Ultimatum

by Matthew Glass

  “Yes, Mr. President,” said Gale. “May I?” He turned on the screen set into the panel opposite the president’s sofa. MacMaster and Levy had to move aside so the president could see it.

  Connor logged into the FoxBloomberg website. A reporter was on the screen with a skyline of towers behind her. The footer on the screen said Shanghai.

  The reporter was in midsentence, saying something incredulous about the sheer volume of business that was included in the memorandums of understanding that had been signed.

  The screen cut to the FoxBloomberg anchor in New York. “And all of this out of the blue, Melanie?”

  Back to Shanghai. “Not exactly, Pete. These contracts have been under negotiation for some months, but my sources tell me that a major push to get these matters settled has been on for the last couple of weeks, culminating in this marathon session that apparently started before the weekend and lasted all the way into Wednesday. Pete.”

  “What’s the broader implication of this? Forty-nine billion dollars of business wrapped up in one big package. Can you remember anything like it, Melanie?”

  “Pete, to be honest, I can’t. What the implications are . . .” On screen, Melanie shrugged. “I guess an awful lot of people will be pondering that today. But there’s one thing I will say. There’s going to be a lot of happy companies out there after this morning, Pete.”

  “And all of them in Europe, apparently. Thanks, Melanie. That was Melanie Chu in Shanghai reporting on the announcement today of a mammoth package of contracts awarded by the Chinese Ministry of Trade, including power plants, aircraft, heavy engineering and a new high-speed rail link out of Shanghai. At the moment, we don’t have exact numbers, but we understand the value of the deals is in the region of forty-nine billion dollars, which we are informed would comfortably make it the largest single trade package ever agreed. A joint press conference is scheduled with the Chinese minister of trade and his counterparts from the UK and the leading EuroCore countries, who flew to Shanghai overnight when it became clear the package was going ahead. We’ll be going live to that conference when it takes place a couple of hours from now. But first, what’s gone wrong? How could it be that not a single American company succeeded in getting a share of this business? What has our government been doing? To discuss this, I’m joined by Ed Logan from the Brookings Institute and Harry Birnbaum from Goldman Morgan. Gentlemen, who’s to blame?”

  “Turn it off,” said the president.

  Gale logged off the stream.

  “Tell Mr. Hoffman I’ll call him as soon as I get a chance.”

  “Yes, sir. Anything else?”

  “Not right now. Tell him I’m busy.”

  Gale went out.

  There was silence. Jodie Ames exchanged a glance with John Eales.

  “Let’s go,” said the president, waving the speech.

  When they were finished, Sam Levy headed out to work up the final draft. The others left the office as well. John Eales stayed behind.

  Connor Gale put his head around the door. “We’ve had calls from Dr. Ball and Secretary Sellers, sir.”

  “I’ll get to them.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Gale, and closed the door again.

  The president nodded at the screen, now blank. “What do you make of that?”

  “I think Mr. Chen just gave us our answer,” said Eales.

  “Yeah, I think so too.” Benton hit a button on his desk console. “Can you get me Mr. Hoffman?”

  A moment later Hoffman was on the line.

  “Ben,” said the president, “I’ve got John here. We both think this is a reply from Chen.”

  “I’ve spoken to Paul Sellers,” said Hoffman. “We were on track for half those contracts as late as last week.”

  “What time is it in Shanghai, anyway?”

  “Right now, it would be about eight in the morning,” said Eales.

  “So they must have announced it around seven? What kind of time is that for an announcement?”

  “Apparently they’ve been negotiating all night,” said Hoffman. “I think someone leaked. They were going to announce formally at this press conference they’ve got organized.”

  “Okay, Ben. Let me know if you find out anything else.”

  Hoffman went offline. Benton sat back on the sofa. “They’ve called our bluff, right?”

  Eales nodded. “We threaten sanctions, they announce fifty billion dollars worth of deals with Europe. They’ll all be conditional. None of these deals will go ahead if the Europeans join us in any kind of sanctions.”

  “They should have known something’s going on.”

  “Who?”

  “The Europeans.”

  Eales laughed.

  Joe Benton shook his head. “Hell’s bells, John! How did we miss this? We should have known we had this much business at stake. How come we didn’t see this coming?”

  “We did. It’s in Alan’s paper as one of the possible measures the Chinese might take. He’ll tell you as soon as you talk to him.”

  “Great.” There were a hundred things in that paper. This would give Ball ammunition in the war that was obviously developing between him and Larry Olsen. Benton was seriously beginning to wonder whether it would be possible to keep both men in his administration.

  “Joe, in principle this doesn’t change anything. You figured the Europeans weren’t going to come on board. Now you know for sure.”

  “Yeah, but now I’ll have half American business baying for my blood.”

  “They were going to start baying sometime.”

