While I am sure many countries, whether foes or friends, have been carrying highly unflattering stories about the student protests against United States complicity in the Palestinian genocide, Russia, China and Iran are for sure doing their share.

But the US and its media are hardly in any position to complain, when they have been doing exactly the same thing to other countries and governments for decades by exploiting their internal divisions to justify subversion, interference and regime change. It’s the classic US foreign policy/CIA playbook.

The only difference is that the US has been doing it far more successfully than anyone else in the past three-quarters of a century. And it is still doing it.

Consider some recent examples:

1. The current unrest in Georgia against the government’s attempt to introduce a “foreign agents” registration law;

2. Protests against the deaths of two female teenagers in Iran in 2022 and 2023;

3. Six months of riots in Hong Kong triggered by an extradition law in 2019;

4. US media celebration of an obscure opposition figure in Venezuela, who was only officially recognised by Washington and a handful of Western allies in 2019 in a failed bid to oust leftist President Nicolas Maduro;

5. The Maidan uprising in Ukraine in 2014, effectively a coup against pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovich to which the current war can be directly traced back.

Admittedly such examples are actually endless since the end of the second world war. But I only have enough column space here to focus on the ongoing case of Georgia which may remind many of us of Hong Kong in 2019.

Please note that I am not denying that many such protests expressed legitimate grievances against their governments and/or other state or societal authorities. What I am claiming is that under the guise of democracy promotion, they have been consistently exploited by the US as a matter of long-standing policy to further its own geopolitical goals and business interests.

Meanwhile, a compliant US news media are only too happy to repeat and spread the Washington-sanctioned narratives. Such interference, exploitation, subversion and sometimes regime change to destabilise a foreign government will never be tolerated by the US government in its own sovereign territories.

Georgia

The current protests in Tbilisi remarkably resemble those throughout 2019 in Hong Kong. Admittedly, the Georgian protesters have been much more peaceful than our vandals, arsonists and those who assaulted innocents in the guise of protests.

The Hong Kong protests were triggered by an extradition bill, which critics and opposition politicians claimed could mean sending Hongkongers to jail in mainland China.

Georgian demonstrators are angry at the likely passage of the “Foreign Agents Bill” in the legislature. Officially known as the draft Law on Transparency of Foreign Influence, it would require all organisations receiving more than 20 per cent of funding from abroad to register as agents of foreign influence, with fines for those who fail to comply. Sounds reasonable to me!

Protesters and the opposition, which denounce the bill as an excuse for state censorship, are supported by Washington, which has criticised the bill for rolling back press freedom. Ironically, the bill is actually modelled on the US’ decades-old Foreign Agents Registration Act.

Just like Hong Kong in 2019, many Georgian groups that oppose the bill have received funding and training from the US Congress-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and other support from various agencies under the US Agency for Global Media (AGM), a US government department.

With some slight name changes, these could easily sound like Western-infiltrated and NED-funded NGOs and political parties in Hong Kong in the last quarter of a century, before the recent introduction of the national security law and Article 23 legislation of the Basic Law.

Like Ukraine, Georgia has centuries-old ties with Russia. But Russia’s support for the secession of South Ossetia and Abkhazia following its 2008 war with Georgia almost broke their long-standing historic association.

Subsequently, though, relations have improved, and Tbilisi refused to join Western sanctions against Moscow over Ukraine; and like most other countries outside the West, it continues to trade with Russia.

This has greatly upset Washington and Brussels, even though like Ukraine and Moldova, Georgia also wants to join the European Union. Its middle and professional classes, and youth are greatly pro-European, and that makes for easy penetration into the country’s civil society and media industry by foreign agencies such as NED.

NED and AGM

You may agree or disagree with the “values” and programmes, if they were what they claimed to be, promoted by NED with millions of dollars in funding and training. But I think it’s fair to conclude that no government would welcome a foreign government-affiliated agency with such extensive tentacles covering practically the entire political and NGO sectors in its own country.

You can imagine what the US government’s response would be if China had operated a propaganda agency to fund American NGOs and opposition parties promoting its socialist political values and world vision. But wait, we don’t have to imagine. The US and many of its Western allies have already banned almost all Confucian Institutes, which were state-funded but were generally apolitical, over the past decade.

In Empire’s Workshop, Yale historian Greg Grandin wrote about US groups like the NED. He wrote: “US-funded “democracy promotion” organisations – many of them carrying hard-to-argue-with names tagging human rights, a free press, and social justice – accuse governments that show too much independence from Washington of actual, exaggerated, or manufactured transgressions.

“As Allen Weinstein, who helped set up the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) during Ronald Reagan’s presidency … put it in the 1980s: ‘A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.’ … They use the rhetoric of democracy and human rights to menace governments viewed unfavourably by the Department of State.”

In 2022, after Moscow launched its invasion of Ukraine, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s former president and CEO Jamie Fly went directly to Tbilisi in an effort to counter “Russian disinformation and efforts to politicise information”.

Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty operate directly under AGM. In US congressional testimonies such as the one given a year ago, the hawkish AGM CEO Amanda Bennett openly declared an information war on countries such as China, Russia, and Iran. The title of the senate meeting was: “The Global Information Wars: Is the US Winning or Losing?”

As she told a Senate foreign relations subcommittee, “We are at an inflection point. Authoritarian regimes are using malign influence, disinformation, propaganda, and information manipulation to close the flow of information and undermine those seeking fact-based information about the world around them.

“The governments of the PRC, Iran, and Russia often work together to amplify their malign influence, obscure the facts, and cause confusion on a global scale. If we miss this opportunity to target investments to counter inroads Russia, the PRC, and Iran are making, we run the risk of losing the global information war.”

The more cynical among us may just see one side fighting propaganda with more propaganda.

Like Hong Kong in 2019 and many before and no doubt many others to come, Georgia has been getting a taste of US “democracy promotion”.