Georgia vs. The Left

On AOC and the Squad's vote against the MEGOBARI Act

Many folks on the internet have been wondering aloud why AOC and the Squad voted against the MEGOBARI Act - a bill in the House of Representatives which is intended to support Georgian democracy. There is a great deal of speculation on this matter and as far as I know none of the progressives have specifically addressed the bill or their vote against it.

I have only speculation to offer myself, but the least we can do is look at the potential reasons for this vote and evaluate them according to how plausible they are and how much they may have contributed to progressive opposition to the MEGOBARI Act.

Briefly, the MEGOBARI Act calls on the President to levy sanctions against individuals responsible for deteriorating US/Georgia relations and deteriorating democracy in Georgia (this is the “stick” section of the bill), and also to create a proposal for an aid and trade package which is to be awarded to Georgia in case the President should determine that Georgia has successfully and sustainably changed course (this is the “carrot”). Notably, the “carrot” includes military aid for Georgia’s defense against Russia.

So perhaps the obvious first question we should ask is, why would we expect progressives to vote for this bill at all? Do progressives generally support sanctions against developing countries, or military aid to countries in the periphery of our strategic rivals? Those are not progressive ideas - those are centrist views, characteristic of the Liberal Interventionist and Neoconservative consensus that the US should project its power throughout the world by bolstering democracy, weakening authoritarianism, and forming a network of military alliances to counterbalance our enemies. If you expected progressives to have the same approach to foreign policy as George W. Bush I don’t know what to tell you.

On the other hand, you might be in favor of the MEGOBARI Act, and think AOC is a good person, and so you might think “AOC should vote for MEGOBARI because she’s a good person and it’s the right thing to do”. So it’s incumbent upon me, I think, to examine some affirmative reasons why progressives might oppose this bill.

In short, some progressive reasons to oppose this bill are:

• Opposition to sanctions

• Opposition to military aid and cooperation

• Opposition to delegating power to President Trump

• Opposition to cutting USAID and withholding investments and trade deals

I will also evaluate some non-reasons, including “horseshoe theory”, and some dubious or unlikely reasons, such as “AOC is secretly a tankie”.

Opposition to Sanctions

I’ve written about this before, but I can’t stress it enough: Sanctions are unreliable at best, and deadly at worst. Crucially:

According to this comprehensive survey, sanctions aimed at regime change and/or democratization have a 31% success rate, with an average sanctions duration of 5.4 years in case of success, and 8 years in case of failure. So what we should expect here is for sanctions to last an average of 7.2 years and ultimately not work. In cases where sanctions were in place for the shortest periods, they still lasted for over a year, and only ended when the regimes massacred people and were subsequently forced out, such as in Thailand in 1992 (over 100 dead) or Malawi in 1993 (38 dead). Despite the death toll, these sanctions are considered amongst the most successful examples of sanctions leading to regime change.

AOC hasn’t addressed sanctions against Georgia that I know of, but she has spoken a great deal about how sanctions against Venezuela drove the refugee crisis that has victimized millions of Venezuelans and destabilized the region and the US border. It may be her belief that sanctions against Georgia - even if they are narrowly targeted - will have the result of destabilizing the country. There’s an argument to be made that more targeted sanctions have a better track record, that AOC has sometimes supported sanctions, and that the MEGOBARI Act sanctions are or would be narrowly targeted enough that they would not lead to instability. Still, sanctions are a risky policy and are more than twice as likely to fail than to succeed.

What are the risks of sanctions? For one, they can cause elites to entrench themselves and to pass along their economic pain to their constituents. For another, they risk pushing Georgia further into the sphere of influence of countries that are either evading sanctions or are themselves the target of sanctions, such as Russia and Iran.

Game it out from the perspective of a Georgian Dream politician: your options are to ignore the Act, which cuts you off from the West but leaves you free to trade with the BRICS (many of which are your close neighbors), perhaps resulting in a diminishment of income; or to capitulate to the Act, which means calling a new election in which your party will be voted out of power and a new government will be elected which may well use the power of the state to prosecute you and seize all of your assets, leaving you impoverished and imprisoned. Or at best you flee to Moscow and live out your days there. What do you think are the chances of a Georgian Dream official choosing option b?

Or consider this: Former President Mikheil Saakashvili held an election which he lost, and the result was a series of political prosecutions against himself and his allies, and he is now in prison. Every Georgian Dream politician must be looking at him when they consider whether to give up power to the opposition. What do you think they will do?

