Politics & Power Quote by Mikhail Saakashvili

There is a deliberate moral booby trap in Saakashvili's wording: he takes the bloodless language of diplomacy, "deals" and "pragmatic considerations", and indicts it as the mechanism of enslavement. "Small nations" is doing double duty here. It sounds like a general principle, but it is also a pointed identification of Georgia and other post-Soviet states that have spent decades living inside someone else's "sphere of influence". The verb "enslaved" is intentionally inflammatory, meant to strip away the polite fiction that pressure, occupation, or forced alignment are just normal outcomes of geopolitics.

The subtext is accusation by abstraction. Saakashvili doesn't name Russia, the EU, or the United States, but the target is the familiar great-power bargain: stability purchased by treating weaker countries as negotiable terrain. By calling these arrangements "totally unacceptable", he refuses the core premise of realpolitik that the powerful are entitled to trade away the autonomy of the less powerful if the spreadsheet balances out.

Context matters because Saakashvili is not theorizing from a lecture hall; he is a leader whose political identity was forged in the early 2000s push to pull Georgia toward the West, and who later confronted the brutal limits of that project. The line is a rallying cry and a warning to outsiders: if you want to speak the language of values, stop outsourcing your compromises to the periphery. It works because it collapses the distance between boardroom diplomacy and lived subjugation, forcing listeners to own the human cost of their "pragmatic" choices.