Civicidea

Tbilisi constantly makes familiar reassurances: progress is coming, decisions are near, the port will be built. Then, just as quickly, the story fades.

In Georgia, the port was never just another infrastructure project. In a region where connectivity is power, it was seen as a core pillar, transforming the country’s strategic geography between Europe and Central Asia, and securing its fragile sovereignty while creating the competitive advantage every small country wants.

Contrary to the vision it was meant to serve, it has become a symbol of paralysis. The turning point came in 2019, when Georgia’s government chose to walk away from the American-backed consortium that was investing in and building the port. The decision played directly into the Kremlin’s long-standing opposition to the project.

There is a widespread assumption that the government sidelined the Western-backed consortium so it could hand the project to the Chinese. On paper, that narrative seems right and, after seven years of tenders, failed bids, and shifting conditions, the only serious contender is the China Communications Construction Company, a giant with global reach.

But on closer inspection, that story starts to fall apart. It is two years since Tbilisi began negotiating with CCCC, and there are no results, no contract, and no work on the port’s development. 

There is very little evidence the shift was properly thought through. There’s no clear strategy, no serious assessment of what would follow, or any honest weighing of the trade-offs. Perhaps most importantly, there’s no understanding of the constraints that would still apply despite ditching the project’s Western partners.

In 2019, the government seems to have assumed it could move away from a Western, mostly American-backed project without serious consequences. It thought it could reconfigure the deal, bring in the Chinese, then proceed without worrying about Washington.

That assumption proved wrong. The reaction from the US, even if measured and largely behind the scenes, was enough to introduce hesitation in Tbilisi at the highest levels. And since then, the government has been stuck in a holding pattern.

The Georgian Dream government doesn’t know if handing over Anaklia to the Chinese would cross a line with Washington. They don’t seem to know where the red lines are.

That uncertainty explains governmental inaction. Rather than test the boundaries of their agreements, the government appears to have chosen to sit on the project, delay decisions, avoid commitments, and effectively put Anaklia on hold until they can better understand the signals.

There is, however, an alternative explanation, and one that is rarely acknowledged in public. The elongated process may be a deliberate effort by the government to ensure the port is not built at all.

That would mean no deep-sea port, no strategic breakthrough, and no competition for Russian-controlled routes across the Black Sea. No fully functioning, multi-dimensional corridor linking Europe and Asia through Georgia.

Under this reading, the years of tenders, shifting partners, all the back-and-forth and contradictory signals are not signs of confusion, but tools of delay. A buffer of ambiguity has been created to ensure the project never reaches execution, while avoiding the political cost of canceling it.

In other words, the outcome the Kremlin has long preferred. And the longer Anaklia remains stuck in this cycle of indecision, the harder it will be to argue that this is just a policy failure.

In today’s geopolitics, prolonged indecision is rarely neutral. It creates space and invites external interference, it erodes credibility, but most importantly it turns strategic assets into strategic liabilities.

Until that changes, Anaklia will continue to exist in this suspended state, too important to abandon or ignore, but too complicated to complete.

The saga shows that pressure can halt undesirable outcomes, but it cannot produce anything positive. Georgia’s future, and the broader stability of the Black Sea corridor, cannot be built on hesitation.

The next phase requires more than preventing Chinese entry, it needs the offer of a credible alternative. Financing that aligns with strategic priorities, coordination between political and economic tools, and a sustained commitment to infrastructure that anchors Georgia firmly in the Euro-Atlantic system.

Anaklia is not just a port, it is a mirror. It reflects the limits of strategic ambiguity in Tbilisi, the enduring leverage of Washington, and the unresolved question at the heart of today’s geopolitical competition: who will build the future?

Tinatin Khidasheli heads Civic-IDEA, a think-thank fighting the Soviet legacy in Georgia, confronting Russian propaganda, and advocating for a sound defense and security policy. Tinatin is the author of the first Georgian language book on Hybrid Warfare and teaches: Hybrid Warfare and Defense Policy in Georgia. Mrs. Khidasheli served as the first female Minister of Defense of Georgia. She is a lawyer by education. She holds LLM in International Law from Tbilisi State University and MA in Political Science from the Central European University in Hungary. Mrs. Khidasheli is a Visiting Researcher at the Graduate School of Law, Hitotsubashi University.