Among the roles of Gazprom’s South Stream pipeline project was that of aborting the EU-backed Nabucco, merely by threatening to preempt Nabucco’s markets along the same route downstream. Conversely, Nabucco’s European rival Trans-Adriatic Pipeline project (TAP) can abort Nabucco by preempting the gas supply source... MORE

On March 22 in Copenhagen, the Danish and Turkish prime ministers, Helle Thorning-Schmidt and Recep Tayyp Erdogan, witnessed the signing of agreements between subsidiaries of Danish Moeller-Maersk and Azerbaijan’s State Oil Company (SOCAR) to develop a giant port near Izmir in Turkey. The petrochemicals holding... MORE

Objectively, the Georgian Dream government is a legatee of the Mikheil Saakashvili government’s trademark foreign policy. National interests require the new government to build on the legacy of its predecessor.On March 16, at the German Marshall Fund’s (GMF) annual Brussels Forum, Georgian Defense Minister Irakli... MORE

The Barack Obama administration declared victory for the “democratic process” in Georgia immediately after that country’s October 1, 2012, parliamentary elections. It defined that victory narrowly as an “orderly transfer of power” from the incumbent government to the election-winning opposition. This would in turn guarantee... MORE

The Barack Obama administration publicly called for an “orderly transfer of power” during Georgia’s electoral campaign. President Obama first gave this message, publicly and (still more explicitly) privately, to the visiting Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili as early as January 2012 in Washington. “Orderly transfer of... MORE

The United States had strongly influenced Georgia’s politics during Mikheil Saakashvili’s presidency. This influence is waning since the regime change that has empowered Prime Minister Bidzina Ivanishvili. The October 2012 parliamentary elections have effected this still-incomplete regime change, pending a constitutional transition period until the... MORE

Georgia’s October 2012 parliamentary elections amounted to a plebiscite on the policies of Mikheil Saakashvili’s government. Voters responded by giving his rival Bidzina Ivanishvili’s Georgian Dream 85 parliamentary seats, against Saakashvili’s United National Movement (UNM), which gained 65 seats in the 150-seat chamber. The votes... MORE

In October 2012, Georgia held the freest parliamentary elections in the country’s two decades of experience with competitive multi-party politics. Also for the first time, the opposition defeated the government, in a contest on a “level playing field.” This, however, was not simply a competition... MORE

Georgia’s parliamentary elections on October 1, 2012, have ushered in, not merely a rotation of government, but a change of regime, from President Mikheil Saakashvili’s United National Movement (UNM) to billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili’s Georgian Dream. The latter won an indisputable mandate in the narrow terms... MORE

Moldova’s Alliance for European Integration (AEI), governing since 2009, has all along been wracked by rivalries, pitting the two smaller parties against the larger one. The lure of Europe, and fear of the strong Communist opposition, have barely kept the AEI together thus far. Meanwhile,... MORE