  “I don’t need it now.” Benton was silent. “I would not have figured...” He shook his head disbelievingly. “I wouldn’t have figured they’d come back so hard. We only talked about sanctions. It was only supposed to be a general warning.”

  “Maybe Olsen went further.”

  “No. Ben was there. Hell’s bells! It’s a damned aggressive thing to do. It’s like a punch in the face.”

  “Joe, we can use this if we want. Start painting the Chinese in the kind of colors we want to paint them in. Unfair, discriminatory in trade matters. We could use this as a reason to escalate action. If we’re going to have to do it, like Larry says, then we’re just going to have to do it. May as well start.”

  Benton frowned. “I’ll say one thing. This is a smart move. The ball’s back in our court. If we don’t do something, they figure they’ve won, right? And we’re finished. That’s it, for the rest of my presidency.”

  “A month or two in I don’t think you can say anything’s finished for the duration.”

  “No, I think Larry’s right about one thing. We don’t do anything now, the more we have to do later to convince them we’re serious. That’s exactly what they’re saying to us. We know you can deal with the hundred-pound weaklings, now can you mix it with the big boys?” Benton shook his head in frustration. “Damn!”

  Eales looked at his watch. “I’ll tell Jodie to put together a communication strategy. We’ll seek clarification, we’ll defend U.S. interests, we’ll review contracts in process with Chinese companies . . .”

  “Make sure she talks to Paul. Make sure he’s in the loop.

  “I’ll talk to him as well. And to Alan.”

  “I’m going to talk to Ogilvie,” said Benton. “See what he knows.”

  “Yeah, well, sounded like the Brits got a chunk of that business as well.”

  Joe Benton stood up. He looked out the window. It must be Idaho down there, he thought, or maybe they were already over Washington State. Thirty-five thousand feet below, through breaks in the cloud cover, he could see patches of green. He knew what he was going to have to face now, the right-wing press, business groups, congresspeople with affected districts all screaming and complaining. All of it way out of proportion. It wasn’t just a smart move by the Chinese, it was a stroke of genius. Put pressure on him in a way that was exquisitely effective against an American president, without revealing anything publicly of the cause. />
  It was as if he could feel—literally feel—the heat of a brewing crisis coming all the way up at him from thirty-five thousand feet below.

  Behind him, Eales got to his feet. “Joe, I’ll deal with this now. Jodie and I will get on it. Today’s about education. You need to give some time to Hilary. I’ll go get her.”

  Benton nodded. Eales went out.

  A moment later the secretary of education came in.

  Joe Benton turned to her. His face cracked in his trademark smile.

  ~ * ~

  Sunday, March 20

  Benton Ranch, Wickenberg, Arizona

  He could still smell the smoke. Days earlier, spring wildfire had swept from Mexico into southern California, which was in its fourth year of drought. From San Diego up to San Marcos and inland to Julian, a million and a half people had been evacuated, and at the height of the crisis the fleet in port at Naval Base San Diego had put to sea. The fire service had been joined by hundreds of volunteers to battle the blazes. Joe and Heather Benton had toured the area with Mary Okoro, California state governor, and Lou Katz, director of the Federal Emergency Response Authority. They helicoptered over a blackened landscape, where the remains of destroyed homes still smouldered. Fourteen firefighters were dead. Benton talked to their comrades, so exhausted they could barely stand. In the emergency centers, he and Heather visited with families who didn’t know if they had a home to go back to. A child who had nothing but the clothes he wore wept over a lost dog, and in front of the cameras Joe Benton knelt to comfort him. At the foot of a hillside of charred stumps he pledged federal funds for emergency relief and reconstruction. But in his heart, he knew that reconstruction would be temporary. The desertification of southern California was irreversible. The full Relocation that was coming would sweep these people away.

  And still the furor over the Chinese business contracts went on. Every special interest group in the business sector was squealing. Andrew Tollson, head of the American Business Forum, had described Joe Benton as the worst president for American business since Herbert Hoover. The right-wing press seemed to find a sadistic pleasure in repeating it.

  His schedule was upside down. There wasn’t time for him to have a day at the ranch on the way back east to Washington. He told Ben Hoffman to make the time.

  He needed to think, to get out into the brush on one of his horses, into the ruggedness, the vastness, with the smudges of the Bradshaws rising in the distance. He needed to pull himself out of the detail and think about the big things, remember what they were, remember why he had even wanted the job he was doing. Even if it was only for a few hours. And even if he was never quite alone, and a Secret Service SUV or an agent on horseback was always somewhere in the corner of his vision, like a reminder of the morass of overwhelming detail that wasn’t gone, just momentarily forgotten.

