Ultimatum

by Matthew Glass

  It was the time it had taken. That was the thing he found most discouraging. Three months since the negotiators had gone to Oslo. Three months just to get to a breakdown. It wasn’t long, he knew, by the standards of these things—in fact, incredibly fast—but an eternity in the face of the urgency he felt. The hurricane season was well under way, and in the past two weeks alone he had toured scenes of devastation on both the Florida and Lousiana coasts. There would be more of that, he knew, this year, and next year, and every year after that until those coasts were abandoned. And now three months of hard, painful work had gone up in smoke. If they had to start again, how many more months would it take? Joe Benton felt sick at the thought of it.

  He had tried to call the Chinese president, but Wen wouldn’t make himself available. He had also refused to see F. William Knight.

  Now the entire Marion group was squeezed into the president’s study at the ranch to figure out what to do next.

  “I want to be clear one last time,” said the president. “There’s no way this could have been a mistake? There’s no way Ding could have genuinely thought he was coming to negotiate?”

  Lisle shook his head.

  “And we have absolutely no reason to imagine Ding would have gone freelance on something like this?”

  “We have no indication of anything going on in the Politburo,” said Oliver Wu. “I’ve spoken with people at State and at the Agency and they have no indication of anything significant under way. The Chinese hierarchy is incredibly sensitive to even minor shifts in power. Wen’s not taking any kind of action against Ding, so even if Ding did go freelance, Wen’s approved it.”

  Olsen nodded. “Before or after the fact, it doesn’t really matter.”

  There was silence.

  “I should meet him,” said the president.

  “Who? Wen?” Olsen’s face was incredulous. “With respect, sir, he won’t even take your call.”

  “I’m sure I can talk to him.”

  “Mr. President!” Larry Olsen stopped himself, took a breath. “Mr. President,” he began again, “with respect, sir, you seem to be trying to find a way to exonerate President Wen. Don’t do that. Wen wanted this to happen. If you feel like someone’s kicked you in the gut, that’s exactly what he wants you to feel. Wen knows what he’s doing. This way, when he comes back for more, he figures he’ll get a better deal.”

  “Larry,” said the president quietly, “you’ve told me that already.”

  “Sir, with all respect, you’re making the mistake of thinking Wen’s like you. That he thinks like you, that he has the same values as you. He doesn’t. Ask Alan. I know we don’t agree on a lot of things, but I bet we’ll agree on this.”

  Ball didn’t respond. Silence was about as close as he could bring himself to saying he agreed with Larry Olsen.

  “Democratic leaders. . .” Olsen shook his head, as if he was almost too exasperated to speak. “Sir, democratic leaders always make this mistake when faced with authoritarians. It’s classic, all the way back to Hitler and appeasement. Democrats think authoritarians think like them, so they’ll back down. Authoritarians think democrats don’t have the cojones to do anything, so they don’t back down. Before you know it, it takes a war for each side to find out the other was wrong.”

  “Larry,” said the president. “Don’t say things like that.”

  There was a troubled silence in the room.

  “All right,” said Eales. “Let’s look at this more objectively. There are two possibilities here. One is that Wen never intended to do this deal. He’s pushed us as hard as he could to see where he can get us to, and now he’s found out. If that’s the case, he’ll probably come back at some point and try to use that to get what he really wants, like Larry says. Second possibility is that he thought he could do a deal and then he found out he couldn’t sell it to his base.

  “And the third possibility,” said Oliver Wu, “is that we’re not even dealing with President Wen, or at least not only with him. He may no longer be in control of this process.”

  “Is there anyway of knowing that?” asked Benton.

  “Not that I can see, sir. Not at present.”

  “So let’s work with what we do know,” said Eales. “Either Wen never intended to cut a deal, or he decided in the end he couldn’t sell it. If he decided he couldn’t sell it, don’t we have to ask ourselves what we can do to help him sell it?”

  “I believe he told us,” said Olsen.

  “Then we may have to think about giving it to him,” said Pete Lisle.

  “No.” Olsen was adamant. “You cannot do business like this, and Wen’s smart enough to know it. This whole deal is about trust, trusting the other party that over five, ten years they’re going to do what they say. Trusting them, by the way, to put in a verification mechanism they couldn’t even agree to already. You cannot agree to a deal like this and then send someone and say at the last minute, oh, by the way, how about giving us Taiwan as well. Even if we did want to give them the go-ahead on Taiwan—and that’s absolutely impossible—you don’t do it like that, you don’t hold everything hostage to it at the very end. It destroys trust. And you know what? It’s destroyed my trust!”

  It wasn’t doing much for Joe Benton’s trust either. He had genuinely liked Wen when he met him at the G9. The Chinese leader was humorous, personable, intelligent. He had seemed to understand the historic importance of what they were doing. Now he seemed crafty. Joe Benton was beginning to feel that Wen had made a fool of him. More than that. He felt a sense of almost personal betrayal.