I think there’s a good argument to be made that most progressive opposition to the MEGOBARI Act comes down to general opposition to sanctions.

Opposition to Military Aid

There are a few reasons one might oppose military aid and cooperation. One, escalating military aid to Georgia may be seen as a provocation by Russia, which is known for retaliating through various means, including full-scale invasion. In the same vein, projecting military power can be seen as an extension of US imperialism, which engenders resentment and makes the world less safe in the long run.

We also know that AOC has spoken in the past about how “military interventionism” and “regime changes at home” have destabilized countries and regions and created refugee crises. You look at this bill, demanding regime change and promising military support to some unknown future Georgian regime, and you have to view the risk profile in light of past US actions that have been absolutely disastrous for the US and the target countries.

I know the world looks different since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, but like myself, AOC formed many of her political tendencies in the aftermath of the disastrous Iraq war, which itself has roots in Cold War era military aid to friendly regimes which promised to oppose Russia but ended up pursuing their own agendas. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to be skeptical of military support as a foreign policy strategy. I think there’s some likelihood that the MEGOBARI Act’s commitment to maintaining and expanding military cooperation and support for Georgia contributed to the Squad’s no votes.

Further than that, there are some who accuse people on the left of being “tankies”, or “Marxists”, or generally supporting Russia and/or the old USSR. On this view, the Squad longs for the days of Communism and would do anything to usher in the second (or would it be third?) Bolshevik revolution. They oppose anything the US does on principle because they think the US should have lost the Cold War. I don’t give this view much credence. There are some on the left who think that way, but I haven’t seen any evidence that The Squad is among them.

It could be that some US leftists are influenced by these elements. For example, Jacobin frequently runs columns about Georgia which promote a pro-Russian and pro-regime (or at least anti-opposition) perspective. I have commented before on the strangeness of Jacobin promoting the power of a billionaire oligarch over that of aid agencies which redistribute wealth to the poor, but if one were expecting US leftists to get their foreign policy views from Jacobin, one might expect US leftists to support Georgian Dream because Jacobin supports Georgian Dream. I would strongly hope that this is not the case, and that The Squad are smart enough to develop their own views independently of one particular socialist magazine which for some reason promotes an authoritarian capitalist regime at the expense of the people, but I can’t say for sure.

Procedural Objections

AOC is known for sometimes opposing bills for procedural reasons. For example, she may broadly agree with the goal of supporting democracy abroad, but she might not agree that the President ought to be given broad discretion to impose or lift sanctions - especially given the current President’s blatant abuse of power for his own enrichment. One can easily imagine Trump accepting an “investment” from an anonymous Georgian billionaire and then suddenly certifying that Georgia is making progress towards democracy. Perhaps AOC would have supported a bill which directly imposed sanctions and reserved to Congress the power to lift them.

Horseshoe Theory

Horseshoe theory is the claim that the “far left” and the “far right” increasingly resemble each other at the political extremes. This theory is widely discredited but is still trotted out (pardon the pun) every time there’s a bill where AOC and MTG vote the same way. The problem with Horseshoe Theory is that it doesn’t predict or explain anything.

At best, the most charitable view of horseshoe theory is that given a binary choice on a bill (a yes/no vote) and a center consensus, you might see the far left and far right vote together to oppose the center.

For example, the political center in the US broadly supports liberal interventionism. Liberal interventionism is “liberal” both in the International Relations (IR) theory sense of believing that international relations are primarily defined by the operation of institutions and cooperation between states, and the conventional political sense of promoting liberal ideals such as democracy, freedom of speech, and other human rights. It’s “interventionism” because it promotes the idea that liberal states ought to intervene in the internal affairs of other states in order to promote liberal ideals and values.

Now, one could imagine several critiques of this framework. Leftists might point out that liberal interventionism often serves to promote the interest of the intervening states at the expense of the states which receive interventions. Those on the right might argue that the US has no obligation to help foreigners and should focus their energy on helping Americans first - either by isolating the country from foreign affairs or by conducting those affairs in the US’ own interest, rather than in the interests of others. Both sides might point to a history of failures, of cases where years or even decades of intervention failed to bring about democracy or promote liberal values, but cost a fortune in blood and treasure. So - there’s the horseshoe, right? Both sides agree, right?

