By Gabriel Silver
Key Takeaways:
- Georgian Dream, in power since 2012, professes support for EU and NATO membership while attributing unwelcome Western policies to an amorphous “Global War Party” that allegedly controls US and European institutions and seeks to drag Georgia into war with Russia, allowing the party to attack specific actions without rejecting the West itself.
- The narrative evolved from Bidzina Ivanishvili’s earlier claims of hidden control—first over Saakashvili’s rivals and media, then over local contractors of US democracy organisations—into a 2024 “superconspiracy” framing domestic opponents, the 2008 war and Ukraine as directed from outside; GD portrays Trump as fighting the same “Deep State,” yet his return has not restored the suspended US strategic partnership or lifted Ivanishvili’s sanctions.
- The fiction helps GD reconcile high public support for Western integration and fear of Russia with democratic backsliding, foreign-influence legislation and halted EU accession; Western partners are advised to maintain consistent, condition-based engagement on democratic standards rather than mixed signals that let GD separate friendly leaders from supposedly compromised institutions.
Georgian Dream (GD) professes support for Georgia’s entry into the European Union and NATO. It has rather less enthusiasm for the Western officials who might help Georgia get there. In power since 2012, the party blames Western policies it opposes on a “Global War Party,” an alleged secret network that influences US and European institutions and seeks to push Georgia into war with Russia. In this account, Western institutions have fallen under hostile influence, allowing GD to attack their policies while continuing to promise Georgians a Western future. This backgrounder traces the roots of this kind of rhetoric and examines why an unnamed enemy has become so useful to GD.
In 2019, Bidzina Ivanishvili, GD’s founder and Georgia’s richest man, praised two US democracy-promotion organizations while accusing their Georgian contractors of manipulating polls against his party. He rejected their findings without condemning the institutions themselves. The Global War Party narrative globalizes this mechanism: unwelcome policies and messages become the work of agents, profiteers, or warmongers pulling strings within Georgia and beyond. To GD, those actors do not represent the governments or leaders that GD considers friendly, allowing the party to have its cake and eat it too.
There was a time, before this narrative took root, when Georgia was Washington’s closest ally in the South Caucasus. After the 2008 Russo-Georgian War, the United States provided Georgia with $1 billion in aid. In 2009, the relationship was formalized with the US-Georgia Charter on Strategic Partnership. Much of that partnership has since unraveled. In July 2024, Washington suspended more than $95 million in assistance to the Georgian government; a few months later, it suspended the strategic partnership itself. When Vice President JD Vance toured the South Caucasus in early 2026, he visited Armenia and Azerbaijan, but not Georgia.
This rupture followed Georgia’s recent democratic backsliding. Since 2024, GD has revived a Russian-style foreign-influence law, increased pressure on civil society and opposition groups, used force against protesters, and halted the country’s EU accession process until 2028.
The Origins of the Hidden Hand
Billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, GD’s founder and dominant figure, has long portrayed his adversaries as agents of hidden interests. When Ivanishvili entered Georgian politics in 2011 to challenge President Mikheil Saakashvili and his ruling United National Movement (UNM), he divided Saakashvili’s opponents into genuine opposition figures and a “pseudo-opposition” that he alleged secretly served the government. “All the television stations, including Maestro and Kavkasia TV is [sic] controlled by Saakashvili,” he wrote, even though both channels were associated with the opposition. Ivanishvili later maintained that their refusal to accept his offer to buy them showed who their real owners were.
This dichotomy between a favorable disposition and a nefarious plot would have staying power in GD’s rhetoric. Political psychologist Robert Jervis found that leaders often misread other governments, seeing them as more “centralized, planned, and coordinated” than they really are. In Ivanishvili’s 2011 account, seemingly independent political and media actors ultimately answered en masse to Saakashvili.
Eight years later, in 2019, a polling dispute showed how flexible Ivanishvili’s hidden-hand thinking had become. Two US-based democracy-promotion organizations, the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and the International Republican Institute (IRI), published surveys conducted by local Georgian research organizations. Ivanishvili called NDI and IRI “great institutions” while arguing that their local contractors had ties to Saakashvili’s United National Movement and were skewing the results against GD. In his words, these local contractors would “arrange everything,” while NDI or IRI would “just give their letterhead.” Ivanishvili could therefore praise NDI and IRI while rejecting the polling published under their names, attributing the alleged manipulation to their Georgian contractors.
