Courtney Austrian Takes Charge in Tbilisi Without an Ambassador

Courtney Austrian took over as chargé d’affaires at the U.S. Embassy in Tbilisi on September 8, 2026. She replaces Amy Diaz, who returns to deputy chief of mission. The ambassador post has been empty since Robin Dunnigan left in July 2025.

Austrian arrives as a career senior foreign service officer whose last Washington job was Europe and the European Union, and whose last field command was the U.S. mission to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. She is the third acting chief in that gap, and no nominee for ambassador is on the public calendar.

Tbilisi Has Had No U.S. Ambassador Since July 2025

Dunnigan, a career diplomat, presented herself as ambassador in October 2023 and ran the mission into the summer of 2025. On June 5, 2025, she posted a personal decision to retire after 33 years. “This is a fully personal decision. I have not been asked to return by my government,” she wrote, and said she would keep working until she left in July.

The chair she vacated is still empty more than 13 months later. A chargé d’affaires ad interim can run the building, sign notes, and sit with ministers. She cannot present credentials as ambassador, and she does not carry a Senate-confirmed title into a fight that has already outlasted one ambassador and two acting chiefs.

Georgia is not the only unfilled post. It is one of the posts with no name attached.

THE VACANT CHAIR, COUNTED

• The gap: Tbilisi has had no U.S. ambassador since Dunnigan left in July 2025, more than 13 months by September 8, 2026.
• The tracker: The American Foreign Service Association, updated September 1, 2026, lists 99 of 196 ambassador-level posts vacant.
• The blank: Georgia’s line on that list is vacant, with no nominee, no nomination date, and no confirmation date.
• The contrast: Several other vacant posts on the same list already carry a name awaiting a Senate vote.

Azerbaijan, on that same tracker, has a nominee pending. Georgia does not. The distinction is not that Tbilisi is empty. It is that Washington has not even put a name on paper.

A Third Acting Chief Now Holds the Mission

The embassy’s own account, @usingeo, announced Austrian in a two-line post on September 8 and posted her photograph. Diaz, it said, had gone back to deputy chief of mission.

https://x.com/usingeo/status/2097235601665782245

Diaz had held the acting job only since July 30, a span of 40 days. Before her, Alan Purcell ran the mission as chargé from July 2025 through July 29, 2026, about a year. The pattern is a relay, not a nomination.

WHO HAS RUN EMBASSY TBILISI

The embassy said it was “pleased to announce the arrival” and left it there. Replies under the post did not turn into a policy fight over her résumé. The live fight in this relationship is still the empty title above her name.

She Already Did a Tour Here as Press Officer

Austrian assumed the post of chargé d’affaires in September 2026, according to the embassy’s own biographical note, which also records that she is married and has two daughters. The same note lists earlier tours in the United Kingdom, Georgia, Ukraine, and Russia.

The Georgia tour is not a line on a résumé she has never lived. In 2015 and 2016 she was the embassy’s public affairs officer in Tbilisi. In a 2016 interview she said she had been in the country two and a half years and had come to the Foreign Service after work that included National Geographic, following parents who were themselves diplomats.

On July 15, 2015, she sat with Georgian First Deputy Foreign Minister David Dondua. The two discussed the banners Russian forces had just put up near Tsitelubani and Orchosani, close to the Tbilisi-Gori highway. She restated U.S. support for Georgia’s territorial integrity at that table, a decade before she came back to run the mission.

THE POSTS BEHIND THE TITLE

• First tours: She began in Haiti in the consular section, then served in Syria in consular and political work during the handover from Hafez al-Assad to Bashar al-Assad.
• Washington and Moscow: She worked the State Department operations center, staffed Secretary of State Colin Powell on foreign travel, and later served as press attaché at the embassy in Moscow.
• Kyiv and Tbilisi: She was cultural affairs attaché in Kyiv, then public affairs officer in Tbilisi for about two and a half years by late 2016.
• Vienna and EUR: She was deputy chief of mission and long-time chargé at the U.S. mission to the OSCE, then director of the Office of the European Union and Regional Affairs, then Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary for Western Europe and the European Union from January 20, 2025.

She holds a B.A. from Swarthmore College, an MBA in public and non-profit administration from Boston University, and an M.S. in national security strategy from the National War College. The Tbilisi job is a return, not an introduction.

