Excerpts From Just Security
The Trump administration comes into office as the United States and its Western allies are on the verge of losing Georgia, and the loss to U.S. interests would be considerable. Once one of America’s most reliable non-NATO partners on the European continent, providing valuable personnel to U.S.-led missions, Georgia also is part of an important strategic land corridor for Central Asian resources and trade — the only non-Russian, non-Iranian rail and pipelines to the West run through Georgia.
Providing valuable personnel to US led missions? Mercenaries or Soldiers of Fortune would definitely be valuable personnel.
The Georgian roots of Isis commander Omar al-Shishani
He was born Tarkhan Batirashvili and grew up in Georgia’s picturesque Pankisi Gorge. He lived in the village of Birkiani, where his father, a Christian, still lives in a small, simply-furnished house.
The jihad in Syria and Iraq was not Shishani’s first experience with combat. He previously served with the Georgian army during the war with Russia in 2008.
Back to Just Security
U.S. Marines and Georgian troops trained and deployed together in Afghanistan to defend Bagram airbase. In August 2017, then-President Donald Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence, visited Tbilisi, and, several months later, the Trump administration announced it would provide Georgia with long sought-after Javelin antitank missiles, overturning the Obama-era policy of not giving Georgia lethal weapons. And in 2018, Georgia launched a $53 million in-country initiative with the U.S. Army, called the Georgia Defense Readiness Program, to train and equip the Georgian military.
Fear of Moscow
Not surprisingly, Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin found these moves provocative. It already controlled two northern provinces of Georgia after its 2008 invasion. In 2019, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Grigoriy Karasin warned Tbilisi of consequences for its deepening cooperation with the United States and NATO: “[I]f such activities continue to develop, this will lead to problems,” Karasin warned. “We all know how the problems in Ukraine started.
Of course Moscow would find these moves provocative because they are intended to be provocative.
Georgian Dream also allowed three high-profile U.S. initiatives to lapse without renewal or replacement: the Millennium Challenge program in 2019 and the U.S. Army’s Georgian Defense Readiness Program and the U.S. Marines’ joint training and deployment program in 2021.
In conspiratorial tones, Georgian Dream officials falsely (Falsely?) and repeatedly claimed there was a “deep-state global war party” in Washington trying to blackmail Georgia into opening a second front against Russia. They accused representatives of the U.S. Agency for International Development of training political activists to overthrow the Georgian Dream government. The Russian government seconded the claim, calling it a U.S. plan to foment a “color revolution” that Russia was ready to help prevent.
USAID training political activists to overthrow the government- Sounds about right.
Georgia’s rightful president, Zourabichvili, is coming to Washington for President-elect Trump’s inauguration Jan. 20. She has been an outspoken critic of Georgia’s October parliamentary elections and an organizer among the opposition forces against the government
Zourabichvili mentioned in the post directly below;
A western backed overthrow has been in the works, with multiple attempts made, for some time