Georgia’s economy minister announced Monday that the state will build the Anaklia deep-sea port on its own, under a “landlord model” — full state ownership, no shares sold, no strategic investor. The Chinese-Singaporean consortium selected in 2024 to hold 49% of the project was not mentioned once. That silence was the news: Beijing is out of the most important infrastructure project on the eastern Black Sea.
It is the outcome that the Trump administration’s pressure campaign in the South Caucasus was designed to produce. It is also exactly half a victory.
Start with what Anaklia is. Georgia’s existing ports, Poti and Batumi, are shallow — they cannot receive the Panamax-class ships that carry most of the world’s containers. Anaklia, with a planned depth of 16-17 meters, is the only site on Georgia’s coast that can. Whoever builds and operates it controls the western gate of the Middle Corridor, the trade route moving cargo from Central Asia to Europe around Russia. Transit through Georgia rose 21% year-on-year in the first four months of 2026. Anaklia is not a real estate project. It is the chokepoint of a continent-spanning route.
Which is why the fight over it was never about engineering. In 2017, Georgia’s billionaire ruler Bidzina Ivanishvili, the man who owns the ruling party and whom the U.S. Treasury sanctioned in December 2024, asked banker Mamuka Khazaradze, then leading the American-backed consortium building the port, a question Khazaradze later made public: “What do the Americans want in the Black Sea?” In 2020, Ivanishvili’s government canceled the American-backed contract. In 2024, it awarded 49% of the port to China Communications Construction Company, a Chinese state firm under U.S. sanctions since 2021 for its ties to Beijing’s military-industrial complex, though, tellingly, the final investment agreement was never signed. Russia took Georgia with a bank, not a tank, as I recently argued in these pages. China was supposed to get the port with a tender.
Then Washington got serious. The United States has kept no confirmed ambassador in Tbilisi for nearly a year. This spring, a State Department official toured Georgia’s ports, and in June, the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation signed its second loan, worth $25 million, to expand the port of Poti, financing Anaklia’s competition a few dozen kilometers down the coast. And on June 8, the House fast-tracked and passed, with bipartisan support, the Countering China’s Control of the Caucasus Act, ordering a classified assessment of Russian and Chinese intelligence assets in Georgia and a five-year U.S. strategy toward Tbilisi. Congress does not commission counterintelligence reports on friends. Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC), the bill’s sponsor, accused the ruling party of “selling out the country.”
Four weeks later, an exit that had been rumored in regional media since November 2025 became official. Tbilisi has never explained why. Pressure, applied for years and escalated for months, works. That is the lesson, and the administration can fairly claim its share of the credit.
Here is what it should not take: the bait.
The Monday announcement was staged as a triumph of sovereignty — the minister called full state ownership “the most national” model. Read it closely, and it looks different. Canceling the tender did not just remove the sanctioned investor — it removed the scrutiny. Contracts for dredging, breakwaters, and berths will now flow through direct state procurement, where the real beneficiaries sit one layer down, in subcontracting chains. And that network is already in place: The China Road and Bridge Corporation, a CCCC subsidiary, has been building Georgian highways since 2018. A CCCC-affiliated subcontractor attracts a fraction of the attention an equity stake did. Meanwhile, the minister said China remains welcome under the new model, and the Georgian broadcaster TV Pirveli reported that the investors now expected at the port are Asian, not Western. The shareholder registry is clean. The back door is open.
And the port itself becomes something more useful to Ivanishvili than any investor: leverage. A fully state-owned Anaklia, built slowly, with terminals he can lease east or west at his discretion, is a card to play against Washington — held by a man convinced that geography obliges America to deal with him eventually. In my assessment, that is the strategy: keep the asset, keep the ambiguity, wait for the phone call.
He is misreading the map he claims to understand. Look at Georgia’s neighbors. Armenia, Moscow’s oldest outpost in the region, granted the U.S. exclusive development rights over the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity corridor through its own territory for up to 99 years at the August 2025 White House summit. Under the implementation framework published in January, the American side holds 74% of the development company. Azerbaijan signed a strategic partnership charter with Washington in February, during Vice President JD Vance’s visit to Baku. Both of Georgia’s neighbors have reanchored to Washington. The exception is the region’s historically most pro-American country, which today has no U.S. ambassador, a counterintelligence bill with its name on it, and a flagship port pulled off the market before construction began.
The TRIPP also starts the clock. Once an axis opens from Turkey through Armenia to the Caspian, the Middle Corridor will no longer need Tbilisi’s permission. Every year Anaklia remains a bargaining chip instead of a port, the chip loses value.
RUSSIA TOOK GEORGIA WITH A BANK, NOT A TANK
So the policy writes itself. Keep the Poti financing flowing. Pass the Countering China’s Control of the Caucasus Act in the Senate. Keep the ambassador’s chair empty until Tbilisi gives Washington a reason to fill it — accreditation is a certificate of normalcy, and normalcy is the one commodity Ivanishvili cannot manufacture at home. And when Tbilisi offers the theater of a “national” port with Chinese subcontractors below the waterline, decline the ticket.
In 2017, Ivanishvili asked what the Americans want in the Black Sea. This month, he began to find out. The answer should not stop at Anaklia’s shoreline.
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 U.S. in 2012.