Strongman, The

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
    And Sarkozy made a forceful new point to the American president about what exactly NATO membership would mean for Ukraine and Georgia. MAP was a ‘foot in the door’, an irreversible step that would lead to full membership of NATO – and then you had to think about Article Five, the alliance’s mutual defence clause. ‘How many troops,’ Sarkozy asked, ‘would we be willing to send to assist our new members in the case of an attack?’ That was why France preferred to make a partnership with Russia the real priority, ‘so that everybody within the continent had the same vision of security’.
    Even within the US administration, there were doubts. Defence Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice shared some of the Europeans’ concerns about democracy in Georgia and Ukraine. Gates recalls: ‘It seemed to me that in terms of the progress of the reform effort, there was still a distance to be covered by both countries.’ 4 But it was the ‘freedom agenda’ advocates that won the day. ‘If the United States were to back down in the face of Russian pressure and not give them MAP,’ national security adviser Stephen Hadley remembers, ‘then actually that in