On July 31, 2024, Anatol Lieven, the Director of the Eurasia Program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, declared moral bankruptcy. His declaration was in the form of a supposed analysis of Georgian politics and how the West should react to it.
Hans Gutbrod teaches at Ilia State University. He holds a Ph.D. in International Relations from the London School of Economics and has been working in the Caucasus region since 1999. His recent book “Ethics of Political Commemoration: Towards a New Paradigm” (with David Wood, 2023) proposes that the just war tradition can help to order public debates on remembrance.
The piece starts with the assertion that “the truth is much more complex” than the supposed “standard Western account.” Lieven proceeds to offer an analysis devoid of complexity. His version of events posits a pragmatic and sage government, guided by Georgia’s national interest, pitted against an illegitimate opposition and meddling Western policymakers who do not yet “grasp the reality” of what happens in the country that Lieven visited for a few days in early July. To call Lieven’s analysis cartoonish does injustice to the Marvel Universe.
To start with, readers of Lieven’s piece are not told that the Georgian Dream government has itself brought about the deterioration of relations with Brussels and Washington. Since 2021, the leadership of the Georgian Dream party has been on a wrecking course, overturning agreements, maligning Western ambassadors, saying EU donors financed terrorism, alleging Freemasons are driving Western policy, and claiming that a senior EU official may have threatened the Georgian Prime Minister with assassination. If the Georgian Dream is an exemplar of Bismarckian grandezza, as Lieven wants us to believe, why do its leaders start a petty fight every other week? Most Western diplomats in Tbilisi feel as if they are stuck in a dysfunctional loop with an abusive chatbot. (Non-Western ambassadors are at a loss, too.)
From Lieven’s description, you would believe that the EU is trying to put Georgia in an impossible situation. Missing from this account is the promise of the Georgian Dream in the most recent election to bring the country towards EU membership. The government’s aggressive reversal now forces European leaders to reconsider their support. They can hardly ask EU taxpayers to subsidize a government that is not intent on essential reforms, especially when there are credible concerns about surging corruption across many state institutions.
Readers of Lieven’s analysis will conclude that the so-called transparency law is narrowly conceived to counter a handful of politically active NGOs. They will miss that this is a “repress anyone you want law” that subjugates civil society, including non-profit schools, organizations that help people with disabilities, and animal shelters. The law imposes massive reporting requirements; is spiked with fines that can destroy organizations; gives government representatives sweeping powers to intrude on any citizen, including on private health records; and all of this to be wielded at will. The Venice Commission of the Council of Europe provided a devastating critique of the law. No reader would glean this information from reading Lieven’s piece.
Lieven’s analysis does not include a word on the violence that has been a key feature of the recent repressions. You would have no idea that Levan Khabeishvili, the leader of the country’s main opposition party, after his arrest was beaten so badly that he suffered serious skull fractures. He resigned from his position thereafter, saying that the injuries made it impossible for him to continue.
This assault is just one item in an extended chronicle of repression. At a protest in early May, a respected American-Georgian lawyer was dragged, beaten, and kicked by police. Police snatched a well-known activist and in multiple rounds used reinforced gloves to beat him nearly to death. Several grievously injured people were subsequently fined in rigged court trials. Various civic activists were attacked outside their homes. One senior police official bragged that he was beating scum. Rather than being disciplined or let go, he had his macho swagger defended by the Prime Minister. Not a single policeman has been charged for well-documented transgressions. Hundreds of people received intimidating phone calls, sometimes also to their children or parents. Several people are in jail and others have fled the country.
From Lieven’s analysis, people will believe that the standoff in Georgia results from unreasonable people rallying against the supposed pragmatism of the government’s foreign policy. There is no mention that what has been going on in recent years is best characterized as a slow-rolling coup, an unlawful seizure of power from above, in which all institutions have been seized, from the court system across all regulatory institutions including the Central Election Commission, the previously independent National Bank of Georgia, and most recently the pension fund that holds the savings of hundreds of thousands of Georgians, now subordinated to full government control.
When Lieven complains that Western governments and commentators talk to NGOs, he omits that these are largely staffed by many of Georgia’s most respected former diplomats and civil servants who have been removed from their positions and do not have anywhere else to go. Many of them, and many of the leading opposition politicians, have served in Georgian Dream governments when it was not yet on a wrecking course.
Instead of talking to some of them while in Georgia, it appears that Lieven spent most of his time with representatives of the Georgian Dream and Russian scholars (including, it has to be said, at least one hard-core imperialist). Although the article makes it look as if he travelled widely, he was mostly lodged at a Middlebury-organized symposium in the lush Stamba Hotel. It is not known that he made much of an effort to reach beyond that bubble.
A Terrible Guide, By His Own Standards
Moral bankruptcy is, of course, a strong charge. Yet Lieven fails against criteria that he himself set for how Realist analysis should be done. Here is Lieven in a discussion from October 2020 on what it takes to understand another country:
“I would say that, and here I’m, of course, echoing a long series of realist thinkers, including Kennan, Morgenthau, Niebuhr and others, what you absolutely have to shelve before trying to [offer analysis ] is self-righteousness. It is quite impossible to develop a sense of where other people are coming from if you are coming at it from the standpoint that you are good and anyone who disagrees with you is bad and basically that’s the end of the story. That is a terrible guide to try to understand other countries.”
