Speaking nine days after Kosovo’s declaration of independence, Saakashvili explained why Georgia was now keener than ever to join NATO. ‘Why do we need NATO membership?’ he asked. ‘We need it because Georgia should be strategically protected in this very difficult and risky region, and receive its share of security guarantees.’ A crucial NATO summit was approaching – in Bucharest in April – at which the alliance would consider whether to allow Georgia and Ukraine to embark on a Membership Action Plan or ‘MAP’, considered the first concrete step on the road to membership. To garner support, Saakashvili flew to Washington in March to flash his democratic credentials around the corridors and committee rooms of Congress and the White House.
He was not short on flattery, telling George Bush in front of the television cameras: ‘What we are up to now is to implement this freedom agenda to the end, for the sake of our people, for the sake of our values, for the sake of what the United States means to all of us, because the US is exporting idealism to the rest of the world.’
Bush could not suppress a smirk of delight; no one in the world supported him like this guy did. Damon Wilson, the president’s adviser on European affairs, recalls: ‘He was terrific, he was on message. He came into the president with a message about the importance of recognising that his legacy was building a democratic Georgia. This was music to our ears, this was the right message.’1
And Saakashvili got exactly the answer he was hoping for. ‘I believe Georgia benefits from being a part of NATO,’ Bush told reporters. ‘And I told the president it’s a message I’ll be taking to Bucharest.’
Not all the allies were so convinced, however, especially the French and the Germans. When Saakashvili arrived in Washington – before he even reached the Oval Office – he received a call from the German chancellor, Angela Merkel. Saakashvili says the first thing he told Bush was, ‘I just had a call from our common friend, Angela Merkel, and she said, “I know you are going to meet with Bush to discuss the pending NATO summit, and I wanted you to know from me that our German position is that you are not ready for membership, and we will not support it.”’2
According to eyewitnesses, Bush smiled and told Saakashvili there were big players and small players in the alliance: ‘You take care of Luxembourg and leave Angela to me. I’ll take care of her.’
That was easier said than done, however. Both the French and the Germans had two reasons to doubt Georgia’s fitness for NATO membership, and neither had to do with ‘appeasing Russia’. Firstly, they felt it was dangerous to admit a country with ‘frozen’ internal conflicts, such as South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Secondly, they were worried by Saakashvili’s personality and recent signs that he was far from the democrat George Bush saw in him.
In November 2007 police had violently broken up huge anti-government demonstrations in Tbilisi. Saakashvili closed down an opposition television station, Imedi, which had extensively covered the violence, and declared a nationwide state of emergency, accusing Russia of plotting a coup d’état against him. Even the White House had been appalled, and Condoleezza Rice dispatched her assistant, Matthew Bryza, to Tbilisi to read Saakashvili the riot act.
But Washington and Berlin had a tacit agreement not to air their doubts in public, and the Americans were furious when Merkel went to Moscow, just days before Saakashvili’s meeting with Bush in March, and stood side by side with Vladimir Putin to denounce Georgia’s (and Ukraine’s) NATO aspirations.
Merkel was hardly a member of the Putin fan-club. A year earlier, during talks in Sochi, she had been horrified when Putin brought out his dog, Koni, and allowed her to sniff around the chancellor’s legs, knowing she was terrified of dogs. (One of Merkel’s senior aides told me they regarded this as ‘typical KGB intimidation’.) Having grown up in communist East Germany, she knew at first hand what totalitarianism meant and what Putin’s background, working hand in hand with the Stasi secret police, said about him.
But Merkel did agree with Putin that if Georgia and Ukraine began the process of joining NATO, it would steeply raise tensions with Russia. At a joint press conference in Moscow, Putin pointed out that a majority of Ukrainian citizens did not want to join NATO, and added: ‘Ultimately, each country decides for itself how best to ensure its security, and we will most certainly accept whatever the Ukrainian and Georgian peoples decide, but this has to be the decision of the people and not the political elite.’ Merkel concurred that ‘it is important that the public in all future NATO members support their country’s membership’, and added: ‘One of the obligations of NATO member states is that they be free from conflicts. This is something we must reflect upon in our discussions, and it is also something we will be discussing at the upcoming summit in Bucharest.’
Two days later, in Berlin, addressing a meeting of Germany’s military top brass, Merkel again went public with her doubts: ‘I mean this seriously – countries ensnared in regional or internal conflicts cannot in my view be part of NATO. We are an alliance for collective security and not an alliance where individual members are still looking after their own security.’
According to Bush’s Georgia adviser, Damon Wilson, the president realised he would have to work ‘personally and privately’ on Merkel to bring her round. ‘He decided the pivot point was the chancellor herself and that if he could help get her on board that he could help close the deal across the alliance.’ Bush and Merkel held a series of video conferences in the run-up to the Bucharest summit. ‘And the remarkable thing is,’ says Wilson, ‘that when you listened to her articulate her concerns, they actually weren’t very different from President Bush’s concerns. In Ukraine, we were concerned about the lack of coherence in governance, the lack of popular support for NATO among the population. In Georgia we both shared concerns about the durability, the depth of democratic institutions.’ The big difference lay in how to move forward. Bush argued that giving Georgia a MAP for NATO membership would encourage them to ‘do their homework’, but Merkel was sceptical about even beginning the process. ‘She wasn’t convinced that Saakashvili was a democrat,’ says Wilson.
In their final video conference there was deadlock. For Bush it was a matter of principle to be supporting fragile democracies, and he told Merkel he would go to Bucharest to achieve that. ‘OK,’ Bush told his aides afterwards, ‘we’re headed for the OK Corral – guns drawn.’
Bush also put in calls to other allies. The British prime minister, Gordon Brown, indicated support for the American position. But the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, was another matter. The feedback the Americans were getting from Sarkozy’s advisers had put them on guard. A member of Bush’s National Security Council recalls: ‘Many of them had argued to us that they were sceptical that Georgia was even a European country, much less that we should be willing to begin this conversation about them moving towards alliance membership eventually.’
When Bush got through to Sarkozy personally, he felt the Frenchman was ‘gettable’: he talked of Ukraine and Georgia having a ‘European and Atlantic vocation’. But Sarkozy also wanted Bush to think about Russia. According to the French president’s diplomatic adviser, Jean-David Levitte, Sarkozy ‘tried to get him to understand that in this situation, we were side by side with the Germans, in an approach which aimed to give Russia time to understand that its future was actually bound with that of Europe and its security should not be something that separates us, but rather something that brings us together, and that this vision meant that we shouldn’t try and push too quickly to obtain a MAP, though we should give a positive signal in Bucharest to our partners in Ukraine and Georgia.’3