The report, titled The Great Transshipment Scam and released by the White House Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy on 13 August, claims China dodges tariffs on goods bound for the American market by rerouting them, identifies more than 40 trading partners as the routes, and puts the affected imports at $40 billion to $75 billion a year. It sorts the partners into three groups. Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan sit in the third, described in the report's coverage as China's “secondary targets”: smaller economies that “offer specific advantages” for rerouting.
Irakli Kobakhidze answered on Tuesday. “Has any concrete fact been provided? I don't think any concrete fact has been provided. We demand facts,” he told journalists in Tbilisi, adding that inclusion in the report “does not, in itself, constitute proof of a specific violation”. If a fact arrives, he said, Georgia will react accordingly.
Every future cargo now argues its origin.
The exposure the report gestures at is modest by Georgia's trade arithmetic: the country imported $1.98 billion of goods from China in 2025 and exported $120 million to the United States, with ferroalloys the leading Chinese import category, by figures JAMnews compiled alongside the report.
The listing matters regionally because the four capitals named together are the spine of the Middle Corridor, the route marketed to Washington as the way around Russia. Kazakhstan already carries a 12.5% American tariff from 24 July, with about 95% of its exports outside the tariff's reach. The enforcement edge is real: the US Trade Representative, Jamieson Greer, calls transshipment “a form of free earning off of President Trump's deals”, and coverage of the release notes that new unilateral tariffs could follow USTR investigations.
No reply from Astana, Tashkent or Baku had surfaced in the wires this desk read by Tuesday evening. For four economies built on being in the middle, the category itself is the cost: every future cargo now argues its origin.