Salome Zurabishvili has a message tailored to President Donald Trump’s “America First” principle in Washington.
The fifth president of Georgia – a small country with a population of just 3.7 million but strategically located along the Black Sea in the Caucasus region of central Europe – is the de facto standard-bearer of Georgia’s popular opposition movement. She says her homeland’s democracy and Western values are under threat. But that’s not why the United States cares. Instead, Ms. Zurabishvili points to at-risk US interests in a region that have shifted in recent years in favor of Russia, China and even Iran.
“Democracy we have to defend; “This is the work of the people who are on our streets every day,” she told a crowd of journalists organized by Al-Monitor in Washington on Wednesday morning. “But if we’re talking about a strong America, a strong America starts in this very strategic region” that includes the Caucasus and the Black Sea.
Why did we write this?
Salome Zurabishvili, “Georgia’s only legitimate president,” warned during an observer breakfast that American interests could be at risk if her country and region fell under Russian control.
Noting that “we are already a very strategic region for Russia,” she adds that it would be “a very big step back for America” to cede influence to an increasingly engaged Moscow and Beijing.
Ms. Zurabishvili refused to step down last December when Mikheil Kavelashvili was inaugurated as Georgia’s new president after elections that many Georgians and most Western countries described as rigged.
Zurabishvili, who called herself “Georgia’s only legitimate president,” has spent recent weeks resisting an opposition movement that has spread beyond the capital, Tbilisi, to dozens of small cities and towns.
But she is also touring European capitals and now Washington, warning that without a strong, united response from Western powers, Russia and China will expand their dominance westward.
When I was introduced to then-President-elect Trump at the official reopening of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris in December, “I told him: [him] “This is a strategic area that the United States cannot forget,” she says, adding that she got the impression that her point of view was accepted with interest. Pointing out that Mr. Trump visited Georgia and indicated that he enjoyed his presence in her country, she added about the meeting: “This was not an abstract moment; [he] “He can be considered a friend of Georgia.”
Ms. Zurabishvili says she shared the same message with Secretary of State Marco Rubio when she met him briefly at one of several inaugural events she attended — including Monday’s inauguration in the US capital — at the invitation of Republican Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina.
Ms. Zurabishvili says: To what extent Washington’s new powers will integrate the geopolitical powers of the Black Sea region and the Caucasus into their priorities remains to be seen. But it underscores that the West can only ignore Russia’s increasingly sophisticated approach of undermining independent, pro-Western states by subverting free and fair elections, at its own peril.
“There is a strategy” for the entire region, she says, “and we better start acknowledging it.”
And to anyone mourning Washington’s apparent shift in foreign policy from former President Joe Biden’s focus on democracy and American values like human rights to President Trump’s more forceful slogans of “peace through strength” and “America First,” Ms. Zurabishvili has another message.
She says that from Georgia’s experience, the Biden doctrine turned out to be mostly just talk.
“The previous administration…didn’t really do anything about preserving democracy in Georgia over the last two years,” she says, noting that Washington did not impose sanctions for what happened until December 29, with the inauguration of President Kavelashvili. It’s called the “New Order”.
Also on that day, the country’s new prime minister announced that Georgia would “suspend” its candidacy for EU membership, a move that was largely opposed by the general public.
At breakfast on Wednesday, Ms. Zurabishvili was reminded that President Trump had shaken allies with his “expansionist” plans, with talk of seizing the Panama Canal and acquiring Greenland.
The Georgian leader was careful not to burn any bridges, even while emphasizing the principle of integrity of international borders as the cornerstone of international security.
“Donald Trump might talk about expansion, but the Russians were doing it,” she says, referring to Russia’s occupation of two Georgian regions. She says important evidence will come from the Trump administration’s position on resolving Russia’s war in Ukraine.
For global stability, world powers, including the United States, “need to finally convince Russia to accept becoming an important power, but… a power that lives within its borders,” she says. “This will end when Russia has borders.”
