Georgia On My Mind
The end of unipolarity threatens Europe.
“If you look around the world, I would say that in many cases our adversaries are stronger than they’ve ever been and became stronger over the last four years.” – Secretary of State Marco Rubio
From time to time, a geopolitical scuffle will have vastly more significance than the immediate stakes might suggest. Such was the case with the recent transfer of power in the former Soviet republic of Georgia. With Joe Biden leaving the Oval Office and Donald Trump returning, it seemed an odd time for the European Union (EU) to insert itself in a disputed election in a non-member state by throwing its support behind then-President Salome Zourabichvili’s effort to overturn the country’s national election results. We covered the situation briefly in late November:
“On October 26, a bitterly contested election was held in the former Soviet republic of Georgia…According to the official results, the incumbent pro-Russia party, Georgia Dream, won nearly 54% of the vote, enough for a clear majority in parliament. Leaders of the EU are crying foul, claiming the vote was rigged and the process replete with interference from Moscow.
Leading the opposition in protest of the results is Georgian President Salome Zourabichvili…[who] recently filed a lawsuit in the country’s constitutional court to invalidate the election results. For its part, Moscow is accusing the West of attempting to provoke another so-called ‘color revolution’ in Georgia, laying bare the raw political brawl currently unfolding.”
Despite repeated vows to defiantly remain in her post, Zourabichvili bowed to reality, weakly insisting that she would take the legitimacy of the office with her as she retreated. Brussels was left to deal with its humiliation.
If there is any doubt about what was going on in Georgia, consider that Zourabichvili—a French-born politician who served for several decades in the French diplomatic service—is now the Henry Kissinger Fellow at the John McCain Institute (yes, you read that correctly):
“As the McCain Institute’s Kissinger Fellow, Zourabichvili will use her vast diplomatic, leadership, and policymaking experience to push for new elections and a democratic path forward in her country.
‘President Zourabichvili embodies political courage and the Kissinger Fellowship’s ideals of statesmanship,’ said McCain Institute Executive Director Dr. Evelyn Farkas. ‘She has shown democratic strength and a forceful defense of her country’s democratic place in Europe in the face of violent repression and autocratic takeover. As the McCain Institute’s 2025 Kissinger Fellow, she can continue to lead efforts to return Georgia to a democratic path.’”
With the US and its EU proxies unmasked and appearing weak yet again, the global neoconservative project stands at the precipice of being overrun. Newly confirmed Secretary of State Marco Rubio ruefully acknowledged this sobering reality in a remarkable interview with Megyn Kelly last week. During the discussion, Rubio emphasized that the US has lost sight of its true national interests and vowed to restore that focus:
“And I think that was lost at the end of the Cold War, because we were the only power in the world, and so we assumed this responsibility of sort of becoming the global government in many cases, trying to solve every problem. And there are terrible things happening in the world. There are. And then there are things that are terrible that impact our national interest directly, and we need to prioritize those again. So it’s not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power. That was not – that was an anomaly. It was a product of the end of the Cold War, but eventually you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multipolar world, multi-great powers in different parts of the planet. We face that now with China and to some extent Russia, and then you have rogue states like Iran and North Korea you have to deal with…
So now more than ever we need to remember that foreign policy should always be about furthering the national interest of the United States and doing so, to the extent possible, avoiding war and armed conflict, which we have seen two times in the last century be very costly.”
Trump’s heavy emphasis on the Western Hemisphere—Greenland, Panama, Canada, Mexico, Venezuela, and Colombia dominated the headlines in his first few weeks in office—reinforces Rubio’s assertion that a return to a multipolar world, where great powers with their spheres of influence can coexist, is underway. If such a transition can be achieved peacefully, it would be a momentous shift that reshapes global affairs for decades. This change would not be without its victims, of course, and no entity stands to lose more than the EU itself. We doubt the bloc can survive Trump 2.0 in anything like its current structure. The ramifications of a European disintegration would be enormous.