Russia has learned that influence can often achieve what occupation no longer can afford to. The Trump administration must be on notice.
For centuries, geopolitical success meant armies crossing borders and imposing control by force. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine shows that model still works — but it also shows how expensive it has become. Occupation invites sanctions, insurgency, and years of economic strain. Winning battles no longer guarantees winning the peace.
So the value of influence has risen. A state that can shape another country’s political decisions, exploit its institutional weaknesses, or deepen its economic dependence can now get what once required tanks and occupation forces — without ever crossing a border.
Moscow’s old approach required overwhelming force and paid a steep price for it: Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, both crushed by Soviet tanks and both a diplomatic embarrassment that outlived the occupations themselves. Today’s approach pays no such price, because it rarely looks like aggression at all.
I watched this shift happen in my own country.
In August 2008, Russia chose the old model. It crossed an internationally recognized border, bombed Georgian cities, and seized territory that it has never returned. By the traditional measure of war, Russia won. But Tbilisi did not fall. The government did not collapse. Georgia’s pursuit of NATO and the European Union did not stop. Occupation delivered two breakaway regions and years of international condemnation. It did not deliver Georgia.
What followed instead was quieter and far more effective: economic leverage, disinformation, corruption, and the patient capture of institutions and political elites.
Moscow tried the old model here in 2008. It has not needed to try it again.
What mattered after 2008 wasn’t only whether Russian troops stayed out. It was whether Georgian courts stayed independent, whether elections stayed credible, and whether the government stayed accountable when no one outside the country was watching.
The answer is now a matter of public record. In 2024, the ruling Georgian Dream party pushed through a Russian-style “foreign agents” law requiring organizations that accept foreign funding to register as serving foreign interests — the same instrument the Kremlin has used since 2012 to strangle its own civil society. Historic street protests followed. So did the consequences: the EU halted Georgia’s accession process and froze assistance, and that November the prime minister announced Tbilisi would not put EU membership on the agenda until 2028. Georgia’s constitution commits the country to European integration. Roughly 80% of Georgians still want it. The government walked away from it anyway — and not one Russian soldier crossed the administrative boundary line to make that happen.
Consider Anaklia, Georgia’s planned deep-water port on the Black Sea — the only site capable of anchoring a Western-oriented trade route between Asia and Europe that bypasses Russia. In 2016, a Western-backed consortium won the contract to build it. The government canceled that contract in 2020. In 2024, it handed the project to a Chinese-Singaporean consortium led by a company under U.S. sanctions — yet no contract was ever signed. This July, Tbilisi announced the Chinese partner had quietly walked away, and that the state would develop the port itself, “in partnership with several countries.” No army moved. No border was crossed. A strategic asset stayed unresolved for a decade — up for grabs to whichever side needed courting. That is leverage occupation could never buy this cheaply — and notably, it ran through Beijing, not Moscow. The model is not Russia’s alone.
None of this is charity or nation-building nostalgia. Georgia sits on the only east-west corridor connecting Central Asia to Europe without passing through Russia or Iran. Whoever shapes decisions in Tbilisi shapes whether that corridor stays open to American allies or becomes one more chokepoint held by their competitors. The country is small. The leverage attached to it is not.
Democracies are well prepared to recognize invasions. Satellites see troop movements. Governments respond to territorial violations with sanctions or military aid. But we are poorly prepared to recognize the slower kind of erosion: a disinformation campaign that deepens political divisions, a strategic port quietly re-hedged between East and West, an independent court that loses public trust one ruling at a time. None of these events looks decisive on its own. Together, they can redirect a country’s strategic future long before Washington notices.
A bridge rarely collapses from a single crack. It fails after years of quiet deterioration that nobody bothered to inspect. Democratic institutions fail the same way — not in one election, but in the slow accumulation of a captured court here, a bought regulator there, a media landscape that gradually stops asking hard questions.
Washington has started paying attention to Georgia specifically —in pieces: the Treasury sanctioned Georgian Dream’s founder, Bidzina Ivanishvili, in December 2024, and State Department officials visited the Anaklia site this spring. But treating each captured institution as its own isolated case is exactly the reactive habit this pattern exploits. NATO tracks troop deployments far more closely than it tracks who ends up owning a port. Congress could close that gap the same way it already does with human rights: by tying foreign assistance and defense cooperation to independent courts and clean elections, not just to what a government does with its military.
Georgia’s lesson extends well beyond the Caucasus. Moldova has spent years fighting off Russian-funded political parties and Kremlin energy leverage. Parts of the Western Balkans face a similar playbook, increasingly from Beijing as well as Moscow. Any democracy dealing with cyber operations, disinformation, or economic coercion aimed at its decision-making rather than its territory is fighting the same war under a different flag. The methods differ by capital. The logic does not.
EMZARI GELASHVILI: GEORGIA IS DEMOLISHING ITS WESTERN FUTURE — ONE LANDMARK AT A TIME
A country can have modern fighter jets and a well-trained army and still be strategically vulnerable if its courts, media, and elections are weak enough for a patient adversary to exploit. Strong democratic institutions — governments that citizens still trust — have become a form of national defense in their own right, not a domestic afterthought. No amount of hardware compensates for a government that its own people no longer believe.
Territory still matters. Armies still matter. Deterrence still matters. But they are no longer the whole story, and treating them as the whole story is how a country loses a war it never saw being fought. I have watched my own country lose ground it was never asked to surrender. The next country the United States loses may never be invaded. Is President Donald Trump paying attention?
Emzari Gelashvili is a San Francisco–based geopolitical analyst and former senior official across Georgia’s Ministry of State Security, Ministry of Defense, and Ministry of Internal Affairs, including as chief of Georgia’s military police. He served in the Georgian Parliament from 2008 to 2012.