationalism, the Orwellian assault on language and meaning followed. For example, the neoliberal economic project became replete with words and phrases such as “libertarianism,” “free markets,” and “Ayn Rand.” At the time, the majority of Georgians did not have a clear idea of the philosophic and intellectual origins of these words, let alone an understanding of the type of economic transformation they were meant to describe. In other words, the economy that was forced upon Georgian society had little to do with the principles of free markets, open competition or libertarianism. Instead, the directive was to simply shove democracy promotion and neoliberal economics down their throats.
Shortly after coming to power, Saakashvili invited Kakha Bendukidze, who had made his fortune in Moscow, to head Georgia’s economy. Bendukidze embarked on an indoctrination campaign to force the ideas of market fundamentalism and privatization on Georgia. His mantra was ‘everything is for sale’, except Georgia’s consciousness. Under his leadership, major strategic economic assets were sold off to none other than Russia. This was a deeply disturbing and a puzzling economic policy, which Georgian society staunchly resisted, but ultimately was no match for the combination of terror and western support deployed by the government. Here was a government whose political image was ostentatiously pro-western, which on a daily basis, stirred up hatred against Russia. Yet, ironically, it was perfectly willing to sell off economic assets of strategic importance to Moscow. All this was done under the banner of libertarianism and free markets.
This ideology descended into its inevitable absurdity when Bendukidze and Saaksvhili proposed the sale of the strategic energy pipeline to Gazprom—the Russian energy giant. Recognizing that such a move would potentially jeopardizethe decades-long political and economic investment in Georgia’s energy transport projects from Washington, it took the US State Department’s involvement to stop the proposal from moving forward. Michael Mann, who was in charge of the Caspian Sea energy issues at the time, had to publicly warn against such moves on part of Saakashvili’s government. In addition to this highly questionable economic policy, there was another foolish proposal to sell off Georgia’s strategic railway system to Russian companies, which also failed to materialize.
In the final analyses, it has become clear that the neoliberal and laissez-faire economic gospel produced very little, if any, long-term sustainable industrialization and/or modernization of the Georgian state. In one of his many criticisms of this plan, a well-known scholar on the region, Stephen Jones, recalls that this period in Georgia was marked by “political schizophrenia” instead of economic prosperity.
From the ‘Freedom Agenda’ to the Imposition of Sanctions
The extraordinary damage to Georgia did not occur solely because of the failure of neoliberal economics. It was primarily a failure of politics, of the so-called “freedom agenda” that was packaged up and sold to Georgia under false pretenses. The “beacon of liberty” soon turned into a state terror that Saakashvili unleashed on his own people.
The first documented signs of state terror started to appear when the current ruling party, The Georgian Dream (GD), defeated the UNM in the 2012 elections. Recognized by the west as a “democratic moment”, a peaceful transfer of power occurred in Tbilisi. However, almost immediately after the elections, illusions of peaceful coexistence between the UNM and GD started to shatter. Georgia faced a fundamental question: Would the GD government mount a successful political and legal campaign to prosecute the members of the UNM for allegations of egregious violations of human rights, property rights and economic crimes? It was understood, however, that the challenge was how to persuade Washington that not only did these crimes occur, but that the GD was morally obligated to deliver justice to the families of the victims. It became clear soon after the elections that forming a statewide, “truth commission” would be categorically opposed in Washington. When Bidzina Ivanishvili, the founder of the GD, met with the US Assistant Secretary of State Philip Gordon, Gordon warnedhim against “selective prosecutions” unless Ivanishvili wanted to see Georgia’s prospects of joining Euro-Atlantic institutions dwindle.
And yet, a few years later , Washington did show a certain flexibility to GD, when it acquiesced to eventual arrests of the most well-known and notorious ministers of Saakashvili’s regime for abuses of power. For example, Mr. Bacho Akhalia, who held the positions of the minister of defense and state intelligence chief, was sentenced to over seven years in prison. Another feared minister of the interior, Mr. Ivane Merabishvili was also sentenced to over four years for abuse of power and financial crimes.
