The deteriorating relations between Washington and Tbilisi

Tuesday 10 February 2026

Washington and Tbilisi used to speak to one another in the shorthand of certainties. Georgia was she who had been invaded by Russia in 2008, she who hosted Western training missions, she who wanted NATO and European Union membership, she who offered the West a strategic vantage point on the Black Sea and the Caucasus. For the United States Georgia was not merely a small state with a large security dilemma; she was a proof-of-concept that a post-Soviet republic could tilt decisively westward and remain there.

That mental map no longer fits the terrain.

The deterioration of relations between Washington and Tbilisi has been gradual in its accumulation but sudden in its outward expression. The United States first signalled a hardening posture in mid-2024 when the Pentagon postponed Exercise Noble Partner, a major joint military drill in Georgia, while it reviewed the bilateral relationship. By late 2024 the breach widened into something structural: after the Georgian government’s decision to suspend its European Union accession process, the United States suspended the US–Georgia Strategic Partnership. Days later Washington sanctioned Bidzina Ivanishvili, founder and honorary chairman of the ruling Georgian Dream party and widely regarded as the country’s de facto powerbroker, for undermining democratic institutions and enabling repression. 

Those measures did not merely punish; they redefined the relationship. The United States moved from patient sponsor to conditional interlocutor. Tbilisi, for her part, moved from aspirant ally to aggrieved petitioner, insisting she had been misunderstood, singled out or treated unfairly by Western capitals.

The immediate cause of this rupture has been Georgia’s domestic trajectory. Georgian Dream’s governing method has increasingly resembled a politics of control: restraining independent media, constraining civil society and treating protest not as an expression of constitutional rights but as a security threat. Over 2024–2025 this approach became law as well as practice. Georgia adopted and then expanded “foreign influence” and foreign-agent style legislation, tightening reporting requirements and creating criminal exposure for individuals and organisations receiving foreign funding. In April 2025 parliament passed a law restricting foreign grants unless approved by the government, a move widely seen as a lever over non-governmental organisations and independent outlets. More recently human rights organisations have warned of proposed or enacted amendments that go further still, requiring prior government approval for wide categories of support and threatening significant prison terms for violations. 

These are not, from Washington’s perspective, procedural disputes about regulatory tidiness. They strike at the basis on which American partnership has been justified to Congress and to the wider foreign policy establishment: that Georgia is travelling west, that she is building institutions compatible with Euro-Atlantic integration, and that she is resilient against the methods Russia uses to keep neighbours pliant.

To this, Tbilisi has offered a familiar defence: that foreign-funded organisations distort politics, that the state must protect stability, that “external actors” wish to drag Georgia into war with Russia, and that the West applies double standards. The argument is not unique to Georgia. It has become a standard repertoire across states where illiberal governments wish to domesticate independent civic life while retaining the branding of sovereign democracy. But in Georgia it lands with particular force because the state’s constitutional and popular aspiration has long been explicitly Euro-Atlantic. The government is in effect trying to enjoy the strategic dividends of a Western identity while legislating against the infrastructure that sustains a Western-style public sphere.

There is a second cause, less discussed but equally corrosive: narrative warfare between supposed allies. Georgian Dream officials have repeatedly framed Western pressure as a form of coercion, sometimes invoking conspiratorial language about “global war parties” or shadowy forces. Such rhetoric makes practical cooperation harder even where interests overlap, because it teaches domestic audiences to treat Western institutions as suspect. It also gives Washington an incentive to reduce high-profile engagement, lest American visits be repurposed as domestic propaganda without yielding meaningful policy change.

Against that backdrop comes the sharpest symbol of all: US Vice President J.D. Vance’s February 2026 visit to the South Caucasus that includes Yerevan and Baku but conspicuously omits Tbilisi. Vance’s trip is being framed by Washington as a peace-and-connectivity push. In Armenia, the United States and Armenia have formalised a civilian nuclear cooperation agreement, and Vance has promoted a proposed transit corridor often described by the administration as the “Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity”, intended to link Azerbaijan with her Nakhchivan exclave via Armenia and to deepen trade routes that bypass Russia and Iran. Vance is then scheduled to travel to Azerbaijan. 

If that is the itinerary, what does it say that Georgia is absent?

Some in Tbilisi will argue the omission is logistical or thematic: the vice president is focused on Armenia–Azerbaijan normalisation, so he visits the parties directly involved. Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze has publicly implied as much. Yet symbolism in diplomacy is not a footnote; it is a message written in geography. Georgia was once the natural American stop in the region, the “safe” partner whose capital offered a Western-friendly stage. Vance visiting Armenia — historically more entangled with Russia — while not visiting Georgia, long treated as Washington’s closest Caucasus partner, is a reversal that would have seemed improbable a few years ago. 

