Tbilisi keeps losing pieces of itself. The Bridge of Peace, the glass-and-steel span across the Mtkvari that Bidzina Ivanishvili called “nothing but ignorance” a month after he entered politics in 2011, still stands — but only because demolishing a tourist postcard is harder than starving a highway.
Kutaisi’s parliament building, relocated out of the capital, sat empty for years after Parliament returned to Tbilisi in 2018; the government now plans a technology hub instead. And the twin steel-and-glass tubes on the Rike riverbank — a $46 million concert hall designed by the Italian firm Studio Fuksas, largely finished in 2012 and never opened since the government that commissioned it lost power — now have a demolition permit and a December deadline. The state set the terms of its own loss.
Recommended Stories
After the site was valued at 96 million lari and seven straight auctions found no buyer, the government sold it in March 2022 for just over 10 million lari, on condition of a further 20 million lari in investment, to a Luxembourg-registered buyer linked to Georgian businessman David Khidasheli. Khidasheli, a former adviser to two Georgian Dream defense ministers, has ties that Radio Liberty has connected to sanctioned Russian oligarch Vladimir Yevtushenkov. Studio Fuksas spent the past year asking Tbilisi to preserve and reuse the building instead. The answer was a permit and a hotel. Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze dismissed the structure as “an ugliness,” reducing one of Georgia’s most recognizable contemporary landmarks to an aesthetic nuisance rather than a strategic cultural asset.
Then there is Anaklia, Georgia’s only site deep enough for the ships that carry most of the world’s cargo. It has now failed three times: the original Western-backed consortium whose 2016 contract Ivanishvili’s government canceled in 2020; a Chinese-Singaporean consortium that won a re-tender in 2024 and quietly walked away this July under sanctions pressure I wrote about in these pages; and, as of this month, no operator at all — a government promising to build it alone, despite enormous financing requirements, and calling that sovereignty.
The wrecking crews took a two-day break on July 16. Turkmen President Serdar Berdimuhamedov arrived in Tbilisi for only the second state visit by a Turkmen head of state since 2015, and Georgian Dream signed 20 memoranda of cooperation — a friendship pact between conservatories, a cultural exchange between theaters, and cooperation between prosecutors’ offices in a country where prosecutors answer to one man. Kobakhidze called Turkmenistan “a reliable partner and a friendly state.” Annual trade sits just above $100 million — less than the cost of clearing the Rike site.
That warmth deserves scrutiny, because Turkmenistan is not a neutral curiosity picking up stray Georgian goodwill. It bars its own students from studying in the West, sending them to a government-approved list topped by Russia and China. Its people have little visible claim to their own country’s wealth despite the world’s fifth-largest gas reserves; reliable poverty data barely exist in so closed a state, and nearly all that gas has flowed in one direction for two decades. In April, Beijing’s Vice Premier Ding Xuexiang flew to Ashgabat to break ground on the fourth phase of the Galkynysh field, one of the largest gas deposits on Earth. Turkmenistan signed a $5.1 billion, four-year contract with China National Petroleum Corporation, adding 10 billion cubic meters of annual capacity toward a 65-billion-cubic-meter target for China alone.
It marked 20 years of Turkmenistan-China gas cooperation and 14 consecutive years of China as Turkmenistan’s largest trading partner and near-exclusive gas customer. Huawei has spent two decades becoming the country’s principal telecommunications partner, wiring its first 5G pilot network in 2025 and briefing Ashgabat’s ministry on artificial intelligence and smart cities this April — its role reaching well beyond equipment into Turkmenistan’s digital modernization. Moscow never let go of the security and intelligence relationships it built when Turkmenistan was still Soviet territory, ties tracing to a shared KGB-successor lineage. “Permanent neutrality” has never once required Ashgabat to say no to either patron.
Turkmenistan’s importance extends well beyond gas. Sitting on the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea, it forms one of the indispensable links in the Trans-Caspian Middle Corridor connecting China to the South Caucasus and Europe. Every container that avoids Russia but still reaches the Black Sea must, in some form, pass through the space Turkmenistan now occupies. Without it, the corridor cannot function at full capacity.
Turkmenistan, notably, is hedging too. Five weeks after locking in another decade of gas exclusivity with Beijing, Ashgabat’s foreign minister met with Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Washington, who offered strong American support for reviving the long-dead Trans-Caspian pipeline — a route that would move Turkmen gas to Europe, touching neither Russian nor Chinese infrastructure. Nothing has been signed. Turkmenistan’s own statement on the meeting avoided the words “Trans-Caspian pipeline” entirely. A government this dependent on one customer doesn’t walk away from it for a Washington photo op. It collects options.
Georgia is doing something similar, except Ivanishvili’s hedge only runs in one direction. Tbilisi has invited Turkmen companies to develop “logistics and warehousing infrastructure” at Anaklia’s free industrial zone — the same zone the Chinese consortium just quietly left. A shareholder registry can be sanctioned. A friendship pact with a government that answers to no real parliament cannot. Capital tied to economic networks shaped by Beijing’s strategic priorities — or moving through environments historically shaped by Russian security influence — may no longer need a Chinese corporate banner to arrive. It could increasingly arrive in a Georgian port under a Turkmen flag instead, and there is little indication that Washington is systematically screening for that possibility.
While Brussels continues debating Georgia’s democratic backsliding, Beijing and Moscow are acting. Infrastructure, logistics, energy corridors, and strategic partnerships are being negotiated in real time. Geopolitics rarely waits for institutional deliberation.
EMZARI GELASHVILI: WASHINGTON IS GRADING THE COSTUME. MOSCOW IS RUNNING THE PLAYBOOK
The Trump administration is trying to pull the region the other way. Last November, it hosted the presidents of all five Central Asian states at the White House — the first time an American president had received them together — with more than $100 billion in trade and investment on the table. The objective is clear: strengthen the Middle Corridor as an alternative to routes dominated by Russia or dependent on Chinese strategic infrastructure. It has continued working the follow-through since, courting even Turkmenistan with pipeline diplomacy that Moscow has blocked for 27 years. Georgia sits exactly where that American opening and Ivanishvili’s Eurasian hedge collide: the Black Sea terminus of the Middle Corridor. Georgia’s recent policies risk making that route more useful to Beijing and Moscow than to the West — at the precise moment Washington is offering the wider region a way out.
Ivanishvili often argues that Georgia is merely pursuing a “pragmatic” foreign policy. Yet pragmatism is measured not by slogans but by direction. Over the past decade, the monuments associated with Georgia’s Western transformation have been dismantled, abandoned, or left to decay, while the country’s strategic links with states embedded in the Sino-Russian sphere have steadily deepened. Whether intentional or not, the cumulative effect points in only one direction. Nations rarely change course through a single dramatic decision. More often, they drift — one demolished landmark, one abandoned project, one memorandum at a time. History rarely announces a geopolitical realignment. More often, it hides one in plain sight.
Emzari Gelashvili is a former senior official of Georgia’s Ministry of State Security, Ministry of Defense, and Ministry of Internal Affairs, specializing in counterintelligence against Russian operations; a former chief of Georgia’s military police; and a former member of Parliament representing the Kareli district. He received political asylum in the United States in 2012.
