“How do you take it?”
“Water.”
Benton went to the bar and poured two scotches. He handed one to Olsen. Then he sat down.
“Cheers.”
Olsen raised his glass.
Benton took a sip and savored it contemplatively. According to the briefing he had been given, Larry Olsen was an old State Department hand, fluent in Mandarin, ex-undersecretary of state for China, and with coverage of other Asian desks in the course of his career. For the last four years he had been teaching at Yale.
“You like teaching?” he said to Olsen.
“Not particularly.”
Benton smiled. “I had one year at Arizona State. I’ve had some bad years, but that was a bad one.”
“It has its compensations.”
“Like what?”
“It’s a job.”
Benton laughed. “Why’d you leave the State Department?”
“Let’s just say I didn’t see eye to eye with all the people who mattered.”
That’s what Joe Benton had heard. And that Olsen had a habit of getting under the skin of his superiors, which Benton could believe after only two minutes in the same room with him. But also that he was very smart, decisive, able to get stuff done and with a peculiar ability to gain the loyalty of the people who reported to him.
Benton liked him. Instinctively. And yet he felt in Olsen’s case that was something he needed to guard against.
“You come highly recommended,” he said.
“As what?”
“Why don’t you tell me?”
“Look, Senator,” said Olsen, “I’m flattered to be asked down to talk to you, I really am. But I don’t think you really want to hear the kinds of things I have to say. Your position is more, let’s say, inward-looking. This country’s foreign involvements are a background, if you will.”
“I’m not sure that’s right,” said Benton. “I can see why you might say that. It’s a matter of degree. Primarily, I see this country’s foreign policy as a means of creating the best conditions for prosperity within the United States. You could say that’s pretty limited. But in our global world, I don’t underestimate how much influence conditions abroad have on prosperity within this country. I don’t underestimate how important—from a domestic perspective—it is to do the right thing in relation to our friends and allies. And our enemies, I might add. So I think you can come at it from one direction or you can come at it from the other, but fundamentally, I don’t think it makes too much difference.”
“I think there is a difference.”
“Perhaps. Some. I’m no expert, Dr. Olsen.”
“If we don’t lead, Senator, we will be led. Therefore we must lead.”
“Again, agreed. There are different ways of leading, though, don’t you think?”
“Only if they achieve the necessary effect.”
Benton looked at the other man with interest. “Is that important to you? Having an effect?”
“What else is diplomacy for?”
Benton shook his head. “You must sure as hell hate teaching.”
For the first time, Olsen smiled. Ruefully.
“Tell me more about yourself,” said Benton.
Olsen did. He kept the detail sparse.
“You know Alan Ball?” asked Benton.
“Sure, I know Alan.”
“What do you think of him?”
“Alan’s got a fine mind. Always makes a good contribution. I don’t often agree with him. His outlook is probably more in keeping with where you’re coming from. I heard you’ve got him down for national security advisor.”
Benton didn’t respond to that.
“I understand you’re announcing some nominations tomorrow.”
“The economic team. The security posts are taking a little longer.”
“Well, I’m sure Alan will do a fine job.” Olsen took another sip of his scotch.
“Can I top you up?” said Benton. “Go ahead. Do it yourself.”
Olsen got up and poured himself more whiskey. Benton watched him.
“You ever read Machiavelli?” asked the senator.
“Sure,” said Olsen, sitting down. “When I was a freshman.”
“What happens if I surround myself with people who all think like me?”
“You’ll probably have very harmonious meetings.”
The senator laughed. “Good answer.”
Olsen put down his glass. “Senator, I think the secretary of state you’re looking for—if you asked me here to get my opinion, if that’s what this is about—is someone who’s going to be content to see this country play a largely reactive role. My sense is your administration is going to be highly focused on domestic issues, and your secretary of state is going to have to look at foreign policy through that prism. In other words, I don’t think he’s going to have a very strong voice within the administration. I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be telling you what you’re going to be doing, that’s just how it looks to me. Personally, I think that’s a great mistake, particularly at this time in history. In fact, at any time in history. It also won’t make it much fun to be running State. But I’m biased. I’m a State guy. I’m going to say that, aren’t I?”
Benton was silent for a moment. “Tell me something,” he said.
“What?”
“Anything. Colombia. What do I do with Colombia? How do I get out? How quick do I push?”
“Colombia’s not important,” replied Olsen.
“Except that we have four House resolutions in the past three years calling for a pullout.”
“That’s exactly what I mean,” said Olsen. “The House passing resolutions is a domestic issue, and the only reason you’d respond to that is if you want the House’s support for domestic reasons. If you want to pull out of Colombia because of domestic pressures, that’s fine. But that’s a different question. That’s not a question of foreign policy. That’s not what you want State taking into account.”
“What do I want State taking into account?”
