Throughout the negotiations the Egyptians were on the phone with the leaders of Hamas and other Palestinian extremist factions in Gaza, including some who were actually sitting in the offices of the Egyptian intelligence services across town. Morsi’s team, new to governing, was tentative with the Palestinians and seemed uncomfortable twisting their arms to get a deal done. We kept reminding the Muslim Brotherhood men that they now represented a major regional power, and it was their responsibility to deliver.
I updated President Obama frequently and spoke to Netanyahu several times. He and Morsi wouldn’t speak directly to each other, so I served as the conduit for a high-stakes game of telephone negotiations, while Jake and our formidable Ambassador in Cairo, Anne Patterson, were drilling down on some of the trickier details with Morsi’s advisors.
Netanyahu was intent on gaining U.S. and Egyptian help to block new weapons shipments into Gaza. He didn’t want to end the air strikes and then find himself back in this untenable position in another year or two. When I pressed Morsi on that point, he agreed it would be in Egypt’s security interests as well. But he, in turn, wanted a commitment to reopen Gaza’s borders to humanitarian aid and other goods as soon as possible, plus greater freedom of movement for Palestinian fishing boats off the coast. Netanyahu was willing to be flexible on these points if he received assurances on the weapons and the rockets stopped. With each turn of the discussion, we inched closer and closer to an understanding.
After hours of intense negotiation we hammered out an agreement. The cease-fire would go into effect at 9 P.M. local time, just a few hours away. (It was an arbitrary time, but we needed to come up with a clear answer to the basic question “When will the violence stop?”) But before we could declare victory, there was one more piece of business to attend to. We had agreed that President Obama would call Bibi, both to personally ask him to agree to the cease-fire and to promise increased American assistance cracking down on weapons smuggling into Gaza. Was this political cover so Bibi could tell his Cabinet and his voters he had called off the invasion because Israel’s most important ally had begged him? Or did he take some personal satisfaction from making the President jump through hoops? Either way, if this was what it would take to seal the deal, we needed to get it done.
Meanwhile my team anxiously watched the clock. It was now after 6:00 in Cairo on the night before Thanksgiving. Air Force regulations about crew rest were going to kick in soon, which would mean we wouldn’t be able to take off until the next day. But if we left soon, under the wire, we might just make it back in time for people to spend the holiday with their families. Any snags, and the only turkey we’d be eating for Thanksgiving would be the Air Force’s famous turkey taco salad. Of course, this wasn’t the first holiday threatened by the crazy demands of international diplomacy, and no one on my team complained; they just wanted to get the job done.
Finally all the pieces were in place, the call was made, and we received the go-ahead from Jerusalem and Washington. Essam al-Haddad, Morsi’s national security advisor, got down on his knees to thank God. Foreign Minister Amr and I walked downstairs to a jam-packed press conference and announced that a cease-fire had been agreed to. It was absolute pandemonium in there, with emotions running high. Amr spoke of “Egypt’s historic responsibility toward the Palestinian cause” and also its “keenness to stop the bloodshed” and preserve regional stability. The new Muslim Brotherhood government would never seem as credible again as it did that day. I thanked President Morsi for his mediation and praised the agreement, but cautioned, “There is no substitute for a just and lasting peace” that “advances the security, dignity, and legitimate aspirations of Palestinians and Israelis alike.” So our work was far from over. I pledged that “in the days ahead, the United States will work with partners across the region to consolidate this progress, improve conditions for the people of Gaza, and provide security for the people of Israel.”
As our motorcade raced through the streets of Cairo that night, I wondered how long—or even if—the cease-fire would hold. The region had seen so many cycles of violence and dashed hopes. It would take only a few extremists and a rocket launcher to reignite the conflict. Both sides would have to work hard to preserve the peace. And even if they succeeded, there would be difficult talks over the coming days about all the complex issues we had deferred in the agreement. I could easily be back here soon, trying to put the pieces together again.
At 9 P.M., as scheduled, the skies above Gaza grew quiet. But in the streets below thousands of Palestinians celebrated. Hamas leaders, who had narrowly avoided another devastating Israeli invasion, declared victory. In Israel, Netanyahu adopted a somber tone and speculated that it was still “very possible” that he would be forced to launch “a much harsher military operation” if the cease-fire did not hold. Yet despite these contrasting reactions, it seemed to me that the two most important strategic outcomes of the conflict boded quite well for Israel. First, for the time being at least, Egypt remained a partner for peace, which had been in serious doubt since the fall of Mubarak. Second, the success of Iron Dome in shooting down incoming rockets had reinforced Israel’s “qualitative military edge” and exposed the futility of Hamas’s military threats.
When we got to the plane, I asked Jake if the agreement was still holding. I was only half joking. He said yes, and I settled in for the long flight home.
