51. The “Night of Sapper Blades”: My Diplomatic Beginnings and Lessons from Strobe Talbott
- Author:
- Tedo Japaridze
- Publication Date:
- 08-2023
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Baku Dialogues
- Institution:
- ADA University
- Abstract:
- Many people of my generation who took up leading roles in the various “newly independent states” (NIS) after the dissolution of the Soviet Union—i.e., at the beginning of the (renewed) independence and sovereignty period—have their own stories about how seemingly accidental happenstance came to play a decisive role in a career change that led to their rise to public prominence. I have chosen to share a part of mine in part because it seems to relate more directly than most to the views expressed over a series of conversations that took place in the span of a decade or so between me and one of America’s at the time most influential policymakers, Strobe Talbott, regarding the Silk Road region (as the editors of Baku Dialogues aptly refer to our part of the world) during what came to be known as the “unipolar era.” I present it to the reader as part of my continuing reflection on the advice Zbigniew Brzezinski gave at his very first meeting with Georgia’s inaugural foreign minister, Giorgi Khostaria, in 1991 in Washington, DC: try to think contextually and reflect with sobriety and realism on the world around you, so that you and your country may lock onto a destination with “firmness in the right” (quoting Lincoln’s Second Inaugural) whilst retaining the flexibility to adapt your course to occurrences beyond your control. Years later, on the day I presented my ambassadorial credentials, I also met with Zbig, and reminded him of his earlier advice. In response, he remarked that “Georgians should make Georgia not only a democratic state but also a ‘grounded and capable’ one—he used, I distinctly recall, the Russian term “samostoyatelnoye gosudarstvo,” to emphasize how Georgia has to become a country not only able to make but also to defend its sovereign choices. With his usual unrelenting clarity, he reminded me then as well as on numerous later occasions that only Georgians will spill blood for Georgia, always cautioning against the pursuit of what he called the “politics of outside salvation.”
- Topic:
- Diplomacy, Leadership, and Memoir
- Political Geography:
- Soviet Union