The Global War Party Takes Shape
By 2024, Ivanishvili had combined his sweeping suspicions into a broader theory he referred to as the “Global War Party.” That year’s election would determine whether GD secured a fourth consecutive term after twelve years in power, and the party framed its own survival as necessary for safeguarding Georgia’s peace. Ivanishvili’s 2024 speeches recast Saakashvili and UNM as subordinate actors in a much larger cabal, although he had once portrayed them as the source of hidden control. “Everything they did was ordered and directed by their masters from outside,” Ivanishvili told supporters in April. Those masters constitute another force: “The important decisions in this world are taken by the global party of war.” By July, he was saying that the Global War Party held “considerable influence” over American and European bureaucracies, while the “collective UNM” stood ready to carry out its orders.
Like a Russian nesting doll, the hidden hand Ivanishvili once decried was now merely one finger among many. Political scientist Michael Barkun calls this structure a “superconspiracy,” in which smaller conspiracies are “nested within one another.” Ivanishvili’s hidden hierarchy became broad enough to explain Georgia’s domestic opposition, Western pressure, the 2008 war, and the war in Ukraine.
What, exactly, is the Global War Party? GD has declined to identify its supposed members, with Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze arguing that disclosure could harm Georgia’s national security interests. Ivanishvili instead describes an amorphous force with influence inside US and European institutions. Its objective, however, is clearer than its composition: war, especially prolonging the conflict in Ukraine and opening a “second front” in Georgia against Russia. Profit may be a motive. Kobakhidze has claimed that the Global War Party grew richer by tens of billions of dollars after the war in Ukraine began, without saying who profited or how. Unlike conspiracy theories centered on named groups such as Freemasons or the Illuminati, the Global War Party narrative leaves its supposed members unidentified. GD attributes sweeping power to the network without explaining who belongs to it or how it operates.
Trump and the Promise of a Reset
President Trump occupies a unique place in GD’s account of Western politics. Rather than treating him as another instrument of the Global War Party, GD has portrayed him as one of its opponents.
In GD’s telling, Trump is engaged in his own struggle against the same hidden forces that have allegedly distorted Western policy against Georgia. In February 2025, the GD Political Council asserted that Trump had “actively engaged” in a battle against the “Deep State” and wished him success in defeating it. Days later, party secretary-general Kakha Kaladze described defeating the Deep State as Trump’s “main concern.” In July 2025, GD was explicitly identifying the Deep State as “the same Global War Party” that sought to manipulate Georgian politics and again expressed hope that Trump would prevail against it. For GD, Trump represented a possible check on the Global War Party’s influence.
GD also hoped this struggle would lead to a rapprochement between Tbilisi and Washington. In February 2026, the GD Political Council said “the best proof” of Trump’s success against the “Deep State” would be “a change in the American administration’s attitude toward Georgia.” Yet Trump’s return to office has not produced the rapprochement GD anticipated. Indeed, Ivanishvili remains sanctioned, and the next milestone of the US-Georgia Strategic Partnership is the second anniversary of its suspension. Even so, in September 2026, Kobakhidze said he hoped to restore the partnership and awaited reciprocal steps.
Amid these tensions, GD’s response to messages from Washington echoed the distinction Ivanishvili had once used to exonerate NDI and IRI. Just as he praised those institutions while blaming their Georgian contractors for unfavorable polling, GD could praise Trump while attributing less approving messages to compromised officials. On May 26, 2025, Secretary of State Marco Rubio extended greetings to the Georgian people and described the countries’ relationship as grounded in democracy and sovereignty. The following day, Kobakhidze contrasted Rubio’s greeting with a letter the Georgian presidency attributed to Trump. Rubio had addressed the Georgian people and connected his well wishes to their resilient commitment to democracy and freedom. The letter attributed to Trump addressed President Mikheil Kavelashvili and expressed a willingness to cooperate with the Georgian government. Kobakhidze assigned the friendlier message to Trump’s administration and the less affirming one to the “Deep State.” This distinction served his government: he could portray a message that bypassed GD as the work of forces seeking to undermine it, while presenting the letter that acknowledged its authority as Washington’s authentic voice.
