On August 12, the US Treasury announced sanctions on SHPS Shelbit, a Georgia-registered cryptocurrency firm, for moving more than $2 million in digital assets on behalf of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and other sanctioned Iranian entities. Georgia’s central bank responded that the firm had never registered as a virtual asset service provider and therefore fell outside its supervision—an answer that was technically accurate but politically did not help its case. In Washington, the designation was received less as an enforcement action than as confirmation of a thesis.
That thesis has been building for two years. Analysts describe Georgian Dream as reorienting the country’s foreign policy toward Tehran. Op-ed writers call Georgia Iran’s sanctions-evasion hub in the Caucasus. Representative Joe Wilson (R-SC), among the loudest congressional voices on Georgia, characterizedPresident Mikheil Kavelashvili’s attendance at Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s funeral in July as part of a deepening “anti-American pact.”
Read the full article on The National Interest.
Bako Kheladze is a Research Fellow and Joseph Epstein is Director at the Turan Research Center.