Ultimatum

by Matthew Glass

“That’s just nonsense,” said Olsen when he heard what Nleki had proposed. “Al, I thought you said Nleki had an idea.”

  “That was his idea,” said Graham, not looking at the president.

  “Crap!” retorted Olsen. “We met him for that? Where are we on the vote?”

  “I think Japan will abstain,” said Graham. “We’ve got Sri Lanka on our side, maybe Norway.”

  “Norway?”

  “I think they heard about the whales.”

  “And Sri Lanka?” said Benton. “Don’t tell me they hunt whales as well.”

  “No, I think they just don’t want to see their island shrink by a third.”

  “Plus our plan says they cut virtually none of their emissions,” said Eales.

  That was probably it, thought Benton. “We should have twenty percent of the world’s countries on our side on that basis.”

  “Unfortunately, they don’t sit on the Security Council.” Graham paused. “Mr. President, really, I don’t see why you won’t consider what the secretary-general said.”

  “Here’s why we won’t consider it,” came Olsen’s voice out of the speaker. “What we’ve put out is the bare minimum. We go back into discussion, what will we be talking about? What can we change?”

  “Al, I said I would consider it,” said Benton quietly.

  “Mr. President!”

  “It’s the way we’ve done it,” said Graham.

  “The way we’ve done it is why it’s worked!” said Olsen.

  “Everyone’s excluded. If we’re going to get agreement, everyone has to feel involved.”

  “Everyone’s been involved for forty years, Al, since the very first Kyoto! And where the hell are we?”

  “Well, I think there’s a case. Mr. President, let’s go back into Kyoto now, and maybe you do bring people on board who can’t find their way to side with us when we’re so unilateralist.”

  “Go back into Kyoto now,” said Olsen, “and everything goes back to just the way it was before.”

  “Maybe we’ll have to give on a couple of things.”

  “I cannot believe I’m hearing this! Mr. Pres—”

  “It might be worth it,” said Graham. “It might get us the support we need.”

  “Mr. President, can I say something, sir?”

  “Larry, I know what you’re going to say.”

  “We can’t go back! You’ve come out boldly, assertively, in the right cause. Look what’s happened. Just by doing that, there’s a new sense of urgency.”

  “More like a sense of crisis.”

  “Well, it is a sense of crisis, Al. And so it should be. It’s a crisis. Mr. President, you’ve changed the terms of the debate. You sure have. And the reason you have is the boldness you did it with. Who would ever believe anyone would actually come out with a global plan? Who would ever believe anyone would be prepared to use sanctions? Go back on that now, and you lose it. In a week, the terms of the debate will be exactly what they were before. Only now you’ll never have the credibility to change them again.”

  “I disagree,” said Graham.

  “With which part? That the terms change back or we lose our credibility?”

  “That the terms—”

  “Like I care! Mr. President, do not go back on this. You have to hold firm.” Larry Olsen’s voice was urgent, the tone of someone knowing he was far away at a moment when he needed to be right there in the room, looking his president in the eye.

  “Joe,” said Graham, “no one can change what you’ve done. Bring it back to the table and no one can ignore it, either.”

  “Like they’re ignoring it now,” said Olsen.

  “Worse. Because of the way we’ve done it, they’re resisting it.” The subtext in Graham’s remark was clear. If he had been secretary of state, they would never have reached this point.

  Oddly enough, Benton realized, Olsen’s subtext was exactly the same.

  “Come back to the table now, Joe, and this vote goes away.”

  “Al,” said Olsen, “it’s just a frigging vote. What are you scared of? We’re going to veto it, and nothing’s going to happen.”

  “It’ll show how isolated we are.”

  “Have you read the papers, Al? Everyone knows that already.”

  “And while this is going on, the Chinese government sits pretty. Right? They’re under no pressure at all, and we’re the bad guys.”

  “Mr. President, don’t believe that.” Olsen’s voice was desperate, reaching across the phone connection in an attempt to get to the president. “Don’t believe Wen’s under no pressure. I’ve explained this. The Agency’s saying they haven’t seen internal repression in China like this for twenty years. That’s good. Mr. President, that kind of thing is not a sign of strength on Wen’s part.”

  “I’d like to know what the hell it is a sign of,” said Graham, looking at the President and shaking his head impatiently.

  Benton’s face was grim. It was Olsen, he recalled, who had tried to persuade him that losing fifty billion dollars of business contracts to the Europeans had been some kind of victory.

  “Mr. President, the more Wen has to clamp down to keep dissent quiet, the more tension he’s trying to suppress. The more hysterical their press gets, the more it shows how worried he is about what he faces internally. That can’t go on forever. Something will happen and he’ll have to do something horrible. Or he’ll make a mistake. Then the world won’t be looking at us, it’ll be looking at him. Mr. President, it’s a game. This is the hard part. We have to wait. He’s hoping you crack under the pressure. He’s trying to keep his domestic situation under control until you do. We tough it out, at some point he can’t continue doing that, and then he’s the one who cracks.”