As it turned out, the cease-fire held better than anyone expected. In 2013, Israel enjoyed the quietest year in a decade. Later, one senior Israeli official confided to me that his government had been forty-eight hours away from launching a ground invasion of Gaza and that my diplomatic intervention was the only thing standing in the way of a much more explosive confrontation. Of course, I continue to believe that over the long run nothing will do more to secure Israel’s future as a Jewish democratic state than a comprehensive peace based on two states for two peoples.
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PART SIX
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The Future We Want
21
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Climate Change: We’re All in This Together
No! No! No!” the Chinese official said, waving his arms across the doorway. The President of the United States was barging uninvited into a closed meeting with the Premier of China—and there was no way to stop him.
When you’re a senior official representing the United States abroad, let alone the President or Secretary of State, every movement is carefully planned and every door opens on cue. You get used to being whisked through busy city centers in motorcades, bypassing customs and security at the airport, and never having to wait for an elevator. But sometimes protocol breaks down and diplomacy gets messy. That’s when you have to improvise. This was one of those times.
President Obama and I were looking for Premier Wen Jiabao in the middle of a large international conference on climate change in Copenhagen, Denmark. In December 2009, that charming city was cold, dark, and uncharacteristically tense. We knew that the only way to achieve a meaningful agreement on climate change was for leaders of the nations emitting the most greenhouse gases to sit down together and hammer out a compromise—especially the United States and China. The choices and trade-offs confronting us would be difficult. New clean energy technologies and greater efficiencies might allow us to cut emissions while creating jobs and exciting new industries, and even help emerging economies leapfrog the dirtiest phases of industrial development. But there was no getting around the fact that combating climate change was going to be a hard political sell at a time when the world was already reeling from a global financial crisis. All economies ran primarily on fossil fuels. Changing that would require bold leadership and international cooperation.
But the Chinese were avoiding us. Worse, we learned that Wen had called a “secret” meeting with the Indians, Brazilians, and South Africans to stop, or at least dilute, the kind of agreement the United States
was seeking. When we couldn’t find any of the leaders of those countries, we knew something was amiss and sent out members of our team to canvass the conference center. Eventually they discovered the meeting’s location.
After exchanging looks of “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” the President and I set off through the long hallways of the sprawling Nordic convention center, with a train of experts and advisors scrambling to keep up. Later we’d joke about this impromptu “footcade,” a motorcade without the motors, but at the time I was focused on the diplomatic challenge waiting at the end of our march. So off we went, charging up a flight of stairs and encountering surprised Chinese officials, who tried to divert us by sending us in the opposite direction. We were undeterred. Newsweek later described us as “a diplomatic version of Starsky and Hutch.”
When we arrived outside the meeting room, there was a jumble of arguing aides and nervous security agents. Robert Gibbs, the White House Press Secretary, got tangled up with a Chinese guard. In the commotion the President slipped through the door and yelled, “Mr. Premier!” really loudly, which got everyone’s attention. The Chinese guards put their arms up against the door again, but I ducked under and made it through.
In a makeshift conference room whose glass walls had been covered by drapes for privacy against prying eyes, we found Wen wedged around a long table with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and South African President Jacob Zuma. Jaws dropped when they saw us.
“Are you ready?” said President Obama, flashing a big grin. Now the real negotiations could begin.
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It was a moment that was at least a year in the making. In our 2008 campaigns both Senator Obama and I highlighted climate change as an urgent challenge for our country and the world, and we offered plans to curb emissions, improve energy efficiency, and develop clean energy technologies. We tried to level with the American people about the hard choices to come while avoiding the old false choice between the economy and the environment.
The problems posed by global warming were evident, despite the deniers. There was a mountain of overwhelming scientific data about the damaging effects of carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gases. Thirteen of the top fourteen warmest years on record have all come since 2000. Extreme weather events, including fires, heat waves, and droughts are measurably on the rise. If this continues, it will cause additional challenges, displacing millions of people, sparking competition over scarce resources such as fresh water, and destabilizing fragile states.
Once in office, President Obama and I agreed that climate change represented both a significant national security threat and a major test of American leadership. We knew that the United Nations would hold a major climate conference at the end of our first year in office and that it would be an opportunity to galvanize broad international action. So we began laying the groundwork.
This was part of a bigger story about how our foreign policy had to change. During the Cold War, Secretaries of State could focus nearly exclusively on traditional issues of war and peace, such as nuclear arms control. In the 21st century we’ve also had to pay attention to the emerging global challenges that affect everyone in our interdependent world: pandemic diseases, financial contagion, international terrorism, transnational criminal networks, human and wildlife trafficking—and, of course, climate change.
