After Trying to Undermine Hungary, Powers Turns To Georgia

In the country of Georgia, Parliament is considering a bill that would require NGOs that get over 20 percent of their funding from abroad to register as foreign agents. The bill passed today, over a threatened presidential veto. There were protests on the streets. And lo, a top Color Revolutionary herself weighed in last week:

Georgia’s proposed foreign agent laws gravely threaten Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic future and the ability of Georgians to fulfill their own economic, social, and other aspirations. I call upon the Georgian Parliament to drop these proposed laws.

— Samantha Power (@PowerUSAID) March 2, 2023

If you follow the link to the news story, you’ll see that the Georgian president opposes the bill because it would hurt European integration. But what business is it of Europe or the US as to whether or not Georgia wants to regulate the activities of foreign-funded NGOs in its own sovereign territory? This bill might not be wise — I don’t know enough about the details to say — but it’s not at all surprising that countries see how Washington and Brussels use soft power through NGOs to manipulate the political processes in those countries, and want to protect themselves from it. I wrote at TAC the other day about how the aptly named Power showed up in Budapest last month to announce a $20 million commitment to fund initiatives in Hungary clearly aimed at undermining the democratically elected government of Viktor Orban.