  “Maybe Wen had no choice,” said Hoffman. “Ding could have threatened—”

  “Please!” said Olsen. “I’m sorry, Ben, but I’m getting sick of this let’s-find-excuses-for-President-Wen society we’ve got going here. Yes, it’s possible he wanted to do a deal and then found he couldn’t unless he got Taiwan as well, but chances are he didn’t. And if we said yes to Taiwan, what he’s going to come back with next? Maybe we’d still have to readjust the formula. And then what? Maybe he’d like us to shut down a bunch of Internet sites like he does it at home. Why don’t we just go ahead and do that for him right now? Look, he’s pushed us as far as we’d go, and that was always his intention. He’s going to come back at some point and start from this position and ask for more, and he thinks he’ll get it because we don’t have the stomach to go through the same thing again. That’s what he’s done. When are we going to hold this man to account?”

  “We can’t give any more,” said the President.

  “He won’t believe that. He’ll play for time, wear you down. He’s taken four months by doing this, moved us to a position, and still been the one to walk away. He’ll see that as a victory.”

  The frustration of the last three incomprehensible days welled up in Joe Benton. “Where’s the victory? Another four months gone with no action! Four months when we could have done something.”

  Olsen leaned forward in his seat. “Mr. President, please, you must stop thinking he thinks like you.”

  “He’s not a monster.”

  “I’m not saying he’s a monster. I’m not saying he’s good or bad. It’s not a value judgment. It’s a fact, he has different priorities. That’s what’s motivating him. From his perspective, everything he does is making sense. We’ve got to see this from inside his head. No matter how likable he is when he talks to you, Wen is not going to risk the party. Nor would any other Chinese leader, by the way. You might be prepared to risk your chances at the next election to get a deal like this done, Mr. President, but whatever he’s really thinking, I can tell you one thing—Frankie Wen ain’t risking a revolution.”

  Joe Benton shook his head. He gazed out the window. Over the course of his years in public life, he thought he had developed a pretty good knack of understanding the way other people saw the world. The deals he had cut in the Senate wouldn’t have happened if hadn’t been able to see things from the other person’s point of view. But those year
s had been devoted to domestic political issues, with domestic politicians. Maybe he really was falling into the trap Olsen was talking about.

  And was Wen even in charge on this? That was a whole different question, and Benton found it intensely troubling. If Wen wasn’t in charge, who was calling the shots?

  “All right,” he said eventually. “What do I do?”

  “By not taking your call, and by refusing to see Knight,” said Ball, “President Wen has sent a very clear message that he wants to leave this for a while.”

  “How long?”

  “I don’t know. We need to respect what he’s saying.”

  “To hell with that!” said Olsen.

  “We can’t leave it,” said Benton.

  “He can.” Olsen prodded the air forcefully. “Mr. President, you’ve hit the nail on the head. He can, you can’t, and he knows it. That’s what he’s just shown you. And when he’s sure the message has sunk in, then he’s going to come back for more.”

  “Your view is so simplistic,” muttered Ball. “So black and white.”

  “In the meantime,” added Olsen, ignoring him, “maybe he turns up the heat on you as well. Get the Taiwan lobby going again. Maybe get the China lobby going.”

  “Mr. President,” said Ben Hoffman. “I agree with Alan. I think we’re going to have to leave him for a while. We’re pursuing him too hard. We’re just going to drive him away.”

  Ball turned his eyes to the ceiling. “Thank you! Finally! A word of sense. The more we say we want to progress this now, the more he’ll hold back.”

  “No no no no no!” cried Olsen. “For once, let’s do what we want. Let’s be the ones who set the agenda.”

  “Isn’t that what we were doing in Oslo?” snapped Ball.

  “Does Tuesday seem like it was what we were doing in Oslo? Wen wants to let it rest. Fine, let’s not let him rest.”

  “And how exactly do we do that? You want the president to go crawling to Beijing?”

  “Sure I do,” said Olsen sarcastically. He gave Ball a scathing look, then turned to the president. “We’ve spent eight months now, one way and another, talking to the Chinese, trying to get them to play ball. Our timetable has been determined by them, by their willingness to engage. All the way, the only weapon we’ve had is the implicit threat that if they don’t play ball, we’re going to do something. Well, you know what? They don’t want to play ball. That’s what this whole process in Oslo was about, and now we’ve got to the bottom of it. They do not want to play ball. So it’s time to make good on our threat.”

  “Which is what exactly?” said Eales.