  “And in the meantime,” quipped Graham, “while we’re waiting for this miracle to happen, we take a vote against us.”

  “Hell yes! We take a vote against us.”

  Benton frowned. It was tempting to think of going back into the Kyoto process now, Carbon Plan in hand, leading from the front. He hated having to do what he had found himself doing. Going back into the process would end this isolation, it would end the chaos that seemed to surround him on every side. It would bring the Democratic Party right back behind him. Maybe he had done enough to unlock the process, like Nleki said. Maybe he’d be more effective now if he did go back in.

  Benton glanced at Al Graham, who was watching him.

  “Mr. President?” It was Olsen’s voice from Kiev. “This vote means nothing. It doesn’t tell anyone anything they don’t know already. It’s the UN. Please. Please, Mr. President, don’t do anything! It’s just a frigging vote.”

  ~ * ~

  Thursday, September 29

  Oval Office, The White House

  Finally, they had begun calling. Ingelbock, Nakamura, Kumar, de Silva, and a dozen others, all urging him to use the gains he had achieved and turn back to a multilateral approach before the Security Council met. In reply, he asked for their support for the Carbon Plan, yet they all found a way of evading commitment. He had numerous conversations with Hugh Ogilvie. The British leader informed him of conversations he had had with other leaders and urged him to take Nleki’s advice. Benton spoke with Alexei Gorodin of Russia, who made pointed remarks about American support for Russian opposition figures. Benton asked directly whether he could count on Gorodin’s support by cutting energy exports to China. Gorodin replied that he didn’t believe in sanctions as a means of achieving progress. Benton asked him what he did think was the key to making progress. Gorodin laughed. If he knew that, he said, he would have already announced it.

  The Security Council vote had gone as expected. The United States, Norway, and Sri Lanka opposed China’s resolution of censure. Japan abstained. The U.S. veto came into play. No one internationally or domestically thought any differently afterward than they had before. In practical terms, as Larry Olsen had predicted, the vote made no difference.

  At home, restrictions on trade wit
h China were progressively coming into place. Imports of a range of commodities and low value manufactures were now either prohibited or controlled, and exports of critical technologies was restricted. Further sanctions were in the pipeline pending congressional legislation. A coalition had formed in Congress consisting of Republicans and right-leaning Democrats. This would probably be sufficient to achieve passage of the bills but made Benton intensely uncomfortable. It was an unnatural coalition and was unworkable for anything else. Nothing but sanctions bills would progress until this grouping unformed and Benton’s true base of support came back together.

  Economic stresses resulting from the sanctions were beginning to be felt. The markets remained depressed and jumpy, but the real economy was starting to stutter as well. Export-oriented business groups were talking about losses in volume of thirty to forty percent, anticipating countersanctions from the Chinese government. There were reports of layoffs starting in a number of locations. Consumer associations were vocal in predicting price rises and shortages as Chinese goods disappeared from stores. Bob Colvin believed inflation figures would reflect these rises as early as the next month. Manufacturing associations and representatives of businesses oriented toward the home market had initially welcomed the sanctions and said it was high time the United States stopped trading freely with countries that weren’t prepared to live up to international obligations, but they were changing their tune now that costs of raw materials were starting to rise. This would add further to inflation and at the extreme could force the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates, adding to the slowdown.

  In the days following the vote, governments began announcing that they would be downgrading their representation at the opening session of the General Assembly from head of government to ministerial level. The session had commenced on the now traditional fourth Tuesday of September, the twenty-seventh, and so far all the major leaders had pulled out and sent foreign ministers or other officials in their place. The U.S. slot was on Monday, October 3 and there was talk of a mass walkout from the General Assembly if Benton appeared. None of Benton’s advisors thought the president should be put in that position. Joe Benton himself wasn’t sure he agreed.

  “It’ll look like I’m turning tail if I don’t go,” he said. “You know what? It might be good if the whole world saw their leaders getting up and walking out. Show them what kind of people are in control of their destinies.”

  “Sir, that would be a disaster,” said Jodie Ames.

  “Mr. President,” said Larry Olsen, “I don’t think we should put you out there. I’ll go.”

  “Larry, you’re the one who said the Security Council vote didn’t matter. And this isn’t even a vote.”

  “There’ll be pictures of this. Out there in the real world, no one cares about the Security Council. It’s not real. No one recognizes anyone there, it’s just a bunch of people sitting around a table. But I’m with Jodie on this. I think images of you standing up in front of an empty General Assembly, that’s something else completely. It’ll be bad. People will look at it, and it will say to them . . . America is standing alone.”

  “Well, we are.”

  “But we don’t want to be.”

  “It’s the image,” said Ames. “It’ll say more than a million words.”

  Benton didn’t care about the General Assembly meeting one way or the other. If everyone thought it would be better for Larry Olsen to address an empty hall—or a near-empty hall, because surely some people would stay, even if it was only the Pakistanis and Colombians—that was okay with him. It wasn’t the idea of standing up there that worried him, or the emptiness of the hall. It was the reality it reflected.

