Into the Rothoverse: The Georgian musings of a mediocre German apparatchik and the “friends from hell” group think of the West

The Caucasus country of Georgia has had elections, and they did not go the way Western elites wanted. The governing Georgian Dream party, routinely derided in the West as “pro-Russian” and “anti-Western,” has won with 54% of the vote; an opposition alliance, extolled as “pro-Western” and in particular “pro-EU” has lost with less than 38%. The opposition alleges election irregularities big enough to invalidate the result; the government acknowledges some irregularities but points out that they happen everywhere and argues they are not significant enough to challenge its “landslide” win.

At the same time, Georgia sits on a classical geopolitical fault line between, for want of better words, East and West. In principle, that kind of situation could be managed, even exploited to a country’s benefit. In Georgia’s case, however, it was made much worse, as in the case of Ukraine, by the West’s, at best, reckless overreach enshrined in the 2008 Bucharest NATO summit decision to offer a vague yet explosive NATO perspective.

Think what you will of Georgian Dream’s billionaire founder and eminence grise Bidzina Ivanishvili, but he is right that this gratuitous and shortsighted NATO policy posed an enormous danger to both his country and Ukraine. In both cases, it contributed massively to the outbreak of war (in Georgia in 2008, in Ukraine in 2014). He may also be correct that it was motivated by something even worse than arrogant sloppiness; namely a cynical, premeditated Western strategy to sacrifice or at least risk these countries as expendable pawns on the grand chessboard of geopolitics.