Turan Research Center

Illustration by Dinmukhamed Kairulla.

The recent Hudson Institute study on the growing Iranian influence in Georgia has drawn significant attention to Georgian-Iranian relations. Following this investigative study, global media, including Persian-speaking groups, have actively published critical articles about Iranian penetration in Georgia. The Washington Post published an opinion piece titled "A former U.S. ally is slipping into Iran's orbit." Around the same time, a U.S. State Department delegation visited Tbilisi in late May for senior-level talks, raising Tbilisi's expectations of a genuine reset in U.S.-Georgia relations. This convergence of events has sparked debate about how a possible realignment between Tbilisi and Washington might reshape the trajectory of Georgian-Iranian relations. Yet to understand the limits of any such shift, one must look to history.

Why Georgia's Threat Environment Drives Everything

Georgia was once among the richest Soviet republics, yet it emerged from the Soviet collapse as one of the poorest and most security-vulnerable post-Soviet states, burdened by a continuous military threat from Russia and two breakaway regions. Beyond these threats, the country occupies a geopolitical periphery characterized by a fragile security environment and a weak democratic tradition. Faced with these compounding challenges, Eduard Shevardnadze chose to anchor Georgia's political future to Euro-Atlantic institutions and forge partnerships with the developed West.

The 2008 War deepened Georgia's vulnerability significantly. Russia formally recognized the independence of Abkhazia and the so-called South Ossetia, and then, under the banner of "borderization," continued occupying Georgian territory, advancing to within reach of the country's central highway. Since recognizing these separatist regimes, Russia has persistently sought broader international recognition for them, a campaign that has posed a serious and ongoing challenge for Georgian diplomacy, given the considerable disparity between Georgian and Russian diplomatic resources.

Despite Georgia's recent and dramatic foreign policy shift from a pro-Western to a multi-vector orientation, the country's existential threats have remained unchanged. The Russian occupation continues, and the Kremlin has not withdrawn its recognition of the breakaway regions. While Georgia's diversified foreign policy posture has somewhat softened rhetoric from Moscow, the absence of strong strategic partners such as the United States and the EU leaves Georgia even more exposed to Russian pressure and potential aggression.

Ultimately, Georgian foreign policy is heavily shaped by these enduring factors, and no Georgian government, regardless of its stated foreign policy orientation, can simply disregard them. This holds true whether the relationship in question is with the United States or with Iran.

Tehran's Early Bid for the Corridor

Despite Iran's historical claims on the Caucasus region, Tehran was among the first to engage with newly independent Georgia following the Soviet collapse. After Georgia declared independence under Zviad Gamsakhurdia, Iran sent one of the earliest governmental delegations and promptly recognized Georgian sovereignty. Seeking to break out of its international isolation, Tehran identified the Caucasus, and Georgia's transit potential in particular, as a strategic corridor linking Russia and the former socialist countries. In April 1995, President Rafsanjani — one of the founding fathers of the Islamic Republic of Iran — visited Georgia and personally asked head of state Eduard Shevardnadze to show him the Poti Port, the maritime gateway of Georgia and the South Caucasus. Following that visit, the Georgian and Iranian governments began active collaboration on the memorandum of understanding in the economic and industrial sectors, which opened much of Georgia's Soviet-era industrial base to Iranian participation. Beyond transit and industrial interests, Iran was keenly interested in Georgia's Soviet-era scientific establishment, particularly in the field of nuclear physics. According to various sources, several Georgian physicists from the Sukhumi Institute of Physics and Technology (SIPT) worked on the Iranian nuclear program in the late 1990s. This alignment alarmed Washington, which pressured Shevardnadze's government to sever all cooperation with Iran, hand over the names of the Georgian physicists involved, and in exchange promised American assistance in rebuilding the country. Ironically, the Iranian factor became one of the catalysts that helped drive the development of Georgian-U.S. relations.

Out of this turbulent early period emerged what became known as "cold friendly" relations between Georgia and Iran: limited engagement built on mutual recognition of core interests, including respect for Georgia's territorial integrity and a Georgian commitment to refraining from joining anti-Iranian coalitions.

