Why McCain Loves Misha

Mikheil Saakashvili, his eyes bloodshot from sleeplessness and his face caked with television makeup, summoned his closest advisers into his office above Tbilisi's Old City. It was 2 a.m. on Aug. 12, and columns of Russian tanks were rolling down the highway toward the Georgian capital. "I am never going to flee," the president told his team. "I will not live my life regretting that I abandoned my own country at war." Then he sent them home to change out of their suits and ties so they could fight the invaders. Swigging a can of Red Bull, Saakashvili grabbed a phone and called the trusted friend and mentor he had turned to every night since Aug. 8, when the war began: John McCain. A source close to the Republican standard-bearer, asking not to be named discussing a private conversation, says McCain voiced support for diplomatic and political pressure against Moscow. "Hang in there," the senator said, according to a Saakashvili aide on condition of anonymity. "We are not going to let this happen … We are doing everything we can to stop this aggression."

It's not surprising that Saakashvili, 41, known to Georgians by the nickname Misha, would turn to McCain at a moment of crisis: their decade-long friendship is among the closest McCain has with any foreign leader. Sen. Richard Burr, a Republican from North Carolina, traveled to Georgia in 2006 with a delegation led by McCain. He says Saakashvili saw the Republican nominee "as a man of greatness … on a different level" from the other legislators. And it's clear why McCain would admire the Georgian president. In many ways he's McCain's McCain—a passionate and unorthodox reformer, and a stalwart freedom fighter ranged against the Russian bear. Saakashvili's stint as Georgia's justice minister ended abruptly at a cabinet meeting in 2001 when he brandished a dossier of photos showing top ministers' lavish country homes, slapped it on the table and demanded that his colleagues be prosecuted immediately. "We are similar in many ways," Saakashvili says. "We agree that you can't compromise your beliefs."

That's exactly what worries some of McCain's many foreign-policy consultants. As the two presidential candidates prepare to debate foreign affairs and national security this Friday night, the Republican nominee is widely assumed to have an edge: polls consistently show that voters think he's better prepared than Sen. Barack Obama to be commander in chief. His relationships with leaders like Saakashvili contribute to that reputation. Yet McCain's affection for Misha runs counter to the instincts of many Republican foreign-policy "realists." (GOP moderates use the term to distinguish themselves from the party's neoconservative wing. McCain's chief foreign-policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann, a former Saakashvili lobbyist, is identified with the neocons.) The candidate likes Saakashvili's sense of moral absolutes, says Dimitri Simes, founding president of the realists' home think tank, the Nixon Center: "I understand how someone who takes this posture would appeal to Senator McCain, who also does not tend to see international relations in shades of gray."

The concern, according to a McCain adviser and former Republican administration official, who did not want his name linked to criticism of the nominee's positions, is this: "When you personalize these issues, you lose sight of some more basic national interests." Saakashvili's tough talk about Moscow may ignite McCain's imagination, but his brinksmanship in August led to the rout of Georgia's armed forces and the worst U.S.-Russia standoff since the cold war. Simes says that "a number of leading Republican realists have shared their reservations with Senator McCain regarding Saakashvili and blind U.S. support for Georgia."

It's hard not to like Saakashvili. He's engaging, unaffected and ferociously smart. He laughs at his own jokes. Like McCain, he has an easy relationship with the press. He sends text messages to visiting reporters from his private mobile phone (without hiding the number) and invites them to spontaneous 3 a.m. dinners. His wife, Sandra, admits he's "impulsive," but says, "That's a good thing. He needs to grasp every opportunity. He wants things done fast." For the most part, though, Saakashvili is remarkably poised, fluently chatting in English, French, Russian and Ukrainian in a loud, deep voice. When speaking of his deepest beliefs—like the virtues of freedom and the evils of communism—he does so with a conviction that is neither glib nor scripted.

It was thanks to McCain's hatred of totalitarianism that he first met Saakashvili. As chairman of the nonpartisan International Republican Institute, a pro-democracy organization founded by Ronald Reagan, McCain directed a search for potential leaders in the former Soviet republics after communism's collapse. He was host at an IRI-sponsored gathering in Washington attended by Saakashvili in 1995. The young Georgian, a graduate of Columbia University and George Washington University Law School, had just decided to give up a career with a New York law firm to go home and enter politics. Their friendship grew when McCain visited Tbilisi in 1997. Saakashvili, by then a parliamentary deputy working for judicial reform, impressed McCain with his enthusiasm for what Saakashvili calls "universal principles, not just American principles, of fairness and realizing your potential."

McCain stood by his friend during the Rose Revolution that brought Saakashvili to the presidency in 2003. The young Georgian was running for his country's top job when McCain returned to Tbilisi with a senior U.S. delegation to encourage the incumbent candidate, Eduard Shevardnadze, to respect the voters' will. (According to Saakashvili, McCain also foresaw trouble: "He told the … [U.S.] military attaché to be sure to give me a flak jacket.") That didn't stop Shevardnadze from trying to rig the results. After Saakashvili and his supporters occupied Parliament in protest, McCain called Shevardnadze—also a longtime friend—urging him to step down peacefully. Shevardnadze eventually did so. "It was a time of great optimism for the friends of Georgia," recalls a senior U.S. official who was in Tbilisi at the time (he asked not to be named because of his job). "Amid all the dysfunction of the old Soviet empire, suddenly you have this young, smart guy charging in to clean house."

Straight out of the gate, Saakashvili fired 80,000 state employees, including 90 percent of the old KGB-trained security force and every last member of the country's notoriously corrupt traffic police. Since then three Parliament members, 16 prosecutors, 45 judges, 400 police and even a serving cabinet minister have been indicted and jailed for graft. And bypassing Georgia's old ruling class, Misha filled his cabinet with young, Western-educated former NGO staffers. "Only young people had the enthusiasm to change the country," says Georgia's state-security secretary, Alexander Lomaia, 50, the cabinet's oldest member. (The defense minister is 29.)