Russian military coercion forced independence-minded Georgia back into its orbit.

Evidence

In these three states public opinion responding to some combination of strategic and economic interests produced governments favoring close alignment with Russia. A somewhat similar pattern eventually occurred in Ukraine. In Georgia the course of events was different. Georgia was an independent country until 1801 when its ruler, King George XIII, asked for Russian protection against the Turks. For three years after the Russian Revolution, 1918— 1921, Georgia was again independent, but the Bolsheviks forcibly incorporated it into the Soviet Union. When the Soviet Union ended, Georgia once again declared independence. A nationalist coalition won the elections, but its leader engaged in self-destructive repression and was violently overthrown. Eduard A. Shevardnadze, who had been foreign minister of the Soviet Union, returned to lead the country and was confirmed in power by presidential elections in 1992 and 1995. He was, however, confronted by a separatist movement in Abkhazia, which became the recipient of substantial Russian support, and also by an insurrection led by the ousted Gamsakhurdia. Emulating King George, he concluded that “We do not have a great choice,” and turned to Moscow for help. Russian troops intervened to support him at the price of Georgia joining the CIS. In 1994 the Georgians agreed to let the Russians keep three military bases in Georgia for an indefinite period of time. Russian military intervention first to weaken the Georgian government and then to sustain it thus brought independence-minded Georgia into the Russian camp. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 448

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The two-phase Russian playbook — destabilize then rescue — which forces a would-be independent state to rejoin to save itself, offers a paradigm for how great powers absorb neighbors while remaining within a humanitarian/peacekeeping frame. Shevardnadze echoing his own predecessor 200 years earlier shows a repeated structural trap.
• XREF: Forecasts the same Russian escalation-then-‘protection’ pattern later used in Crimea, Donbas, and Syria.
• BMF: The trap of ‘ask for protection and lose sovereignty to your protector’ resonates obliquely with Gore Vidal’s Eighteen Seventy, where vulnerable American regions weigh aligning with stronger powers for survival against surrendering independence.