Georgia's leader calls for Trump's ‘strong America' to push back Russia

The Hill

26-01-2025

Salome Zourabichvili, Georgia's fifth president, is on a mission in Washington to make her country matter to President Trump and his incoming team's 'America First' foreign policy.
And she's using personal relationships to gain access that was largely blocked in a Biden administration that rigidly stuck to protocol.
'I couldn't get to have even a phone call with the vice president when she was elected,' said Zourabichvili, who is Georgia's first female president.
For a valuable few minutes of face time with Trump in December, Zourabichvili relied on French President Emanuel Macron to organize an introduction on the sidelines of the rededication ceremony of the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris.
Her message is that the U.S. should push back on Russia using Georgia 'as a playground.' Russian forces have occupied 20 percent of the country since an invasion in 2008. And Moscow is accused of helping fuel a political crisis in the country.
Mass protests have taken place for more than two months, demonstrating against the Kremlin-aligned ruling party, Georgian Dream (GD). The ruling government has cut off accession talks to the European Union, deepened ties with China, and held high-level contacts with Iran.
'I had the chance to tell him that this was a strategic region that cannot be forgotten by the United States,' Zourabichvili said last week, meeting with reporters in Washington, D.C.
Did he seem receptive to that message?
'Well, yes, in the sense that he knows Georgia, he has been to Georgia. He enjoyed having been to Georgia. So it was not an abstract moment.'
Trump once pursued construction of a residential tower in the Black Sea resort town of Batumi, but abandoned the project when he was elected president in 2016.
Zourabichvili used another close connection, Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.), to secure a rare invitation to Trump's inauguration. One of a few European leaders to attend the ceremony, she sat in the overflow room of the Capitol and had a prime seat for the president's second, unscripted speech to attendees – a rambling 30 minutes where he repeated false claims that he lost the 2020 election.
'Nobody was expecting it, it was really a surprise,' she said. 'And for me, as a political science specialist, it was fascinating.'
At pre-inauguration receptions, she shook hands with the incoming president's Cabinet nominees — Secretary of State pick Marco Rubio and Defense nominee Pete Hegseth. She has carried out a weeklong media blitz, including Trump's favorite news channel, Fox News, to get her message across.
'They cannot let this region go to Russia. That's what we have to understand,' Zourabichvili said of her main message.
Her strategy is that those first few introductions lead to more substantial meetings — particularly at the Munich Security Conference next month – and convince Trump's team that it's important to have a policy on Georgia.
'What I expect is America to feel engaged in this region because otherwise it's leading this region to Russia, to the Chinese,' she said.
Trump, while reversing a slew of Biden's policies and actions, has not yet touched the Georgia file, and there's a core group of bipartisan lawmakers who are supportive of keeping the previous administration's policies in place.
This includes the Biden administration suspension of $95 million in assistance to the Georgian government over passage of a so-called Russian law, mirroring Kremlin legislation that is used to suppress and criminalize civil society organizations and the media.
The Biden administration also held back recognizing Georgian Dream's claims of victory following October parliamentary elections, which were widely condemned as fraudulent. And the previous administration imposed a raft of sanctions on GD officials and security forces over violence directed at protesters.
Zourabichvili has called for new elections, but she walked out of the presidential palace late last month after the Georgian Dream-controlled parliament elected a new president.
Yet she refuses to relinquish her title. As Georgia's fifth president, the last one to be directly elected by the people, she's rallying support globally to isolate the Georgian Dream government and support the people in the street.
'My role is to be their voice, to be the voice of the country,' she said.
She told The Hill she does not see an immediate, and clear threat of arrest. But anything is possible.
Georgia's former prime minister and leader of one of the main opposition groups was severely beaten and hospitalized, and has blamed GD for ordering the attack.
'You cannot exclude anything from them,' she said.
Georgia has a small group of bipartisan, dedicated advocates on Capitol Hill, such as Wilson, but also Sens. Jim Risch (R-Idaho) and Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), the chair and ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Still, lawmakers struggled to elevate their legislative priorities for Georgia in the face of other end-of-year priorities, and showed little influence on getting the Biden administration to move faster on sanctions against Georgian Dream's founder Bidzina Ivanishvili, a billionaire who made his fortune in Russia and is viewed as the main power behind the party.
'We had to wait for the 29th of December for having the sanctions that were promised a long time ago,' Zourabichvili fumed.
She's not hiding her frustration with the former Biden administration – a mix of genuine disappointment over being excluded from any high-level visits from the president or Secretary of State Antony Blinken. But it's also a key strategy appealing to Trump's drive to show up Biden at every turn.
' It has to be said that the previous administration, while having a priority on democracy, did not really do anything about preserving democracy in Georgia over the past two years,' she said.
'Now the new administration has a different approach, clearly. But that approach of a strong America, if it's sustained, means that they have to be concerned about what happens in the Caucasus and in that region. Even if democracy is not as such, the priority, geopolitics should be the priority,' she said.