But perhaps most shockingly, the Georgian court arrested and sentenced Saakashvili himself for abuse of power, for ordering a beating of a Georgian citizen, businessman and opposition figure. What made this perplexing for Georgian citizens was that GD had repeatedly tried to extraditeSaakashvili from Kiev, Ukraine, but had failed. However, Saakashvili returned on his own volition, only for GD to arrest him. So far, this strange incident has been explained in Georgia as yet another in a series of erratic behaviors by the former president who is determined to cause another revolution and make a comeback. If so, this turned out to be a major miscalculation on Saakashvili’s part. He and his supporters must have forgotten that UNM’s crimes were still fresh in collective memory of the Georgian society, and they could not fathom the idea of Saakashvili’s return to power, which in their minds would certainly mean the return of terror.
In any event, he sneaked back into the country in the back of a truck.
Saakashvili is currently serving his time in a “jail cell” (house arrest) with nurses hovering over him to make sure the GD does not face trumped up accusations from extremist parties in Europe that they are slowly killing the former president under appalling conditions. In other words, the GD does not want to turn Saakashvili into another “pro-western martyr” like Sergei Magnitsky.
Eventually, when the European Court of Human Rights, “confirming that the trial was fair”, ruled that “there were no human rights or health grounds to release Saakashvili”, the extremist opposition parties along with their European counterparts had no choice but to acquiesce to the hard facts about their one-time hero.
Under Saakashvili’s reign there was a structure of systemic abuse. Shortly after winning the election in 2012, GD revealed hundreds, if not thousands of secret, illegal tapes that contained compromising materials on Georgian citizens,including horrific videos of rape and physical abuse, which the previous government used in Soviet-style interrogations against its opponents.
Arguably, the most damaging incident, and the one which is believed to have sealed the fate of Saakashvili and his UNM during the 2012 elections, was the prison abuse videotaken in a notorious prison on the outskirts of Tbilisi: Gldani Prison,which has earned a coveted place on the list of the worst prisons in the world–a list which also includes the prison at Guantanamo Bay.
The horrific scenes of institutionalized abuse of power would also regularly manifest in the streets of Tbilisi. The death of a young bank employee, Sandro Girgvliani, is still remembered in Georgia as a symbol of state terror under UNM. After a verbal altercation with high officials from the Ministry of the Interior in a local restaurant, Girgviliani was taken outside of Tbilisi and killed. There were also said to be signs of torture on Girgvliani’s body. This event galvanized the population with protesters demanding the arrest of those responsible for the crime. However, after arresting those who were directly responsible for the killing, Saakashvili pardoned them with an early release. They had also been given “extremely favorable treatment” while in prison.
Eventually, the family of Girgvliani mounted a legal case in the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. The court issued a scathing report and expressed shock on “how the different branches of state power…acted in concert in preventing justice from being done”, It determined that the government “failed to consider credible allegations of complicity”. This tragic incident has become a permanent reminder to Georgian society of the hypocrisies of Washington’s “Freedom agenda” during the Saakasvili era.
Yet, Saakashvili’s regime continued to present to the Georgian public and to its western partners a façade-the reality, however, was quite different. For example, while administrative, law enforcement, or “technical institutions”functioned effectively, the WEF’s Global Competitiveness Report consistently showed that in terms of “judicial independence,” Georgia was “in the 95th place, a lowly 131st place when it comes to “property rights,” and in 141st place with regard to “effectiveness of anti-monopoly policy.” The UNM’s program of state extended to the business community and private sector. According to the transparency international report, owners of businesses were constantly terrorized by the government which used the federal prosecutor’s office as a tool of extortion.
Neither did the Western ideology of limited government trickle down to the populace under Saakashvili. Saakashvili’s intellectually unimpressive admiration of Reagan might have been expected, given his government’s promotion of John Galt, or Margaret Thatcheras exemplars of freedom and personal responsibility. However, here, too, Saakashvili, along with his patrons in Washington, thought the abuse and betrayal of these ideas was an insignificant matter in the grand scheme of things; a small nation, in a primitive state of admiration for all things American, could be used as a laboratory of experiments for these ideas, with little to no concern for failed methods of delivering and putting them into practice.
And fail they did. Misha’s infamous “zero tolerance” policy was eerily similar to that of Reagan’s war on drugs policy. Even worse, it was heavily based on 1984 Soviet law which allowed the state to keep alleged criminals in jail for ninety days on the sole basis of police testimony. When enacted in 2006 , almost overnight the entire population of Georgia became guilty on the basis of the state’s say-so: “with more than 99 percent of criminal cases brought to court ending with a conviction. “ The following quote describes accurately disturbing signs of autocracy at work: “transforming the public’s attitude towards crime, decreasing the crime rate to a minimum, and eradicating impunity by reacting to every single crime, including minor [ones].”