“State should be considering the geostrategic context and the implications of action, or lack of action, on the ability of the United States to achieve its objectives both in Colombia, the region, and in other parts of the world. Senator, if you want my personal opinion, here it is. Colombia is of no genuine geostrategic interest to anybody except us. We were invited in by their government as a means of dealing with a decades-old insurgency. That may have been a pretext Bill Shawcross chose to exploit, or even helped create, but there it is. Last time I heard, President Lobinas was still asking us to stay. Now, the truth is, Colombia is a failing state, and probably will fail if and when we pull out. In the meantime, our personnel suffer very low attrition—unfortunate, but we can absorb it—and we reduce the flow of cocaine into the United States by three-fourths. This is not an urgent issue for resolution. I wouldn’t expend an ounce of our credibility on it.”
“Except that every time we talk to anyone about their human rights situation—the Chinese, the Russians—they tell us to get out of Colombia before we come preaching to them.”
“But they’re not analogous situations. We’re not abusing human rights in Colombia the way China and Russia abuse the rights of their own citizens. We’re not even an occupying power. We’re not there in defiance of the local government. On the contrary, the local government invited us to come in.”
“But other countries still use it against us.”
“Correct, but the very fact that they use this—which is a nonanalogous situation—just shows that they use it because they need something to use against us. Anything. Pull out of Colombia and it’ll be something else.
“So you’re saying I do nothing about Colombia?”
“Senator, you asked me for a State Department opinion. You may have domestic reasons to do something about it. That’s why you’re the president, so you can balance all those things together. If you have domestic reasons, and if those reasons are good enough, yo
u’d have to act.”
“But if I don’t, I do nothing?”
“On the contrary. Ideally, I don’t want American soldiers dying in Colombia any more than you do. Here’s what you do. In the first instance, you do stay in Colombia, because the interdiction of supply to cocaine is worth the price we’re paying militarily. But you also lean hard on Bolivia and Peru to get them to meet their obligations on ending cocaine production and you impose real sanctions if they fail to do so. That’s what finances the insurgency in Colombia, which is what keeps us in there in the first place. We’ve lost sight of that. We’re fighting the snake’s tail. We’re not doing anything about its head.”
Benton was silent for a moment. Then he got up and poured more scotch into his glass. He sat down and took a sip.
Olsen leaned forward in his chair.
“Senator, you want my strategic priorities? One, we need to accept the reality of the Shia alliance and work with its moderate leaders instead of pretending its threat can be dealt with by the relevant states. Two, we need to get Syria and Iraq talking seriously to end their dispute over the Euphrates, and we need to lead a broader water conference in the Middle East. We need to find a way of dealing more effectively with the insurgency in Pakistan and of transitioning from the Badur regime back to a democratic form of government. We also need to give counterinsurgency aid to Indonesia if we want to prevent it becoming the next Pakistan. We need to get the Indians talking with the Bangladeshis, and I believe in the end we will need to provide significant aid for the resettlement of the Bay of Bengal water refugees. Officially, more than eleven million are already in India, and in reality it’s probably more than double that. So if we’re going to have to help, let’s start doing it and not wait for a regional war to break out before we act. We need urgently to strengthen the global quarantine framework. We need to start offering asylum to Russian opposition leaders as a first step to achieving the restoration of meaningful democracy there. And we need to put troops in the Congo and develop a multistate solution to the political breakdown of Central Africa.”
“Why the Congo?”
“The civil war in the Congo has gone on for sixty years. Eighteen million people have died.”
“Granted. On a humanitarian level, I agree. Where’s the U.S. interest?” “The Congo conflict destabilizes the entire central African region. This sends refugees to North Africa, which destabilizes those countries and adds to environmental migration from them toward Europe. This means more refugees crossing the Mediterranean toward Spain, Italy, and Greece, who try to keep them out. This means these southern European countries are effectively fighting a low intensity naval war against civilian populations. Given the populations we’re talking about, this is also a racial war, and the countries prosecuting it are becoming increasingly xenophobic. These countries are our allies. Xenophobic countries do not make good allies for the United States, sir.”
Benton was impressed. He didn’t want to show it. “That’s a wish list,” he said.
“It is for you. For me, it’s a to-do list.”
“Nothing’s a to-do list from Yale, Dr. Olsen,” said Benton pointedly.
Olsen stared at him for a moment, then silently shook his head.
“Tell me about emissions,” said Benton. “You haven’t mentioned that.”
“Your position’s well known on that issue, Senator.”
“You said you were going to tell me your strategic priorities. Isn’t emissions among them?”
“We need to develop a standing mechanism involving ourselves, the EuroCore, Brazil, Russia, India, Japan, and China to controllably reduce them.” Olsen’s tone was mechanical, as if he was saying it for form’s sake, not expecting the senator to agree with any of it. “That puts ninety percent of the world’s emissions on the table.”