But the difference is apparent when one views the remedy. Leftists broadly support international cooperation - but on more equal terms, which is to say, without the presumption that the US is the senior partner or has the moral high ground and that other countries must conform to our will in order to be worthy of partnership. Leftists broadly oppose military aid but support humanitarian aid - notably, even to countries whose governments act in opposition to US values or to their own people. The right wing, however, opposes international cooperation in many cases - frequently attacking the legitimacy of the UN, NATO, the ICC, and other instruments of international cooperation - and would often prefer to act unilaterally or to take the lead and demand other countries follow. The right often opposes foreign aid, as we’ve seen with the DOGE cuts to USAID and other aid programs, and the right often supports military intervention to support US economic or strategic interests.

Those are two very different worldviews. The left’s support of USAID, humanitarian aid, the WHO, the Paris Accords, the UN, and diplomatic solutions where available is diametrically opposed to the right’s schizophrenic support of neoconservative military adventurism interspersed with periods of sullen isolationism and trade protectionism.

And speaking of USAID…

Support for Humanitarian and Development Aid

Tucked away in the MEGOBARI Act is an instruction to USAID to produce a strategy which would assess “whether Georgia should remain the second-highest recipient of United States funding in the Europe and Eurasia region”, determine “the extent to which the United States should continue to invest in its partnership with Georgia”, and decide “whether the United States Government should continue to invest in Georgian projects”. Well, pardon me, but this doesn’t look very targeted! This looks like the US government is threatening to reduce USAID funds and withhold trade agreements and investments if Georgian Dream doesn’t abdicate power. As I’ve said before, my kids go to a school which was renovated using US development funding. USAID supports education, journalism, health care and medicine, environmental safety systems, and all kinds of other sectors. Cutting off USAID projects is just going to punish the Georgian people for what Georgian Dream has done. It’s not targeted at all. I have heard from several Georgians who have lost jobs due to DOGE cuts to USAID. People are already suffering here, and the MEGOBARI Act provides a foothold to conservatives to make those cuts permanent by garnering Congressional support.

As I said above, leftists tend to support unconditional humanitarian aid, and I could imagine The Squad voting for a version of this bill which left USAID alone and only imposed targeted individual sanctions on oligarchs.

Right vs. Left

I don’t think The Squad votes on partisan lines - often going against the Democrats - so I’m not proposing the political context as an explanation for this vote. However, I cannot help but observe that Georgian politicians and pundits often embrace the right wing of US politics and criticize or disparage the left, and I’ve seen many Georgians and Georgia-followers on social media using this vote as evidence that leftism, progressivism, and “wokeism” are evil, Marxists plots. I also have to wonder if they are targeting AOC in particular in order to score points with Trump and the right wing, or if they’ve just spent so much time under Republican influence that they’ve sort of absorbed Republican tactics and memes through osmosis.

There is, of course, logic to this. Republican neocons during the Bush administration “supported” Georgia by issuing assurances that Georgia would join NATO and then voicing support during Russia’s subsequent invasion of the country. This support didn’t actually prevent Russia from occupying Georgian territory, but Georgians welcomed it anyway and Bush got a big road named after him in Tbilisi. Georgians loved John McCain, and now they love Republican Joe Wilson, who Americans know only in the context of his egregious, likely racist breach of decorum when he shouted “you lie!” at President Obama during a speech about healthcare. Georgians, however, know him as a tireless advocate and as the sponsor of the MEGOBARI Act.

Now, I watched Joe Wilson’s speech in Congress, as he stumbled, as if in a drug-induced haze, over both the Georgian names and over ordinary English words, like someone seeing his own prepared statement for the first time. I suppose Wilson has some handler or staffer who feeds him his information about Georgia - a staffer who is likely now wondering who “Even Vashvili” is and which of Wilson’s meds need to be adjusted to wake him up during his own speeches - but needless to say I was not impressed.

And I know that Georgians as a whole lean conservative, with libertarianism being the prevailing economic ideology here and Orthodox Christianity being the prevailing social ideology, so it’s not at all surprising that they find the American right wing to be natural allies. Still, it’s ironic that Georgians’ solution to the problem of an authoritarian billionaire corrupting their politics is to make obeisance to the authoritarian billionaires corrupting US politics.

But I think Georgians would do well to engage with progressivism, since it is historically progressives and leftists and socialists who are often at the forefront of the type of struggle which Georgians now find themselves in - in favor of democracy and human rights, and against repression, plutarchy, and corruption. They might even find that leftists have a few tactics that could potentially be more effective than “asking billionaires politely”. If right wing figures like Joe Wilson and Donald Trump do manage to score some kind of grand victory for democracy, I will recant what I’ve said here, but my prediction is that cozying up to the Right is only going to end in more disappointment for Georgians.