In order to maintain control of this draconian system, a creative legal mechanism was concocted, which introduced the practice of “plea bargaining” which was used to generate revenue for the state, letting alleged criminals off the hook with a fine and an admission of guilt. Plea bargaining generated over fifty million dollars in the first nine months of 2009 alone. As predicted, this new law led to excessive use of force, which in turn resulted in increased deaths in police custody.
According to a Carnegie Endowment report, 73 arrests between 2005-2006 resulted in 25 deaths—and the majority of the victims were unarmed. According to Gevin Slade, an expert on criminal justice, Saakashvili’s government borrowed heavily from both the US and Russian prison systems and adopted some of the worst aspects of each state’s penal law. As a result of these policies, the population of Georgia saw drastic increases in the number of prisoners between 2004 and 2012. Georgia became the country with “the highest per capita prison population in Europe, with 514 prisoners per 100,000 citizens, and the sixth highest out of 221 prison systems in the world”. For a small country of just about 4 million people, this was a shocking statistic. Still more, during the last 6 years of UNM’s rule, 653 prisoners died in Georgian jails. By comparison, “in 2009 the average prison mortality rate in Europe was 28.9 to 10,000 inmates, while Georgia’s rate was 71.6the third highest in Europe”.
How Neoconservatism Failed Georgia
The great irony of the neoconservative project in Georgia is the fact that neoconservatism in America has intellectual ties with Trotskyism. Making this historic fact a part of the social discourse in the US would most certainly serve as an irritant to the neocon gospel, especially given its political alliance with the conservative religious-philosophic outlookin the American body politic.
Fortunately, the Georgian body politic does not suffer from the same limitations when discussing the roots of neoconservatism. In Georgia, the fact that the “neo-con” ideology traces its roots to Trotskyism is frequently discussed. Although delving deeper into this issue is outside the scope of this report, it is briefly worth mentioning that the neoconservative movement would have had a better chance for establishing a lasting presence in Georgia if it had considered the fact that Georgia is a conservative, Orthodox Christian nation. By contrast, one of the key reasons for Donald Trump’s popularity in Georgia is that he is perceived as the president who has reduced the neoconservative and neoliberal establishment’s influence within Georgia. For Georgian conservatives, Trump is seen as the president who reclaimed conservatism from Washington’s neoconservative claque, by reconnecting it to the socio-cultural fabric of everyday Americans.
More broadly, to Georgian citizens, Trump is the guardian of Christianity and conservative social values that they feel have been under assault from the liberal-leftist “woke” and globalist powers. For them, it makes little political difference whether it is Latin/Roman or Protestant Christianity that stands firm against this assault. Hence, even though George W. Bush’s Republican party was profoundly Christian, and had the support of the traditional evangelical base, the Georgian conservative establishment perceived it as having been hijacked by the “neoconservative international” with its strict adherence to militarist and universalist dogma of the Wolfowitz Doctrine.
Noam Chomsky captured this dogmatic marriage of Christian faith with the US foreign policy when he provided a detailed account of a conversation between the then French President Jacques Chirac and Bush, during which Bush discussed an obscure passage from the Bible of “Gog and Magog” to imply that god would soon be at war with his enemies in Iraq. The implication of Chomsky’s story was to describe Bush’s desire to “cleanse” Iraq of evil, and to demonstrate the profound dangers of such thinking.
The point here is not that there was a scarcity of Christianity in the Bush White House, or that Georgian society would not have gobbled it all up if Bush had only shrewdly applied it to his relations with Saakashvili, but that the Bush foreign policy team applied a neoconservative internationalism that combined strong social engineering, universalism and militarism that evoked visceral feelings among Georgians that this was neither a democratic nor a Christian conservatism. It seemed instead a concerted effort to turn Georgia into a regional base for Trotskyist style permanent révolution against Russia. If Trump manages to insulate his administration from neoconservative universalism and militarism, even partially, then Georgia’s relationship with the US will stand a better chance of improving.