Her OSCE Job Put Georgia and Ukraine in the Same Sentence

The OSCE years are the part of the résumé that maps onto the map she now sits on. As U.S. chargé in Vienna she spoke, week after week, to the Permanent Council about Russia’s war against Ukraine, the Special Monitoring Mission, and Crimea. She also kept Georgia in the argument.

On April 14, 2021, at a joint session of the Forum for Security Cooperation and the Permanent Council, she told other participating states that Ukraine was right to worry about Russian force movements, and she reached back to the last time Moscow had staged that way on this same southern flank.

In both 2008 and 2014, Russia massed forces in a similar manner before it launched military operations against Georgia and then Ukraine.

Courtney Austrian, then U.S. chargé d’affaires to the OSCE, Permanent Council, April 14, 2021

Later that year she told the same council the primary obstacle to peace in Ukraine was Russia, a line she delivered as “this is a conflict Russia started.” Those are not talking points she will have to learn on arrival. They are sentences she already put on the record in the hall that still handles the 2008 ceasefire file.

The U.S. mission to the OSCE has, in the years since, kept saying Russia occupies 20 percent of Georgia and should pull back to pre-conflict positions under the 2008 ceasefire. In January 2026 the United Kingdom and 23 other countries invoked the OSCE Moscow Mechanism for an expert mission on human rights inside territory Tbilisi controls. Austrian is now the American sitting in the capital that mechanism was aimed at.

The Reset Tbilisi Wanted Never Reached the Embassy Gate

Georgian Dream has spent the Trump administration talking about a reset with Washington. Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze has said Georgia is not a school student who can be picked apart. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told a House panel in June 2026 that U.S. officials had spelled out what better ties would take and had seen some positive responses, and that he hoped to change the trajectory of Georgia’s behavior as well as the relationship.

The laws on the books did not move with the talking points. Since 2024 the ruling party has layered registration rules, grant controls, and penalties onto groups that take foreign money. In April 2025 parliament adopted a Foreign Agents Registration Act with definitions broad enough to reach ordinary contact with foreign partners. In March 2026 it widened the definition of a grant that needs government approval, added criminal penalties, and created jail terms of up to three years for “systematic acts” aimed at creating the perception that the government is illegitimate.

WHAT TBILISI CHANGED ON PAPER

• Foreign funding: Grant rules now cover technical help, in-kind support, and money sent to local branches of foreign groups, with criminal penalties for getting it wrong.
• Agent rules: The 2025 registration act can reach organizations and people who share routine information with foreign partners.
• The volume: In a June 22, 2026 letter, the Georgian government told Human Rights Watch it had received 222 grant applications from April 2025 to June 2026.
• Diplomats: April 2026 amendments carved some exemptions for missions and international organizations, while committee leaders still said embassy money meant to shape policy would need government agreement.

Human Rights Watch said in July 2026 that the mix of those laws and politically timed investigations was hollowing out independent civic groups. The U.S. mission to the OSCE had already called the 2024 foreign-agents law a Kremlin-style measure when it passed. Austrian inherits that file as the person who has to walk into the foreign ministry and still get business done.

Congress Ordered Its Own Intelligence Report on Georgia

The Hill did not wait for an ambassador. Rep. Joe Wilson, a South Carolina Republican, introduced H.R. 7668, the Countering China’s Control of the Caucasus Act, on February 24, 2026. The House passed it on June 8. The Senate received it on June 9 and sent it to Foreign Relations, where it still sits.

The act, as passed by the House, requires a classified report on Russian and Chinese intelligence assets in Georgia, including where those networks overlap, plus a strategy for U.S.-Georgia ties and a determination of whether Washington should keep investing in the partnership. It is a reporting bill, not a new ambassador. It is also a second channel of Georgia policy that does not run through Austrian’s office and does not need her confirmation.

State Department teams did come through Tbilisi in the spring of 2026 and met both the government and the opposition. The embassy has kept working public-health and other cooperation in the meantime; Diaz was at the Lugar Center in early September talking about that work. None of that fills the title Dunnigan took with her.

Austrian can run the mission she already knows, in a language of ceasefires and European files she has already spoken in Vienna and in Foggy Bottom. She cannot, from this rank, close the argument Congress is having about Russian and Chinese networks, or the argument Tbilisi is having with its own civic groups. Until a name lands on the Senate calendar, the United States will keep doing Georgia policy with an acting chief and a stack of unread reports.