“You wouldn’t use Kyoto?”
“I would pull out of Kyoto. I opposed Kyoto 3. It’s no secret. They gave you a briefing about me, didn’t they?”
“You said it was too weak. Maybe we can make Kyoto 4 stronger.”
Olsen shook his head. “Kyoto’s all process. Right now, the illusion that we can solve things through Kyoto is the most dangerous piece of fiction in the world. Someone has to have the courage to kill Kyoto and liberate us from it. I would kill it, day one.”
“And how do you envision that we get to the mechanism you mentioned?”
“Bilateral negotiations with the Chinese. Start there. Once an agreement’s in place, we apply sanctions to those who don’t join. The moral force of the argument will be powerful. The economic force of combined sanctions from the U.S. and China will be irresistible.”
“That only leaves the slight problem of how to get the Chinese to agree.”
“I wouldn’t call it a slight problem, Senator. But they’re going to have to agree one way or another, at some point, whether through Kyoto or another mechanism, so there’s no way of avoiding it, is there? Kyoto doesn’t solve the problem for you—it just puts it into a context that’s a thousand times more complicated.”
Joe Benton didn’t say anything to that. Olsen’s point struck him with a strange force. If Chinese agreement was the sticking point—and it had to be, with China being by far the world’s biggest polluter—somehow it had to be overcome, whatever the framework.
“Senator, we’ve had thirty years of Kyoto treaties. Kyoto itself, then the Copenhagen round, then Santiago. How long do you keep going before you admit a process isn’t working? The people who negotiated that first Kyoto Protocol would not believe the world we live in today. Southern Europe is on its way to becoming a desert. The fire in the Amazon has been burning for the past four years and no one has any idea how to put it out. How much of the Greenland ice pack is left? Every country with a coastline accepts that millions of people are going to have to be moved. Already we’re seeing ethnic conflict over this. That’s the world we live in, Senator. Do you think when they agreed on the first Kyoto Protocol in 1997 they thought this was what they were going to achieve? If those people were here today, do you think they’d count this a success? Senator, those people, if they were around today, would be the first ones to declare the process dead. They’d tell you, Stop! For God’s sake find another way.”
Olsen stopped. He shook his head slightly, as if struggling to contain his exasperation.
“Tell me why you think Kyoto’s been such a problem,” said Benton quietly.
“It gives too much room for cover. Too much diffusion of responsibility. It’s too easy to avoid agreeing any kind of meaningful sanctions. It’s all promises and no way to enforce execution. Senator, you and I differ in outlook. I think multilateral negotiations rarely work, not when we’re talking about something on this scale with so much at stake and so many parties involved.”
“I don’t know if I agree with that. What about the World Trade Organization?”
Olsen smiled, the kind of smile, Benton imagined, he might use in his seminar room at Yale. The senator didn’t much like it.
“The outcomes of the WTO can afford to be imperfect,” said Olsen. “And they are. Very imperfect. But the future of the planet doesn’t depend on them. The analogy here for me isn’t the WTO, it’s the SALT and START treaties between us and the Soviets in the later decades of the last century. Bilateral negotiations on limiting nuclear weapons. Senator, let’s look at history. Why did they work?”
“We were the only countries involved.”
“Not so. A number of other countries possessed nuclear weapons at the time, and had the means to deliver them. The limitation by the two leading exponents created an irresistible pressure on those others to limit proliferation as well, which led to the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty. But would there have been a multilateral test ban agreement without the bilateral treaties between the two global arms leaders to create the imperative? I submit that there would not. The lead shown by the dominant nuclear powers—their ability to do a bilateral deal—was the crucial thing.”
“Every country would have been affected by an outbreak of full-scale nuclear war between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., arguably more severely than climate change will affect them. Would you have invited Fiji to participate in the SALT talks? Would you have restricted yourself to conditions they agreed with?”
Benton didn’t reply. Olsen could see he was listening.
“Look, Senator, you and I and everyone else on the planet know that if you get the top seven polluters agreeing to what needs to be done, the problem’s solved. China, us, India, the EuroCore, Japan, Brazil, and Russia. So why do we go to a conference where we sit down and listen to Malawi tell us what they think we should do? I’m sorry, I’ve never met a Malawian I didn’t like, but that is just not going to work. Now, first thing you do, is you admit the emperor has no clothes. When you see a process that’s busted, you kill it. Then, you start with the top two polluters, and you get agreement with them—and that’s the top two economies in the world—and that unlocks the rest. And if Malawi doesn’t want to play ball, if it won’t cut any of its emissions, you know what, it doesn’t even matter.” Olsen shrugged. “I’m sorry. I know that’s not what you want to hear. It’s only my opinion, but if you can find anything in the history of Kyoto that tells you otherwise, let me know.”
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