  “We have to do something. Something that says, we’re not sticking to your timetable, we’ve got our own. And not behind closed doors. When they gave those contracts to the Europeans, it wasn’t just some speech they gave behind closed doors. It was real. The rationale might have been secret, but the action was public. They’re in breach of a hundred trade agreements and intellectual property agreements. We don’t even need to make a new case. Let’s just do it!”

  “Mr. President, this is not the right thing,” said Ball. “President Wen has sent a clear message that he wants to let this settle for a while and we’re not going help things by trying to push him. It’ll just entrench him.”

  “Then we’ve got to dig him out.”

  “Mr. President, this kind of thinking isn’t going to get us anywhere.”

  “You call where we are somewhere?” demanded Olsen. “Look where we are, Alan. We act now or we can forget it.”

  “Mr. President, this is a mistake. If we wait on this, in three months, six months, you may well find President Wen is coming back to you with some idea of his own and then you’ll be in a much stronger position to drive the process and you’ll avoid this confrontationalism.”

  “Six months?” said Olsen. “Twelve months? Eighteen months? Jesus Christ! How long do we wait for Wen Guojie to decide to put on his party dress again?”

  “Why?” shot back Ball. “Can’t you wait to go to the prom?”

  “All right, that’s enough!” The president looked at Olsen and Ball. “Hell’s bells, you guys! You have got to learn to work together.”

  There was silence. Ben Hoffman and Jackie Rubin exchanged a glance.

  Joe Benton was aware of the anger within himself over the sense that Wen had made a fool of him. It would be easy to strike back impulsively with some kind of retaliation, as Olsen was suggesting. Maybe striking back was the right thing to do, but if he was going to do it, it had to be for cool, strategic reasons, not out of anger. And it was hard for Benton to believe that really was the right direction to take, that between two world leaders, between two grown men of any type, demand and counterdemand, strike and counterstrike, could ever be the answer.

  He turned to Ball. “Alan,” he said. “Convince me. If I wait, what’s the best that happens?”

  “Wen comes back and says he’s ready to do the deal.”

  “The same deal?”

  “Possibly. Maybe by then we can figure out if there’s some way we can help him sell it.”

  Olsen rolled his eyes.

  Ball saw him. “I’m not saying Taiwan! I’m just saying, when he comes back, and he’s had time to think about it, maybe there’s something more reasonable we can work out.”

  “How long does it take for him to come back?” asked Benton.

  Ball shrugged. “I don’t think it’ll be that long.”

  “How long is that?”

  “There’s no way of knowing, sir.”

  Benton nodded. In his mind, an image came back of the wreckage he had seen along the Louisiana coast the previous week, a sodden, stinking street lined with houses that the hurricane had reduced to splinters. Further down the street, out of range of the cameras that were filming him, he had caught sight of a drowned dog bloating in the sun. He thought of the people he had met who were being housed communally in municipal halls upstate, people who told him they had been driven out of their homes two, three, four times in the past fifteen years, people who couldn’t bear the thought of rebuilding only to be driven out again, who said they wouldn’t go back even if it was only to wait for the relocation program to resettle them.

  He shook his head. “You know, Alan, I just don’t think that’s good enough.”

  ~ * ~

  Tuesday, September 6

  Gale Rove Auditorium, San Diego

  Sam Levy stood in the wings. From here, he could see the president as Joe Benton stepped forward to the lectern. Jodie Ames was in the wings as well, along with Connor Gale and a half dozen other aides and assistants. Sam could feel Jodie glancing at him. Of all the people looking on, only he knew what the president was about to say.

  He hadn’t found out until a couple of hours previously, on the plane. The president hadn’t asked him to prepare a draft or even write a line. In fact, until three days before, Benton hadn’t even been scheduled to appear at this conference, which was a meeting of leading environmental experts as one of the preliminaries to the opening of the Kyoto 4 agenda talks in Bangkok in November. Until the president had himself included in the schedule, Andrea Powers was slated to speak for the administration. And then Benton had asked Levy to come on the trip, and it was only when they were airborne that he had called Sam into his office and shared with him the draft of his speech and asked Sam to work on it with him, and Levy had discovered what was going on.

  Jodie Ames was still in the dark about it. Now, as they waited for the president to begin, she gave Levy one last, intense, questioning glance.

  Then Benton began, and they both turned to watch him.

  The president opened by saying that he wanted to confirm the United States’ commitment to the Kyoto process. Then he paused. If he was going to do that, it would have to be a Kyoto process that was different to that which had come before. Not an ever-extending round of piecemeal cuts, but a single, final, decisive round, which would face up to the full magnitude of the proble
ms the world faced and deal with them responsibly, not defer them for the next round of piecemeal cuts, and the next round, and the round that came after that.

  Sam nodded as the president said it. It was a recurrent theme that Benton had worked into the speech, piecemeal cuts, and Sam had given him an obvious phrase toward the end that would help it stick.