However, a change that will most certainly guarantee better relations between Tbilisi and Washington, would be President Trump’s embrace of a realist foreign policy to navigate our new multipolar world. The shift from unipolarity to multipolarity has affected the regional geopolitics of the South Caucasus. Trump’s campaign promise and his current efforts as president to end the Russo-Ukrainian war, as well as his reluctance to pursue traditional American adventurism in the Middle East. This being said, the jury is still out on whether Mr. Trump will come under the sway of traditional neoconservative ideologues, keen on embroiling the US in yet another tragic wars in the Middle East. Judging by most recent bombing campaigns in Yemen, and an increasing pressure to strike Iran as a way to prevent that country from building a nuclear weapon, Trump faces a historic challenge to resist bombing of yet another sovereign nation in the Middle East, use strategic prudency, manage Iran’s nuclear program, engage with it economically and eventually resist the domestic cabal of ideologues in Washington. However, even in the midst of such a gloomy scenario, it is manifestly clear that Trump (personally) recognizes that the multipolar world order has returned. On a personal level, his instinct seems to be that the repeat or continuation of the foreign policy of his predecessors will stain his political legacy as well as further strengthen the geopolitical resistance against the US in the other two major capitals of the world: Moscow and Beijing. Accordingly, Trump sees China as a possible bridge between the US and Russia in negotiations over Ukraine. More critically, Trump’s view on the strategic competition with China is also apparent in his desire to “channel Nixon” and balance Russia against China. Considering that the Trump administration is engaged in a trade war with Beijing; and complete erosion of trust of Moscow towards Washington that the neocon-neoliberal elites singlehandedly worked hard to create, the possibility of launching a fruitful dialogue with Moscow to pull off such strategic brilliance are slim to none. Nevertheless, what this shows is that Trump might be willing to exercise pragmatism, even in the face of such challenges. At the very least he is attempting to marginalize the sinister neocon influence on American statecraft.
That the conditions for sustaining the liberal international order led by the US are no longer conducive to maintaining American primacy of the post-Cold War era will soon be apparent in the new geopolitical order being shaped by the US and Russia in ending the war in Ukraine. In this new arrangement, Ukraine will be the main loser, as it faces a division of its territory by a hostile power. Its national economic wealth is up for grabs as leverage for negotiations between Russia and America. In other words, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022 ended the sovereignty of that country as the world has known it since the collapse of the USSR in 1991. Simply put, after a decades-long struggle to become a member of the western political and economic architecture, Ukraine has nothing to show for it except for its destruction. It now has no prospects of becoming a member of NATO.
Europe too has been relegated to the margins as a result of the above shift in the international system. Although the US will continue to guarantee Europe’s security, the “old continent” is no longer the geopolitical centerpiece that it once was during the Cold War, mainly because the strategic threat to the continent has disappeared with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Nevertheless, America’s continuous search for strategic relevance for NATO resulted in disasters for Georgia with the five day war in 2008, and, on a much larger scale, for Ukraine in 2022. Lurking behind these disasters has always been the deep-seated interest of the collective west to weaken Russia on its own turf: The Eurasian Heartland. However, the west once again failed to achieve their goal. With an ideologically-driven foreign policy, the collective west manufactured baseless accusations that Russia would invade Europe, after it had finished off Ukraine. Ironically, this western chimera to double down on Russia, resulted in the strengthening of Russia on the Eurasian continent. According to NATO SACEUR Christopher Cavoli, the Russian army is now larger than it was on February 24, 2022. In other words, Using Ukraine to weaken Russia, might have accelerated the return of multipolarity, thus shortening the longevity of America’s primacy in the unipolar world.
The thrust of this shift in the international system is also felt in the sub-region of the Eurasian heartland-The South Caucasus. With the strengthening of the Russian Federation in Eurasia, the South Caucasian region will experience less, not more insecurity. According to Saul Cohen, an eminent geopolitical theorist, if the west succeeds in penetrating the “convergence zone” of Eurasia, which entails the South Caucasus, it will cause emergence of “shatter zones”. The question then becomes, will the West’s failure to penetrate the convergence zone mitigate the further deterioration of conditions in the current shattered zone of the South Caucasus? The effects on the South Caucasus of the current shift in the international system indicates that the less successful the west is in indulging in its adventurism in the region, the better the chances are for Georgia to establish pragmatic relations with Moscow, thus mitigating the negative effects of its location in this shatter zone.