Movement on the domestic front began quickly in 2009, as the new Obama Administration started working with Congress on ambitious “cap-and-trade” legislation that would create a market for pricing, buying, and selling carbon emissions, while also taking direct action through federal agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and passing legislation that provided incentives to generate more solar and wind power. There was a lot of excitement when a bill passed the House of Representatives in June with the leadership of Congressmen Henry Waxman from California and Ed Markey from Massachusetts, but it quickly got bogged down in the Senate.
Internationally, we had tough going. From the start I knew it would take creative and persistent diplomacy to build a network of global partners willing to tackle climate change together. Building this kind of coalition, especially when the policy choices involved are so difficult, is much harder than herding cats. The first step was embracing the international negotiations process called the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which allowed all participating nations to discuss this shared challenge at a single venue. The goal was to gather everyone in Copenhagen in December 2009 and try to strike a deal between the developed and developing countries.
I needed an experienced negotiator with expertise in climate and energy issues to lead this effort, so I asked Todd Stern to become Special Envoy for Climate Change. I knew Todd from his work in the 1990s as a negotiator on the Kyoto Accord, which Vice President Al Gore championed and Bill signed but the Senate never ratified. Beneath a calm demeanor, Todd is a passionate and dogged diplomat. During the years of the Bush Administration he worked diligently on climate and energy issues at the Center for American Progress. Now he would have to use all his skill to cajole reluctant nations to come to the negotiating table and compromise. I wanted to give him as much of a running start as possible, so I brought him with me on my first trip to Asia. If we didn’t convince China, Japan, South Korea, and Indonesia to adopt better climate policies, it would be nearly impossible to reach a credible international agreement.
In Beijing, Todd and I visited the high-tech gas-fired Taiyanggong Thermal Power Plant, which emits half the carbon dioxide of a coal-powered plant and uses a third of the water. After getting a look at the state-of-the-art turbines manufactured by General Electric, I spoke to a Chinese audience about the economic opportunities that come from addressing the challenges of climate change. Their government had begun making huge investments in clean energy, especially in solar and wind, but was refusing to commit to any binding international agreements on emissions. Todd spent many hours then and later trying to convince them to change their minds.
Our early focus on China was no accident. Thanks to its tremendous economic growth over the past decade, China was quickly becoming the world’s largest overall emitter of greenhouse gases. (Chinese officials were always quick to point out that their country’s per capita emission rate still lagged far behind that of the industrialized West, particularly the United States. Although on that score, too, they are rapidly catching up.) China was also the largest and most influential of a new group of regional and global powers, including Brazil, India, Indonesia, Turkey, and South Africa, who were gaining international clout more for their expanding economies than their military might. Their cooperation would be essential for any comprehensive agreement on climate change.
Each in its own way, these countries were grappling with the implications of their growing weight and influence. For example, China had moved hundreds of millions of people out of poverty since Deng Xiaoping opened it to the world in 1978, but in 2009, 100 million people still lived on less than a dollar per day. The Communist Party’s commitment to raising incomes and decreasing poverty relied on increasing industrial output. That posed a stark choice: Could China afford to tackle climate change while so many millions were still so poor? Could it follow a different development path, relying on more efficient and renewable energy, that would still decrease poverty? China was not the only nation struggling with this question. When you govern a country that has deep inequalities and poverty, it’s understandable to believe you can’t afford to restrain your growth just because 19th- and 20th-century industrial powers polluted their way to prosperity. If India could improve the lives of millions of its citizens by accelerating industrial growth, how could it afford to choose a different path? The answers given by these countries as to whether they would be part of combating climate change, even though they hadn’t caused it, would determine the success or failure of our diplomacy.
With this in mind, T
odd and I went together to India in the summer of 2009. After proudly showing us around one of the greenest buildings near Delhi and offering me a flowered garland, Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh surprised us during our public speeches by throwing down a rhetorical gauntlet. Taking steps to address climate change should be the responsibility of wealthy countries like the United States, he declared, not emerging powers like India that had more pressing domestic challenges to worry about. In our private conversation, Ramesh reiterated that India’s per capita emissions were below that of developed countries, and he argued that there was no legitimate basis for international pressure being put on India in the run-up to Copenhagen.
But it was a stubborn fact that it would be impossible to stop the rise in global temperatures if these rapidly developing countries insisted on playing by the old rules and pumping massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. Even if the United States somehow reduced our emissions all the way to zero tomorrow, total global levels still would be nowhere near where they need to be if China, India, and others failed to contain their own emissions. What’s more, the same poor people the Indian Minister was concerned about helping would be the ones most vulnerable to the ravages of climate change. So in my response to his comments I said that the United States would do its part to develop clean technologies that would drive economic growth and fight poverty while also reducing emissions. But, I emphasized, it was crucial for the whole world to embrace this as a shared mission and responsibility. This was a debate that would continue in the following months, shape the negotiating positions when countries gathered for the UN’s climate conference in Denmark that December, and provoke the secret meeting the President and I crashed.
Hard Choices Page 62
