Leadership Quote by Eduard Shevardnadze

“To sum up” sounds tidy, almost managerial, but in Eduard Shevardnadze’s mouth it’s a quiet act of political theater: a statesman closing an argument by redefining what counts as success. “Policy” is the Soviet-era keyword here, the language of doctrine and blocs. Yet the payoff isn’t ideology, territory, or victory. It’s “friends” - a deliberately human, disarming term that smuggles warmth into a system built on suspicion.

The phrasing “looked for and found” does double duty. It implies agency (we chose openness) while also casting friendship as something discoverable, even inevitable, if you stop treating the world as an enemy map. In late Cold War diplomacy - the arena where Shevardnadze mattered most as Gorbachev’s foreign minister - this is code for a sharp pivot: away from zero-sum confrontation, toward détente, arms control, and the rhetorical rebranding of the USSR as a normal participant in a shared world.

The subtext is defensive as much as it is aspirational. Friendship becomes a metric because other metrics were collapsing: economic strain, imperial overreach, a credibility crisis. When a superpower starts talking like a mid-sized country courting partners, it’s not just idealism; it’s triage. Still, the line works because it compresses a geopolitical gamble into a moral narrative. It asks listeners to remember the end of an era not as retreat, but as recognition: influence can be accumulated through trust, not just through fear.