Leadership Quote by Eduard Shevardnadze

A single bland adjective does a lot of geopolitical work here. When Shevardnadze says, "in the West they support realistic forces", he isn’t praising Western clarity so much as he’s trying to rename the power struggle on his own terms. "Realistic" is a code word with two audiences: to Western capitals it reads as pragmatic, reform-minded, stable; to domestic rivals it reads as a warning that the money, recognition, and diplomatic cover are already being routed to the other side.

The line lands in the late-Soviet and immediate post-Soviet atmosphere Shevardnadze helped shape and then had to survive. As Gorbachev’s foreign minister, he spent years translating Soviet intentions into a language Western leaders could accept. Later, in newly independent Georgia, he became the kind of leader who needed Western sponsorship while facing a fractured internal field: nationalists, hardliners, warlords, separatists, and would-be reformers. Calling some actors "realistic forces" draws a boundary between those eligible for international legitimacy and those condemned as romantic extremists, spoilers, or unreconstructed authoritarians.

What makes the phrase effective is its strategic vagueness. It implies a Western method (back the "realists") without specifying criteria, which lets Shevardnadze borrow the West’s authority while keeping maximum flexibility about who counts as "realistic" tomorrow. It’s diplomatic ventriloquism: he speaks as if he’s merely reporting Western preferences, while nudging both foreign patrons and local players toward the coalition he wants. The sentence is less description than leverage.