The World According to Misha: Georgia's Saakashvili

The weary dissidents and opposition leaders of Tbilisi call it the Show, the ready display of virility and political kinetics that Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili reserves for the many visitors whose good opinion he seeks. "I'm sure you'll be charmed," says Tinatin Khidasheli, a human-rights lawyer who is a leader of the opposition Republican Party of Georgia, over espresso and cigarettes at the brand-new Radisson Tbilisi. "Everyone always is."

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The Show is a little different for each visitor. For Senator John McCain, it meant jet-skiing with Saakashvili on the Black Sea. Vice President Joe Biden was treated to a twirling, leaping folk-dance spectacular in Tbilisi. More than a few reporters have been granted late-night interviews on Saakashvili's presidential plane, a sleek Bombardier Challenger stocked with cognac and patriotic Georgian music videos. (See TIME's photo-essay "Georgian Spring.")

My Show began a short while after the one-year anniversary of Georgia's ill-fated war with Russia. A report by the European Union blaming both Russia and Georgia for the conflict was about to be released, but word had already leaked that the report would accuse Georgia of firing the first shots. The war all but ended Saakashvili's dreams of unifying Georgia with the breakaway republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia — nearly a fifth of its territory — and the report could possibly damage his other great project: convincing the West that Georgia is a reliable military and economic ally.

With much to prove, Saakashvili gave an unusually robust Show during my visit. It started with a ride along the Black Sea coast on his presidential helicopter, and by the time it was finished almost a week later, it had led from the Abkhazian border in the northwest to the central wine country of Kakheti and eventually to the President's offices inside the new glass-and-steel chancellery building in Tbilisi.

Saakashvili still has the immense talent for communication that made him an international celebrity when he took power after 2003's bloodless Rose Revolution. He's an imposing man — at 6 ft. 4 in. (193 cm), he is the tallest Georgian I saw until we watched the national basketball team beat Belarus — with a polyglot charisma. At various times throughout the week, he spoke to me in Russian, Spanish and — above all — his famous English, an enthusiastic tumble of idiomatic American that he learned while studying and practicing law in New York City and Washington. (See pictures of the Russians in Ossetia.)

But the question isn't Saakashvili's charm; it's the quality of his vision for Georgia and whether his wary allies can trust him to lead his country there. The stakes are high. This tiny country half the size of North Carolina is the rawest point of contact between the rising confidence of Russia and the eastward encroachment of the great Western alliances — NATO and the E.U. Yet the most crucial conflict may be the one within Saakashvili himself, between his enormous ambitions for Georgia and the impetuousness that could yet spoil his young democracy or bring more bloodshed to the Caucasus.

The Road to War
Our first flight took us to a deserted stretch of Black Sea coast at Anaklia Bay. Saakashvili, who is sometimes swept away by his own optimism, met several leading Spanish architects on the beach to discuss developing a resort nearly 4 miles (6 km) long that would lead right up to the border with the breakaway republic of Abkhazia. The area may have natural potential — "The water's like boiled milk," an official told me approvingly — but Saakashvili seemed to be ignoring the obvious. If war breaks out again, the Russian army will rumble first through Anaklia, bombing and burning, just as it did last year.

Saakashvili's heavily armed SUV convoy then took us north over dusty roads to the border village of Ganmukhuri and the 8-ft. (2.5 m) earthen berm he likes to call "the next Berlin Wall." Throngs of jubilant Georgians waved flags, passed him handwritten notes, yelled "Misha" and led chants of "Gaumarjos!" (To victory!). Saakashvili's personal film crew, which follows him nearly everywhere he goes, climbed the berm looking for a better shot but was quickly pulled down. This is, after all, a tense place, where a shouting match two years ago between Saakashvili and a Russian general almost led to a wider conflict.

One of Saakashvili's earliest political promises in 2004 was to get Abkhazia and South Ossetia back in Georgia's fold. Both territories had turned to Russia for protection after a bloody civil war in the early 1990s, however, and the Kremlin had little incentive to broker a peace. Instead, it began to use unrest there to undermine Saakashvili's courtship of NATO, which he wanted Georgia to join. Saakashvili told me that from the outset, any talk he had with then Russian President Vladimir Putin on the breakaway territories was met with warnings about his relationship to the West: "The first lecture [Putin] ever gave me in Moscow was 'All these Eastern European leaders seem to be so subservient to the U.S.' It was very disgusting to Putin. He warned me, 'Don't even try that.'"

Read an interview with Saakashvili.

See TIME's special report on the Georgia-Russian crisis.