When the courtroom becomes the battlefield

The Washington Examiner reports a striking inversion: a woman who became the symbol of Georgia's pro-Western aspirations wrote, in 2008, a book that Russia later carried into The Hague and read aloud as evidence against her. I did not live to see The Hague's courts, but I negotiated documents whose words were later construed against us in exactly this fashion — and I learned the hard lesson early. Words written in one context are instruments in another's hands the moment they are set down.

This is not, at its core, a military story. Russia's tanks moved in 2008; that was the visible act. What the Examiner describes is the slower, more durable campaign: the colonization of international legal forums. A nation that cannot win on the battlefield may yet win in the courtroom, if it is sufficiently patient and if its adversary is insufficiently careful. Moscow, it appears, is running precisely that playbook.

The lesson for those who would resist such a strategy is not to write less or speak less freely — free expression is the very thing worth defending. The lesson is to understand that in any proceeding before an international tribunal, every prior statement becomes potential evidence, every rhetorical flourish a potential liability. This is not paranoia; it is the ordinary discipline of anyone who has ever drafted a treaty clause knowing that its construction will one day be argued by parties with opposing interests.

I must speak with humility on the specific procedural posture of the Hague proceedings, as I cannot know the precise legal instrument under which Russia acted — whether it invoked the Rome Statute, a bilateral convention, or some other jurisdictional hook. That I mark as inference, not recollection. What I can say with confidence is that the shape of the maneuver is ancient: you invite your adversary into a forum governed by rules, and then you use those rules against the adversary's own record. The British did something not entirely unlike this in the years before the Jay Treaty, citing American obligations under the Treaty of Paris that we ourselves had drafted.

The proper response is neither to abandon international legal forums — they are, imperfect as they are, among civilization's better inventions — nor to treat them as reliably neutral ground. The response is to compete in them with the same seriousness one brings to any other theater of national interest. That means engaging skilled counsel, building coalitions among parties who share an interest in honest construction of international law, and refusing to cede the interpretive field to those who would weaponize it. Washington should be asking not only what Russia is arguing at The Hague, but what the United States and its allies are arguing in reply — and whether that reply is being made with the gravity the forum demands.