From the Republic of Georgia, a president’s plea to the West: Stop Russia here

Salome Zourabichvili has a message tailored to the “America First” Washington of President Donald Trump.

The fifth president of Georgia – a small country of only 3.7 million people, yet strategically placed along the Black Sea in Central Europe’s Caucasus region – is the de facto standard-bearer of Georgia’s grassroots opposition movement. She says her homeland’s democracy and Western values are under threat. But that’s not why the United States should care. Instead, Ms. Zourabichvili points to the U.S. interests at stake in a region that in recent years has shifted in favor of Russia, China, and even Iran.

“Democracy is for us to defend; that’s the work of the people who are on our streets every day,” she told a gathering of journalists organized by the Monitor in Washington Wednesday morning. “But if we’re talking about a strong America, a strong America starts in this very strategic region” encompassing the Caucasus and the Black Sea.

Noting that “We are already a very strategic region to Russia,” she adds that it would be “a very major retreat for America” to cede influence to Moscow and an increasingly engaged Beijing.

Ms. Zourabichvili refused to step down this past December when Mikheil Kavelashvili was inaugurated as Georgia’s new president after elections that many Georgians and most Western countries dismissed as fraudulent.

Calling herself Georgia’s “only legitimate president,” Ms. Zourabichvili has spent recent weeks bucking up an opposition movement that has spread beyond the capital, Tbilisi, to dozens of smaller cities and towns.

But she is also touring European capitals and now Washington, warning that without a strong and united response from Western powers, Russia and China will extend their dominance westward.

When introduced to then-President-elect Trump at the official reopening of the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris in December, “I told [him] that this is a strategic region that cannot be forgotten by the United States,” she says, adding that she got the impression her point was received with interest. Noting that Mr. Trump has been to Georgia and indicated to her that he enjoyed being in her country, she adds of the encounter, “This was not an abstract moment; [he] can be considered a friend of Georgia.”

Ms. Zourabichvili 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 at the U.S. capital – at the invitation of Republican Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina.

To what extent Washington’s new powers will incorporate the Black Sea and Caucasus region’s geopolitical power play into their priorities remains to be seen, Ms. Zourabichvili says. But she emphasizes that the West can only ignore Russia’s increasingly sophisticated approach of undermining independent and pro-Western countries through subversion of free and fair elections at its peril.

“There is a strategy” for the entire region, she says, “and we had better start recognizing it.”

And to anyone mourning Washington’s apparent shift in foreign policy from former President Joe Biden’s emphasis on democracy and American values such as human rights to President Trump’s more muscular “peace through strength” and “America First,” Ms. Zourabichvili has another message.

From Georgia’s experience, she says, the Biden doctrine turned out to be mostly lip service.

“The previous administration ... did not really do anything about preserving democracy in Georgia over the past two years,” she says, noting that it was not until Dec. 29, with the investiture of President Kavelashvili, that Washington imposed sanctions on what she calls “the new regime.”

Also that day, the country’s new prime minister announced that Georgia would “suspend” its candidacy for the European Union, a step largely opposed by the public.

At Wednesday’s breakfast, Ms. Zourabichvili was reminded that President Trump has shaken allies with his own “expansionist” plans, with talk of seizing the Panama Canal and acquiring Greenland.

The Georgian leader was careful not to burn any bridges, even as she underscored the principle of the integrity of international borders as a bedrock of international security.

“Donald Trump might talk about expansion, but the Russians have been doing it,” she says, noting Russia’s occupation of two Georgian regions. Important clues will come from the Trump administration’s stance on resolution of Russia’s war in Ukraine, she says.

For the sake of global stability, the world’s powers, including the U.S., “need to finally get Russia to accept to become an important power but ... one that lives within its borders,” she says. “This ends when Russia has borders.”