  So many things seemed to be coming at him, had been from before his inauguration. Some big, some small, the media didn’t care as long as they had something to fling at him. The worked-up outrage over Heather’s decision to keep her job, the attack over Montera. Now the siege at Whitefish had dragged into its fifth week and was heading for who-knew-what-kind of resolution. Activity against U.S. troops in Colombia had increased as a challenge from the insurgents to test his resolve, and had pushed the casualty rate to more than twice the average of the past couple of years. The Republicans had seized on a statement by a newly appointed Justice Department official about federal prison release policy—the kind of poorly judged, ambiguous statement that inevitably gets made by someone in a new administration and which has to be retracted three hours later—to run a scare campaign and try to pass a House resolution condemning the administration’s prisons policy. It was one thing after another. Where was the perspective? Four years of drought in southern California, that was important. People whose houses had burned down and who were camping out in a shelter, that was important. The New Foundation program that he and Angela Chavez and the rest of the administration were trying to put in place, that was important. Compared with that, who cared about a slip of the tongue by a junior official?

  And yet he knew he ought to be grateful, because the media didn’t know about the biggest thing. Joe Benton felt his presidency was in crisis. Not because of all the little things that kept getting thrown at him. They were par for the course for any president. And not even because of the hate and anger that were being turned on him after the loss of the Chinese contracts. But because of what lay behind the loss of those contracts, the limitation of his ability to exert U.S. influence on the international stage.

  People sensed the Chinese government had challenged him when it awarded those contracts to Europeans, but no one outside the Marion group could put their finger on what the challenge was about. Yet the Chinese government knew, of course. If he allowed that challenge to pass, he would be beaten. His ability to exert influence with the Chinese regime would be gone. That would soon become evident to other countries. And once it was evident that he couldn’t exert influence with China, the only other country on the planet with a claim to be a superpower, his ability to exert influence with anyone would go the same way.

  He had got hold of a copy of James Alderson’s study of the Bay of Pigs and read it on the flight into Phoenix. That was the analogy that immediately sprang to his mind. Within three months of taking office, Kennedy had been publicly beaten, humiliated, and discredited—far more publicly and more comprehensively than had happened to him—yet had recovered and gone on to exert considerable international influence. But there was an important difference. In the Cold War World of the 1960s, there was a hunger for American leadership against the Communist bloc. Kennedy stepped into that role and, despite his humbling over the Bay of Pigs, made it his own through his handling of the Cuban missile crisis eighteen months later. Seventy years on, in Joe Benton’s world, there was no hunger for American leadership. Anything the United States proposed was going to meet with skepticism. Add a lack of credibility in exerting American influence, and it was going to be met with derision.

  He read Alderson’s account carefully. Kennedy had gone with a plan the CIA had already prepared. It chimed with his instincts, and he didn’t know enough to say no. He, Joe Benton, hadn’t gone with a plan from the previous administration. It was his own plan. So the responsibility, in that sense, was more squarely on his shoulders than it had been on Kennedy’s.

  Two months after his inauguration, his power on the global stage was potentially shot. That had to be his fault. The buck had to stop with him. What he needed to understand now was how it could have happened. And what, if anything, he could do to rescue the situation.

  He rode slowly along the horse track above the house. He had taken out a chestnut mare called Martha. It was the first time Joe Benton had been back to the ranch since the inauguration. A crisp spring wind blew in his face. As he rode, he glimpsed spring wildflowers, pink verbenas and yellow poppies, scattered through the brush. He thought of the fire survivors he had seen the previous day. Exhausted, bewildered, scared.

  He turned his mind back to his predicament. How had he got to where he was? Two things came to mind. First, he had acted unilaterally. He hadn’t tried to build an international consensus. But for what? He hadn’t planned on doing anything yet. That led to the second thing. He had made a threat of sanctions—even if only a veiled threat—sanctions that he himself hadn’t yet identified or figured out how he was going to implement. Perhaps a smarter man, a wiser man, would have realized you couldn’t act so quickly and so much alone. Perhaps if he was in the third year of his administration, and not the first, he would have acted differently.

  But there was another point there. He hadn’t actually decided to use sanctions. He had simply agreed that Olsen could raise the prospect with Chen. That was a failure of process. If he had forced himself to make an explicit decision to use them, the debate leading up to that decision would surely have been more robust, more searching, the implications more caref
ully considered. The decision to drop a hint to Chen, if he still had made it, would have been made with a greater awareness of what might happen next and greater care in timing and preparation.

  But would he really not have made it? Would the decision have been any different?

  Anyway, that was done. The question now was whether he wanted to escalate. Whether he had to escalate. Or could he back down? How much of his credit with the Chinese had he really blown?

  He could make the visit to Beijing, as the Chinese were suggesting. See what would come of that. That was what Alan Ball was proposing.

  But not Larry Olsen. Olsen had managed to find a way of claiming the contracts debacle as a success. Benton had to admire his chutzpah, if nothing else. According to Olsen, they had flushed the Chinese out, discovered how aggressive they were prepared to be—very—and now they knew the kind of game they would have to play. If losing the jobs that would go with forty-nine billion dollars of business was a success, Benton didn’t want to see what Larry Olsen would count as a failure.