By Kit Klarenberg, Substack, 6/15/24
It’s been reported by Georgian media that Tbilisi is now “actively working” to restore the country’s diplomatic relations with Moscow, severed by the then regime in August 2008, following its trouncing in a calamitous five-day war with Russia. While this may seem mundane to outside observers, it is a seismic development, amply testifying to the extraordinary pace and scale of the US Empire’s self-inflicted collapse.
Over decades, Washington has invested enormous energy and money into turning Georgia against Russia. Tbilisi has deep and cohering cultural, economic, and historic ties with its huge neighbor. Today, nostalgia for the Soviet Union is widespread, and Joseph Stalin remains a local hero for a significant majority of citizens. While public support for Euro-Atlantic integration and EU and NATO membership is strong, recent developments have prompted many Georgians to reconsider their country’s relationship with the West.
Since taking office in 2012, the ruling Georgian Dream has struck a delicate balance between strengthening Western ties and maintaining civil coexistence with Moscow. This has become an ever-fraught dance since the outbreak of the Ukraine proxy conflict, with external pressure to impose sanctions on Russia and send arms to Kiev perpetually rising. Against this backdrop, there have been multiple apparent plots to overthrow the government and install a more belligerent administration.
In order to neutralize the threat of a coup by Georgian Dream’s domestic and international adversaries, legislation compelling foreign-funded NGOs – of which there are over 25,000 in Tbilisi – has been passed. Its gestation produced a bitter showdown with the EU and US, ending with lawmakers who voted for the law being sanctioned by Washington and the threat of further action to come. Along the way, Georgian citizens were confronted with the poisonous reality of their relationship with the West. And they didn’t like it.
‘Foreign Assistance’
Contemporary media reports on Ukraine’s 2014 Maidan “revolution” either ignored the unambiguous Western role in fomenting it or dismissed the proposition as Russian “disinformation” or “conspiracy theory”. Ever since the proxy conflict began, Western journalists have become even more aggressive in rejecting any and all suggestions that the insurrectionary upheaval in Kiev was anything other than an overwhelmingly – if not universally – popular grassroots public revolt.
Yet, it was not long ago that the Empire unabashedly advertised its role in orchestrating “color revolutions” throughout the former Soviet sphere, of which Maidan will surely in future be considered the final installment. In 2005, intelligence cutout USAID published a slick magazine, Democracy Rising, documenting in detail how Washington was behind a wave of rebellious unrest in Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Ukraine, Yugoslavia, and elsewhere during the first years of the 21st century.
Two years prior, the Washington-sponsored “Rose Revolution” unseated longtime Georgian leader Eduard Shevardnadze, replacing him with handpicked, US-educated Mikheil Saakashvili, a close associate of George Soros. Shevardnadze had since Tbilisi’s 1991 independence from the Soviet Union eagerly served as a committed agent of Empire, opening up his country to far-reaching privatization for the benefit of Western investors and extensive societal and political infiltration by US and European-funded organizations.
In a bitter irony, such subservience was Shevardnadze’s ultimate undoing. Brussels and Washington exploited this space to lay the foundations of his overthrow, financing individuals and organizations who would serve as shock troops in the “Rose Revolution”. For instance, Democracy Rising reveals that in 1999, US funding “helped Georgians draw up and build support for a Freedom of Information Law, which the government adopted.” This allowed Western-funded media and NGO assets “to investigate government budgets, [and] force the firing of a corrupt minister.”
The US, moreover, bankrolled the training of “lawyers, judges, journalists, members of parliament, NGOs, political party leaders, and others” to wage war against their government. The official purpose of this largesse was to “give people a sense that they should regulate the government.” As per Democracy Rising, “the Rose Revolution was the climax of these efforts.” Following Tbilisi’s November 2003 election, US-financed exit polling suggested the official result – pointing to the victory of a coalition of pro-Shevardnadze parties – was fraudulent.
Scores of anti-government activists from across the country then descended upon Tbilisi’s parliament building, ferried on buses paid for by Washington. Nationwide demonstrations led by US-bankrolled NGOs and activist groups raged for weeks, culminating on November 23 with activists storming parliament brandishing roses. The very next day, Shevardnadze resigned. One recipient of Western support remarked in Democracy Rising, “without foreign assistance, I’m not sure we would have been able to achieve what we did without bloodshed.”