The history of the past thirty years has shown that Georgia’s foreign policy of idealism, heavily dependent on by the United States, has been delusional. As with Ukraine, the US does not have vital national security interests in the region, and therefore its meddling hardly demonstrates a true geo-strategic commitment, the likes of which Washington has made towards western Europe, Japan, South Korea and the Middle East, during and after the Cold War. Moreover, throughout the long sweep of history, Russia has committed to maintain its influence in the South Caucasus, precisely because it sees it as a “soft Under Belly” from which the west has tried to weaken and divide Russia. In other words, the geopolitical space of the South Caucasus represents a vital national security interest for Russia. Hence, it will go to great lengths to prevent the emergence of a western-led security architecture in the region. Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008 was a clear manifestation of this strategy in action. Therefore, Georgia, as a small state in the international system, must continue to craft its foreign policy with a strict adherence to the principles of geopolitics, and the national security interests of the regional powers.
In a significant concept paper, the rector of the Sokhumi State University (Tbilisi, Georgia) professor Zurab Khonelidze, has presented the idea that the South Caucasus is a single geopolitical space. In the book titled, “Georgian Paradigm of Peace, Khonelidze dedicates the chapter to the concept called, “The South Caucasus, Geopolitical Space- New Format for Regional Cooperation”. It offers piercing analyses of the function and the role of the South Caucasus in the international system.
Khonelidze challenges the mistaken approach of the collective west, and particularly of the US, which singles out Georgia as an exclusive candidate for membership in the western economic, political and security architecture. The author sees this as a policy that narrows and limits the functionality/operability of the entire geopolitical space for regional and outside powers. The experience of the last thirty years has shown that western attempts to carve out specific spheres of influence in the region by singling out Georgia, has been countered by Russia with military means—all at the expense of Georgia’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. Instead, the proposed alternative is to widen the regional interests of the great powers without pinning their respective interests against each other at the expense of Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia. The idea being, that if neither of the three republics can be singled out from its geopolitical core, which is the South Caucasus, then the geopolitical space the region offers can be widened for outside powers to implement their respective geopolitical and geo-economic interests, without subjecting the region or any individual state in the South Caucasus to proxy wars against Russia. Although the process that could consolidate this vision is complex, there is evidence to suggest that in the long run, the region is manifesting political signs that are conducive to its geopolitics and respective interests of its three members.
Despite its longing for the future in the west, Georgia continues to find itself at the mercy of great power politics. Nevertheless, recent months and years have shown that there is a way for Georgia to survive as a small state. The Georgian Dream government has managed to correctly identify fundamental changes taking places in the international system, and has adjusted Georgia’s foreign policy to those dynamics—and against enormous challenges put up by the US and EU. This has allowed GD to avoid repeating the tragedy of the war with Russia in 2008 thereby saving Georgia’s statehood. While the current diplomatic conflict with Washington and Brussels is certainly unprecedented and unnecessary, Georgia’s western partners must understand that Georgia will stay committed to its chosen western path, but not at the expense of its national security. So far, Georgia has been able to establish and keep the correct balance between its northern neighbor and its western partners (not without challenges) and it must continue to do so.
More broadly, the non-Western world seems to be moving on from the “dogmatic slumber” the West had put it under for the last thirty years. Washington too has expressed its desire to get back to realism and end its obsession with going to faraway lands “in search of monsters to destroy”. However, even though Donald Trump’s White House seems to be an island of pragmatism in a sea of brittle dogmatism, the current president will continue to face challenges in creating a more stable world order.
Neoconservative and neoliberal ideologues are running out of options, but still hold to their dreams of hegemony. Energized by a visceral hatred of Russia, they continue to fume as they watch president Trump slowly dismantle Ukraine – a tragedy of their own making-in his negotiations with Vladimir Putin.
As the night falls on the neoconservative era, it has all but disappeared as the “only game in town” in Tbilisi (and other capitals of Europe). Imposition of sanctions on the current GD government is more revealing of their failed strategic thinking-much like on Ukraine- than the possibility of destroying GD, or causing yet another color revolution. Those days are simply gone.
The question now facing them is how they will sustain the fervor of their permanent revolution in Georgia against Russia, should Tbilisi find a way to restore its sovereignty with Moscow. For the neoconservative and neoliberal factions in Washington, trapped in their absolutism, finding answers to this question will remain a formidable challenge.
Photo by Denis Arslanbekov on Unsplash