Three Decades of Pressure and Recalibration

As Georgia deepened its alignment with the Euro-Atlantic space, its distance from Iran grew accordingly, and the Rose Revolution intensified that alignment and drew open dissatisfaction from Tehran. Iranian leaders came to treat Georgia's revolution as a cautionary model for the kind of Western-backed political change they feared at home — a framing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei made explicit during Iran's 2009 post-election unrest, when he dismissed the protest movement by insisting its backers were wrong to "think this is Georgia," where a color revolution could be engineered. In addition, Tehran viewed Georgia's growing alignment with NATO and Israel with suspicion, believing it could serve as a platform for collecting intelligence on Iran or even facilitating strikes against it — a fear that appeared plausible to Tehran in the wake of the Afghanistan and Iraq campaigns. This suspicion deepened around Georgian-Israeli defense cooperation, which intensified during the 2006–2008 tenure of Davit Kezerashvili — a Georgian Jew with Israeli citizenship — as defense minister. In Tehran's telling, Israel gained access to two former Soviet airbases in southern Georgia under his watch and used them to surveil Iran. Yet wariness did not preclude cooperation. In January 2006, the Ahmadinejad government supplied emergency gas to Georgia after pipeline explosions that Tbilisi attributed to Russian sabotage severed supplies in the middle of winter and plunged the country into an energy crisis.

Despite the early hostility in Iranian rhetoric, the "cold friendly" dynamic largely held throughout the Saakashvili era. Notably, the fact that Iran maintained strategic ties with Georgia's arch-rival Russia, while Georgia cultivated strategic ties with Iran's arch-rivals the United States and Israel, did not fundamentally destabilize bilateral relations.

After the 2008 War, when Russia sought international recognition for Georgia's breakaway regions, Iran, itself an ethnically diverse country sensitive to separatist precedents, declined to grant that recognition, adhering instead to the principle of Georgia's territorial integrity. However, the war's grave consequences left Georgia diplomatically weakened and unable to resist American pressure. In 2008, Georgian authorities extradited the Iranian national Amir Hossein Ardebili — arrested in Tbilisi in 2007 — to the United States; the case's public disclosure in 2009 triggered serious tension with Tehran and, reportedly, the evacuation of Georgian embassy staff from Iran. Relations did not normalize until 2011, when Georgia introduced a visa-free regime with Iran, a significant gain for the internationally isolated country.

The liberalization of Georgia's visa regime for Iranian nationals opened the country not only to ordinary Iranian citizens but also to individuals affiliated with the Iranian state and its sanctions-evasion networks, who saw Georgia as a convenient gateway for circumventing Western sanctions. This dynamic became evident as early as 2011, when Iranian businessmen — including Pourya Nayebi, Houshang Hosseinpour, and Houshang Farsoudeh, all three later sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury in 2014 under Executive Order 13608 — established an extensive commercial network in Georgia used to help Tehran evade sanctions. In 2012, Georgian security services defused a bomb planted under an Israeli embassy vehicle in Tbilisi, an attack attributed to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), underscoring the security dimension of Iran's growing presence. In November 2022, Georgia's State Security Service announced it had foiled an IRGC-linked plot by an Iranian-Pakistani cell to assassinate Itzik Moshe, head of the Israel–Georgia Chamber of Commerce — not, the Jerusalem Post reported, Tehran's first attempt on his life.

By 2013, with the Georgian Dream party newly in power, the scale of Iranian activity had attracted serious attention from Washington. The Treasury Department grew increasingly alarmed at signs that operations on Georgian territory bore the hallmarks of money laundering and sanctions circumvention. Through a joint U.S.–Georgian effort, several Iranian-linked companies — including JSC InvestBank and the airline Fly Georgia — folded, and Tbilisi reinstated visa requirements for Iranian citizens, a measure that remained in place for roughly two years.

Iran's strategy in Georgia has not been confined to finance and logistics. Tehran has also pursued a sustained soft-power campaign aimed at Georgia's ethnic Azerbaijani Shia minority, viewing the community as a natural ideological foothold. Through religious and cultural outreach, Iran has sought to promote its brand of state-sponsored Shia theology and political ideology among Georgian Azerbaijanis, extending its influence beyond commerce and into the realm of identity and belief.

When Donald Trump withdrew from the JCPOA and launched his "maximum pressure" campaign against Iran, Georgia informally aligned with the sanctions regime. Georgian private banks barred Iranian citizens from opening international accounts, residency permits became increasingly difficult to obtain, and border rejections rose sharply. In response, the Iranian parliament issued sharp criticism of Georgia and called on Georgian authorities to reconsider their stance. The Covid-19 pandemic then brought Georgian-Iranian relations to their lowest point in decades, as border closures effectively severed all remaining ties.

Following the prolonged border closures, flights between the two countries resumed in 2021, and economic ties began a slow, modest recovery. It was in this context that Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze made two visits to Iran in 2024 — first for President Ebrahim Raisi's funeral in May, then for President Masoud Pezeshkian's inauguration in July — drawing alarm from Georgia's former partners in Brussels and Washington. At first glance, a head of government attending a state funeral in a nearby country is unremarkable. But the timing was telling: Kobakhidze's appearances in Tehran came precisely as Tbilisi's relations with the United States and the European Union were deteriorating sharply.