  Where was the support? Not one major leader had come out in public and said they would support the Carbon Plan. They hadn’t even been prepared to say it in private.

  He had given them a deadline of sixty days before sanctions would be applied to their countries as well. A quarter of that period was gone. The more time that passed, the less likely it would be for others to join. If he had to apply sanctions to everyone, foreign competitors would simply step into the places forcibly vacated by U.S. business. Withdrawal of American trade would throw the global economy into recession, but that would be nothing compared with the scale of the downturn that would occur within the United States itself. Benton had told the American people they would have to absorb pain, but it wasn’t meant to be pain on this scale, and America wasn’t supposed to be absorbing it alone.

  Still Larry Olsen was telling him that he had to wait, that he just had to wait and eventually Wen would make a wrong step.

  He thought about the empty hall waiting for him, or for Larry Olsen, at the United Nations. Alan Ball, Al Graham and a host of other people were telling him he couldn’t afford to keep waiting. If he wanted to go back into Kyoto with authority, he had to do it now. With every additional day that went by, the more it would look as if he was being forced to go back because he couldn’t get any support, not because he was choosing to do it. Time was his enemy. If he waited sixty days and went back into Kyoto because no one had joined up to the plan, he’d have no authority at all.

  ~ * ~

  Monday, October 10

  Princeton University, New Jersey

  The Columbus Day address at Princeton had been scheduled months before. In the circumstances, Benton could have cancelled the speech. Instead, he decided to use it.

  He was still waiting on the rest of the world, and the rest of the world was still waiting on him. For four weeks now, there had been a kind of standoff, no one prepared to make the first move. Yet something had changed, if only subtly. People had begun talking about Kyoto again. In the first days after the Carbon Plan was announced, it seemed that Kyoto was dead and buried, and Joseph Nleki had begged him to come back and resurrect the process. Now ministers in various countries were asking why the Bangkok agenda meeting for the Kyoto 4 round shouldn’t go ahead in November as planned. If the United States chose to boycott the round, that shouldn’t stop others moving ahead with it. Nleki was becoming openly supportive of that line. In a speech made in Sao Paulo, he remarked that the only way to overcome the demands of a unilateralist was for multilateralists to continue their work. But the door would never be shut, he said, as if this was some great concession, as if the power balance had now tipped to the other side, and it wasn’t up to the United States to return to the table, but up to those still at the table to decide whether the United States could return.

  And when he looked at it, Joe Benton couldn’t see where his support was going to come from. Pakistan, Colombia and Sri Lanka hardly counted, nor did the impoverished countries of the developing world who had offered their commitment. They were signing up only because the Carbon Plan absolved them of the need to take any action and they stood to lose more from cessation of U.S. aid than from a loss of trade with China. None of the world’s leading emitters nor the second tier polluters had joined. Olsen had managed to set up a visit for the president to Tokyo later in the month and claimed the Japanese could well come out in support. But Benton knew that Olsen was just trying to keep him going. He didn’t believe Nakamura would go out on a limb, not with forty percent of Japanese exports going to China, even if he offered support on the Kurils. And he couldn’t offer Japan support on the Kurils because of the effect that would have on Russia.

  In China, Wen still seemed to be in control, keeping the screws turned on his domestic opposition. He was waiting, watching as American democracy turned on itself, as its media and its business groups and its unions and its political parties jabbed accusatory fingers and yelled at their president and at each other. He was keeping his head down, doing nothing to remind the world what kind of a regime he headed and whom the rest of the world had chosen to get into bed with, content to stay silent as long as the world viewed America as the villain, seeing how much self-inflicted pain America could bear. If something was going to happen, as Larry Olsen kept saying, if Wen was going t
o make a mistake, there was no sign of it yet.

  The right-wing press, initially so supportive of Benton’s action, was backpedaling now, accusing him of taking the country into a trap, saying that America needed to wield a big stick and that this showed a liberal wasn’t capable of doing it. But his center-left support hadn’t come back and showed no signs of doing so unless he abandoned his position.

  He knew what Democrats were saying. Marty Montag, about a week earlier, had come to see him in the White House and told him straight out. He was irresponsible to have launched an initiative like this without lining up support from key allies. And all things being equal, that was right That’s what he would have said himself had he been on the outside looking in. But exactly which allies would have given him support for the plan he put forward? He would have ended up negotiating with them, trying to establish a common position, and pretty soon everyone would have been protecting themselves and their interests and what he would have had would have been another Kyoto, a mini-Kyoto, a pre-Kyoto, with all the problems and constraints of the real one. So he still couldn’t see—much as he told Marty that he wanted to—how he could have done other than he did. And maybe he would fail, maybe in a year the U.S. would have to undo the sanctions and come crawling back to the table with its tail between its legs, but that was a risk he felt he had to take, unsavory and humiliating as it would be if it turned out to be true. But it was too early to make that choice, or even think about making it. Way too early. He wasn’t even thinking about it.