The omission matters for regional politics because it hints at a re-ordering of the South Caucasus in American strategy. For two decades, Georgia’s principal geopolitical value lay in three roles.

First, she was a security partner on Russia’s periphery, a place where training, exercises and intelligence cooperation could be conducted without the constraints present in more Russia-dependent states.

Second, she was a transit state — for pipelines, for roads, for rail, for undersea cable ambitions across the Black Sea — a corridor through which the West could connect to the Caspian and onwards to Central Asia.

Third, she was a normative project — a candidate for Euro-Atlantic integration whose success would serve as an advertisement to the region.

All three roles have weakened.

Security cooperation has been chilled by Washington’s political judgement that Georgia’s domestic path is undermining the credibility and reliability of partnership — the postponement of Noble Partner in 2024 was one concrete expression of that. Transit primacy is being contested by the very project Vance is championing: a new Armenia–Azerbaijan corridor that, if realised, changes the logic of east–west connectivity in the South Caucasus and reduces Georgia’s leverage as the indispensable route. And the normative project is strained by legal and political developments that external observers describe as democratic backsliding and repression. 

In that sense Vance’s itinerary is not merely a snub; it is a sign that the United States is exploring a South Caucasus strategy in which Georgia is no longer the organising principle.

The geopolitical consequences would be serious even if Georgia’s government were stable and popular. They become more acute because Georgia is politically polarised, with legitimacy contested by significant segments of society. When international partners downgrade engagement with a government that many citizens already distrust, the state’s internal fracture can widen. The government can portray Western distance as hostility, while the opposition can portray it as confirmation that the ruling party has squandered Georgia’s future. Either way, the space for national consensus narrows.

Regionally Russia benefits from any weakening of Georgia’s Western anchors. Moscow does not need to “win” Georgia outright. She merely needs Georgia to be uncertain, cautious and isolated — a state that doubts Western backing, hesitates to integrate further, and treats accommodation with Russia as inevitable. The more Washington reduces high-level engagement, the easier it becomes for the Kremlin to argue that the West is fickle and transactional. At the same time, the West’s ability to use Georgia as a platform for Black Sea security diminishes, and the strategic pressure on Russia’s southern flank eases.

There is also a subtle but consequential shift in how the region’s other actors calculate. Armenia, under Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, has sought to diversify away from Russian dependence, and American engagement — including the civil nuclear cooperation agreement — strengthens that vector. Azerbaijan, for her part, prefers to be courted as a pivotal state that can trade energy, transit and security cooperation for diplomatic legitimacy. A US vice-presidential visit amplifies that perception. If Georgia is absent, she risks being recast as peripheral — not geographically, but diplomatically.

For Europe the consequences are uncomfortable. The European Union has struggled to maintain a coherent Georgia policy that balances support for Georgian society with pressure upon Georgian Dream. European institutions have documented democratic regression and warned of consequences for Georgia’s European trajectory. If Washington is also stepping back at senior levels, the West loses the ability to combine American security weight with European economic and accession leverage. Instead, pressure becomes fragmented — and fragmentation is precisely what illiberal governments exploit.

Finally there is the question of China, and of transactional alternatives. Where Western relationships are conditioned on institutional reform, other partnerships can be more forgiving. Georgia’s strategic geography remains attractive to external powers that wish to build influence through infrastructure, logistics and financial ties. If Tbilisi persuades herself that the West is permanently hostile, she may lean harder into non-Western relationships — not necessarily out of ideological affinity, but out of a desire for room to manoeuvre without political conditions. That would not remove Georgia from the West’s map, but it would make her a more ambiguous terrain — a place where Western and non-Western interests overlap uneasily, and where trust becomes harder to sustain.

What happens next depends on whether Georgia’s leadership treats the current rupture as a bargaining problem or as a choice of civilisational direction. If it is merely bargaining, we may see attempts at tactical repair: quiet legal adjustments, selective prisoner releases, invitations to observers, toned-down rhetoric, and renewed offers of cooperation. If it is civilisational, we may see deeper entrenchment: harsher grant laws, broader criminalisation of civic activity, and an insistence that sovereignty requires insulation from Western influence.

In either scenario, Vance’s decision to visit Yerevan and Baku while passing over Tbilisi will hang in the air. Diplomatic itineraries are a language of priorities. Today, that language suggests that Washington’s South Caucasus policy is becoming less Georgia-centred — and that the United States, frustrated by Georgia’s domestic direction, is willing to pursue regional projects that diminish Georgia’s traditional role as the West’s main Caucasus partner. 

For Georgians who still think of their country as irreversibly Western, the message will be unsettling. For Georgian Dream, it will be inconvenient. For Russia, it will be encouraging. And for the region as a whole, it will be a reminder that, in geopolitics, the fastest way to lose strategic importance is to make yourself politically unreliable — because great powers do not abandon geography, but they do re-route around governments they no longer trust.