It should also be noted that, in a further complication, Georgia simultaneously deepened its ties with Israel during this period, a development that generated deeply contradictory perceptions of Georgia's evolving foreign policy trajectory, including in Tehran itself. Tehran, as always, closely monitors every development in Georgia-Israel relations, especially after the 12-Day War of June 2025. Shortly after that war, in August 2025, Israel's Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, traveled to Tbilisi for meetings with Georgian Interior Minister Gela Geladze and Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze, framed officially as an effort to deepen law-enforcement and counter-terrorism cooperation. Geladze reciprocated with a visit to Israel two months later, during which the two interior and security ministries signed a memorandum of understanding formalizing cooperation in law enforcement and security. Iran's state-aligned outlet Tabnak interpreted this trajectory — coupled with Tbilisi's perceived drift from Washington and Brussels — as confirmation of Georgia's emerging "multi-vector" foreign policy, one that simultaneously courts Tehran and Jerusalem. Yet for all of Georgia's rhetorical balancing act, one pattern remains unmistakable: any visible deepening of Georgian-Israeli cooperation, particularly in security and law enforcement, is read in Tehran as a direct provocation.

Georgia's Security Calculus and the Iran War

Given Georgia's enduring vulnerability to Russian pressure, maintaining workable relations with major regional powers, including Iran, has long been a strategic imperative. The ongoing U.S.-Iran War adds a further dimension to this calculus: any improvement in U.S.-Georgia relations cannot realistically be pursued at the cost of a serious rupture with Tehran.

Despite Georgia's unexpected foreign policy transformation, its underlying security calculus has not changed. Russian occupation and unresolved territorial disputes remain the defining challenges for Georgia's security and diplomacy. Consequently, whether or not the current Georgian government succeeds in resetting relations with Washington, Tbilisi's Iran policy is unlikely to undergo any fundamental reorientation from the course it followed before the Joe Biden administration suspended the strategic partnership.

The Gulf war adds another layer of complexity. Throughout the conflict, Iran demonstrated formidable missile and drone capabilities, repeatedly striking U.S. partner countries in the region and inflicting considerable infrastructural and financial damage. Even after the ceasefire, Iran has continued to target neighboring U.S.-aligned states and has issued warnings that others risk sharing their fate. This message was echoed by Iran's ambassador in Georgia, Seyed Ali Moujani, triggering a sharp public backlash; his Facebook page was briefly unavailable amid the controversy. The episode is a reminder that Georgian-Iranian tensions do not operate in a vacuum, and that the regional fallout from the Gulf war will continue to shape and constrain the options available to Tbilisi.

Conclusion

Georgia's "cold friendly" relationship with Iran is best read not as a policy preference but as a structural constraint — the residue of an unaltered security environment in which Russian occupation, contested territory, and limited diplomatic weight leave Tbilisi unable either to break cleanly with Tehran or to embrace it. Every apparent swing in that relationship has tracked external pressure rather than Georgian intent: when Washington pushed, Tbilisi conceded and absorbed a diplomatic cost; when its security needs reasserted themselves, ties with Iran quietly recovered. The pattern has held across three decades and three governments because the underlying conditions have not moved.

What has moved is the price of getting the balance wrong. The U.S.-Iran War has converted Iran from a difficult neighbor into a demonstrated regional striker, and the Iranian ambassador's warning in Tbilisi made clear that small states perceived to be enabling Washington are now treated as legitimate pressure points. That raises, rather than lowers, the value Tbilisi places on its "cold friendly" equilibrium — precisely the variable a U.S.-Georgia reset is most likely to demand be sacrificed.

The analytical implication for Washington is concrete. A reset built on the expectation that Tbilisi will downgrade ties with Tehran asks Georgia to assume retaliatory risk at the moment that risk is highest, and history suggests Georgia will comply only as far as its security margin allows before recalibrating. The durable version of any rapprochement is therefore one that decouples Washington's genuine interests in Georgia — corridor security, governance, resilience against Russian influence — from a demand for anti-Iran alignment. Whether the current opening becomes a reset or another short cycle of pressure and recovery will be the clearest test of whether Washington has learned that lesson.

Bako Kheladze is a Non-Resident Fellow at the Irregular Warfare Initiative, specializing in international relations and security studies, with a particular focus on Iran, the South Caucasus, and Eurasian geopolitics. He holds an M.A. in International Security Studies from the University of Leicester. Previously, he served as a Press Officer at the Embassy of Georgia to the Islamic Republic of Iran. He is fluent in Georgian, English, Persian, and Russian.