Just 36 when he became president in 2004, Mr. Saakashvili set out to become a historic figure: a model he has often cited is David the Builder, a 12th-century king who drove the Turks out of Georgia and is worshiped as a saint.

Mr. Saakashvili won his first election with 97 percent of the vote and, buoyed by passion and adrenaline, pressed to amend Georgia’s Constitution, granting himself extraordinary power. His advocates say this was the only way to wrench a corrupt post-Soviet state into the modern age; critics say he created an autocracy, surrounding himself with a clique of loyalists. Either way, no comparable figure has yet emerged from Georgia’s fractured opposition. Mr. Saakashvili called this “very sad.”

“If I had been in the opposition, I would have destroyed this government in three months,” especially given the economic crisis, he said. Asked how, his answer was almost teasing: “I know how to do it,” he said, “but I don’t want to teach them how to do it.”

Mr. Saakashvili thinks, talks and moves at a high rate of speed. When he decides that an event has ended, his aides often break into a full run, lest they be stranded, panting, in his wake. His appetite is legend: on a 45-minute flight, he ordered three cups of tea, a glass of wine and a cognac, and gave a flight attendant a genial hard time for not stocking up on cheese.

He is easily bored. For reading material on the same flight, he had a glossy magazine, a biography of Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain, the disgraced French general; architectural plans for a cargo airport that he had sketched himself when 20 submissions fell short (“I hate to confess it,” he said); and a Georgian newspaper, which he glanced through and put aside.

“Every Georgian newspaper hates me; what’s the difference?” he said. “If you can find me one that likes me, I’ll read it all the time.”

From the beginning, Mr. Saakashvili’s presidency has been marked by audacious gestures. Months after his swearing-in, he dismissed all 13,000 of Georgia’s GAI  the Soviet-era traffic police notorious for low-level corruption  replacing them with 1,600 officers modeled on American state troopers. He also promised to reclaim South Ossetia and Abkhazia, stoking Georgian nationalism and inflaming tensions with Moscow.