Rhetoric about the Global War Party also has enabled GD to avoid facing Washington’s requirements for a reset of relations. During Ivanishvili’s long-running dispute with Credit Suisse, which began as litigation over the bank’s mishandling of his assets, Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze described the dispute as “de facto sanctions” and “blackmail.” In October 2024, the US Embassy responded that his money remained under the jurisdiction of courts in Bermuda and Singapore, “not the United States.” Ivanishvili replied that he had never accused the United States itself. Rather, he said, the Global War Party exercised “substantive influence” over US politicians and bureaucrats.
Seven months later, US Ambassador to Georgia Robin Dunnigan sought a meeting with Ivanishvili at Secretary Rubio’s request to relay specific steps Georgia could take to improve relations. Ivanishvili refused, saying that under such “personal blackmail” he could not appropriately discuss state affairs. The meeting would have brought Washington’s conditions for a reset directly to Ivanishvili. By citing “personal blackmail,” Ivanishvili managed to decline that exchange while continuing to profess interest in better relations with the United States.
Why the Narrative Endures
GD’s often contradictory political posture reflects the party’s precarious political position at home. A 2023 NDI survey found that around 80 percent of Georgians favored EU membership and 70 percent favored NATO membership. GD itself commands only a minority of the electorate’s firm allegiance, while large numbers of Georgians identify with no party at all. At the same time, a 2023 IRI poll found that 77 percent considered Russia Georgia’s greatest political threat. Political scientist Per Ekman argues that public fear of Russia, together with Georgia’s war-torn modern history, made GD’s message of peace and stability likely to resonate with parts of the population. GD therefore must win over voters who want integration with Europe, fear Russia, and remain sensitive to the danger of another war, even as Georgia’s relations with Western governments deteriorate.
Whether or not GD’s leaders believe the Global War Party is real, the fiction helps the party manage its competing objectives. At home, the rhetoric enables the party to cast its opponents as proponents of war while still insisting that Georgia’s future lies in the West. GD can blame its delays in meeting Western democratic demands on hostile actors inside Western institutions rather than on Europe as a whole. In this way, GD can attack a corrupted West while claiming continued allegiance to the “real” one its voters favor. Abroad, the rhetoric lets GD voice criticisms of Western interference, escalation, and warmaking that resemble those heard from Moscow without burning bridges with Western presidents and prime ministers. In that sense, GD accommodates the true party of war on its border by directing its hostility toward a fictional one.
Evidently, references to the Global War Party serve electoral, ideological, and diplomatic purposes for GD. Western governments and institutions should expect the rhetoric to persist and communicate consistent conditions for closer relations. Both a renewed US partnership and progress toward EU membership should depend on concrete steps to restore democratic competition, protect civil society, and end political repression. Mixed signals give GD room to separate sympathetic Western leaders from supposedly compromised institutions and officials. Consistent engagement would limit the party’s ability to exploit those differences. Disengagement, by contrast, risks giving GD greater freedom to explain deteriorating ties on its own terms.
There are positive reasons to stay engaged as well. Georgia’s Black Sea access and east-west road and rail network make it an important link in the Middle Corridor between Europe and Central Asia. In June 2026, the World Bank committed $372 million to upgrade the Georgian segment of that route. Georgia also retains security value from its location in the South Caucasus and a long history of military cooperation and interoperability with US and NATO forces. Other major powers have interests in the region. Georgia and China elevated their relationship to a comprehensive strategic partnership in June 2026, after agreeing to deepen trade ties and establish an investment dialogue. These ties offer GD other sources of investment and political support as relations with Western partners deteriorate. There is good reason to preserve the possibility of closer ties, while making their conditions explicit.
The question remains whether GD is prepared to accept the democratic limits on its power that its promised Western future requires.