As the USAID pamphlet noted, many US-financed and trained assets in Georgia central to the Rose Revolution went on to become officials within Saakashvili’s government. One, Zurab Chiaberashvili, was appointed as chair of Tbilisi’s Central Election Commission from 2003 to 2004, before becoming mayor of Tbilisi. He was quoted in Democracy Rising as saying:
“Under US assistance, new leaders were born…[the US] helped good people get rid of a bad and corrupted government…[this assistance] made civil actors alive, and when the critical moment came, we understood each other like a well-prepared soccer team.”
The Empire’s in-house journal Foreign Policy has conceded the results of the “Rose Revolution” were “terribly disappointing”. Far-reaching change “never really materialized,” and “elite corruption still continued apace.” Saakashvili was no more democratic or less authoritarian than his predecessor – in fact, his rule was brutal and dictatorial in many ways Shevardnadze’s was not. Questions abound about his involvement in several suspicious deaths, he directed security services to assassinate rivals, and at his personal behest, prisons became politicized hotbeds of torture and rape.
The Empire could forgive Saakashvili all this though, for further facilitating his country’s economic rape and pillage, and even more crucially, intensifying Tbilisi’s anti-Russian agitation locally and internationally. This crusade came to a bloody head in August 2008, when Georgian forces, with US encouragement, began shelling civilian positions in the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Moscow intervened to decisively defend the pair. As many as 200,000 locals were displaced in subsequent battles, with hundreds killed.
Dissident journalist Mark Ames visited sites of the fighting in December of that year and witnessed “an epic historical shift” – “the first ruins of America’s imperial decline.” The Georgian army had been trained, armed, and even clothed by the US over many years, only to be comprehensively crushed by Russia’s military – and there was “no American cavalry on the way.” His first-hand insights led Ames to dub the outbreak of war that year, “the day America’s empire died.”
Ames had previously visited Georgia in 2002 to report on the arrival of US military advisors to the country. As the journalist records, “At the time, the American empire was riding high.” TIME magazine had recently celebrated George W. Bush’s inauguration with a column declaring that Washington was “the dominant power in the world, more dominant than any since Rome,” and thus positioned “to re-shape norms, alter expectations and create new realities,” via “unapologetic and implacable demonstrations of will.”
US military expansion into Georgia was one such bold “demonstration of will.” Military advisors were dispatched ostensibly to train Tbilisi’s soldiers to combat “terrorism”. In reality, as Ames wrote, the purpose was to tutor them “for key imperial outsourcing duties.” It was expected that “Georgia would do for the American Empire what Mumbai call centers did for Delta Airlines: deliver greater returns at a fraction of the cost.” The move would also secure Washington’s “strategic control of the untapped oil in the region.”
The benefit for Georgia? “[Moscow] wouldn’t fuck with them, because fucking with them would be fucking with us – and nobody would dare to do that.” In the event, however, Saakashvili’s intimate bromance with the West was no deterrent at all. The blitzkrieg’s success, moreover, left Russia “drunk on its victory and the possibilities that it might imply”:
“Now it’s over for us. That’s clear on the ground. But it will be years before America’s political elite even begins to grasp this fact…We have entered a dangerous moment in history – America in decline is reacting hysterically, woofing and screeching and throwing a tantrum, desperate to prove that it still has teeth. Russia, meanwhile, is as high as a Hollywood speedballer from its victory…If we’re lucky, we’ll survive the humiliating decline…without causing too much damage to ourselves or the rest of the world.”
The Maidan coup starkly showed the Empire failed to learn lessons from the 2008 war, and Ames’ hope that Washington’s “humiliating decline” could be endured by US citizens and politicians alike “without causing too much damage to ourselves or the rest of the world” was futile. The West is now struggling to confront its undeniable defeat on Ukraine’s eastern steppe and accept the unraveling of its long-running efforts to absorb Moscow’s “near abroad”, openly mulling direct intervention in the proxy conflict. God help us all.
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