This is eminently sensible advice. Yet by that standard, Lieven has proven a terrible guide to understanding Georgia. He paints the government as good, the people who disagree with him as bad, and that is, indeed, “the end of the story.”
As the illuminating critique by Luka Nakhutsrishvili that first drew my attention to Lieven’s article notes, the “reduction of [Georgian] realities to geopolitics only reproduces the treatment of Georgia ‘as a creature of the US and the West’ that it criticizes.”
Mr. Lieven is a “terrible guide” not just in the sense of misleading readers. In one passage, Lieven highlights the allegation that the US was
“laying the groundwork for regime change in Georgia by funding training of Georgians by Serbian activists whose previous organization had played an important part in toppling the government of President Slobodan Milosevic. Their present group, Belgrade-based Canvas, “advocates for the use of nonviolent resistance in the promotion of human rights and democracy.”
During the Cold War, U.S. administrations frequently helped overthrow democratically elected governments that differed with Washington. Americans should ask themselves if this is really a tradition they wish to continue.”
In a rhetorical sleight of hand that readers may not initially notice, Lieven moves from a Georgian Dream allegation to insinuating U.S. intent to overthrow the government. (A check on AI highlights that by “asking if this is a tradition Americans wish to continue, the text implies that such practices might still be ongoing.”)
This is a malevolent misrepresentation. Unlike Lieven, I have talked to several people involved in the CANVAS advocacy trainings. The main audiences of the training were parents of sick children who cannot afford life-saving treatment and had been looking for effective ways to advocate for support; students, primarily concerned with housing that has become unaffordable due to the influx of Russian émigrés; and artists, who had been cut off from funding under political purges that the literary critic Maya Jaggi has documented in detail.
No reader of Lieven’s piece would have any idea that the supposed vanguard of regime change in Georgia are parents of children with cancer. The charges of plotting a coup, which are clearly made up, have been used by Georgia’s state security service to hound civic activists, put them under investigation, and have brought misery into good people’s lives. These facts are widely known and yet Lieven carelessly repeats this allegation. This is a terrible thing to do. (To boot, the Quincy Institute tweeted that “@lieven_anatol visited Georgia recently and discovered that regime change elements are afoot, with much of it coming from the outside.”)
When Decent People are under Assault
Lieven is a regular guest at high-profile events funded by well-meaning institutions, supposedly to add a Realist perspective to our understanding of the complexity of world politics. He is the wrong person for that task. As is evident, complexity now seems beyond him. To again cite Lieven, here on experts of Russia:
“Only a small proportion of analysts of Russia are capable of walking even a few yards in Russian shoes. In consequence, American assumptions have tended to swing wildly between a naively optimistic belief that Russians can quickly be turned into American style Democrats, and a crudely pessimistic, even racist, belief that Russians are incorrigibly authoritarian and expansionist.”
If Lieven tried to walk a few yards in Georgian shoes, those were of an authoritarian hide. This results in a “naively optimistic belief” in the Georgian Dream’s ability to secure the country’s national interest and “a crudely pessimistic, even racist, belief” that young Georgians who oppose repressive governance are not worth listening to.
It undermines the essence of any serious discussion on foreign policy if supposed experts have such a casual relationship to the truth. Scholars have a privileged position. From it arises an obligation to get things right when decent people are under assault. It is clear from his article that Mr. Lieven, though he pronounces his views with confidence, is not willing or able to tell the truth. At a time of existential challenge, he offers a cavalier take that misrepresents Georgia’s situation to readers.
Anatol Lieven should retract the piece and apologize. He has not upheld the good standards he set out. If he does not do so, the Quincy Institute would be well served by parting ways with him and the editors who failed to identify the glaring problems with his terrible piece. Donors should ask the institute to overhaul its process of internal peer review. The world needs responsible statecraft. Any sensible foreign policy has to consider the limits of its reach, or, as the traditional framing of ethics puts it, the “reasonable chances of success.”
The situation in Georgia is complex. A lot of coverage, including by that Natalie Sabanadze at Chatham House (here an event to which I contributed) or Thomas de Waal at Carnegie Europe have conveyed some of that complexity. How exactly the West should level with the Georgian Dream’s slow-rolling coup is a difficult question. As I have recently argued, Georgian opposition parties need to make a strong domestic case to voters and leave any appeal to sanctions out of the discussion. These questions are hard. If they were easy to square, as Lieven’s facile take suggests, why would we even need expertise?
It is necessary that one has a good debate on how to get this and other complicated situations as right as is possible. Statecraft, in many ways, is the right term. There can be big gaps between what seems moral and what is wise; a chasm between what we want to achieve and what we can do; and a dilemma between conflicting and even desperate priorities. That kind of statecraft can only be honored if it actually is responsible. Giving an adequate presentation of the situation on the ground in Georgia and elsewhere is where this must start.
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