How Tbilisi threw away its greatest strategic asset.
For three decades, Georgia held a geographic trump card (no pun intended) that no amount of money could buy. It was the only country connecting Europe to Central Asia that did not involve crossing Russian or Iranian territory. Every pipeline, every railway, every fibre-optic cable linking the Caspian to the Black Sea ran through Georgian soil. Tbilisi did not need to be rich or powerful. It just needed to be there.
That advantage is now evaporating, and largely through Georgia’s own choices. The ruling Georgian Dream party has managed something that neither Moscow nor Tehran could achieve by coercion: it has made the country strategically dispensable at precisely the moment when the South Caucasus matters more than it has in a generation.
In January 2026, the United States and Armenia announced a detailed framework for the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity, or TRIPP, a transport corridor through southern Armenia connecting mainland Azerbaijan to its Nakhchivan exclave. Washington is taking a 74 per cent controlling stake in the development company for 49 years. The route promises something shippers have long wanted, that being an East-West path across the Caucasus that bypasses Georgia altogether.
Brussels has noticed, and the European Commission is exploring a four-party connectivity group involving Azerbaijan, Armenia, Türkiye, and the EU to co-ordinate transport infrastructure. Georgia is not at the table. European Commissioner for Enlargement Marta Kos has spoken of integrating TRIPP into the EU’s Global Gateway strategy.
None of this was inevitable. Georgia’s problems are almost comically self-inflicted. The European Commission granted the country candidate status in December 2023. Within months, Georgian Dream began dismantling the very reforms that had earned it. The party pushed through a Russian-style ‘foreign agents’ law restricting NGOs, held elections widely regarded as flawed, suspended EU accession talks for four years, and jailed opposition politicians. By 2025, the Commission had declared Georgia a “candidate country in name only”.
The economic consequences are already measurable. Foreign direct investment fell 30 per cent in 2024, according to the US State Department, with Western-backed projects growing scarce. The Anaklia deep-sea port (Georgia’s most important infrastructure play for capturing Middle Corridor trade) remains mired in controversy. The government cancelled a US- and European-backed consortium in 2020 and entered negotiations with a Chinese group led by China Communications Construction Company, a firm on Washington’s entity list. The first phase is officially due by 2029. In reality, there’s doubt it might ever happen at all.
Visa-free travel to the EU, granted in 2017 and once Georgian Dream’s proudest foreign-policy achievement, hangs by a thread. The Commission’s December 2025 report warned that the entire regime could be revoked unless Tbilisi reverses course. Diplomatic passport holders have already lost their exemption. For a country whose IT contractors and seasonal workers depend on frictionless access to Schengen, and where remittances from Europe are a lifeline, the implications are severe.
The irony is that Georgia’s transit business is booming, at least for now. Container traffic through the Middle Corridor grew 173 per cent in the first half of 2025 compared with a year earlier. The Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway carried 59 times more containers than in the same period of 2024. Cargo at the Black Sea ports of Poti and Batumi rose nearly six per cent. But these numbers reflect a route that has no real alternative, yet. If TRIPP and the EU’s broader connectivity plans mature, Georgia’s monopoly premium disappears.
A Friedrich Ebert Stiftung study published last year put it plainly: Georgia is “the weakest among the regional beneficiaries” of the Middle Corridor and depends on transit development more than any other country along the route. Its falling-out with the EU means Brussels may see little reason to help strengthen a corridor that enriches a hostile government. The World Bank, meanwhile, has pointed to Georgian port tariffs as uncompetitive: crossing Poti costs 275 US dollars per 40-foot container, compared with 148 US dollars in Baku or Aktau.
Compare this trajectory with Armenia’s. Yerevan has its own troubles, such as a fractious political landscape, Russian meddling, and a public still raw from the loss of Nagorno-Karabakh. But Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has bet on Western alignment, securing the TRIPP framework and expanded co-operation with Washington on infrastructure and energy. Armenian fuel prices have already dropped 15 per cent since Azerbaijan began shipping oil and gas across the border. Geography dealt Armenia a weaker hand than Georgia, but Yerevan is currently playing it with considerably more skill.
Georgian Dream’s defenders argue the party is simply being pragmatic, balancing between great powers and refusing to be dragged into confrontation with Russia. Tbilisi’s mayor, Kakha Kaladze, has called the EU’s threats “blackmail”. The party points to the 100,000-odd Russians who have relocated to Georgia since 2022, many establishing businesses, as proof that neutrality pays.
Perhaps it does, but those Russian arrivals have raised alarm in Brussels about foreign-influence operations, and they will not build the port upgrades and customs modernisation Georgia needs to stay competitive. Countries tend to assume that geographic advantages are permanent. They are not. Ask Panama about alternative canal routes, or Suez about the Cape of Good Hope. Georgia’s position as the indispensable corridor between East and West was only ever as durable as its willingness to remain a trustworthy partner. Having squandered that trust, Tbilisi may find that the trade routes, like the EU accession talks, simply go around it.
Photo: Dreamstime.