But the President was really angry, and he never fully forgot what he saw as the disrespectful tone taken at that dinner. In time we produced policies that gave us a real voice in the climate change debate. The President’s approach gained traction, with everyone realizing that the goal was to find sources of clean energy to protect the environment while still allowing for economic growth. Discussions of alternative fuel sources, from battery technology to cellulosic biomass, would animate the President as he poured over reports, listened to entrepreneurs, and engaged like-minded leaders such as Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil. By the time we left office, the United States had spent more than $40 billion on programs related to climate change.
To be fair, the administration struggled to find a voice between the climate change alarmists who proposed draconian measures to confront the problem and those—even in the administration—who thought that any “concession” on the question was a slippery slope. I don’t think there were any “deniers” among the key members of the President’s team. But there was a wide divergence of opinion about how much the President should do.
In time, our willingness to engage the international community would lead to several breakthroughs: the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate, which brought China and India into the conversation in 2005; convening the largest emitters of greenhouse gases to chart a common way forward; and, perhaps most important, a public statement from the President that finally acknowledged the human element in climate change in July 2005. Still, we were never going to be seen as true believers, and it was hard to get attention for the pathbreaking work, especially in the second term, that the Council on Environmental Quality at the White House did, particularly under James Connaughton’s leadership in partnership with State’s under secretary for global affairs, Paula Dobriansky.
Years later the President and I talked about why the reaction in 2001 had been so sharp. “Mr. President,” I said, “the Europeans had built this crystalline structure called Kyoto.”
“I see; we came along and knocked it over,” he said.
“No, it was worse than that,” I told him. “We knocked it over and said, ‘Did I hit something?’ And we just kept on walking.” That was a self-inflicted wound that could have been avoided.
The First Dangerous Crisis Unfolds
ISSUES LIKE climate change were ever present, particularly at the time of an international conference or meeting with a head of state. They formed the backdrop of steady daily work, carried mostly by the agencies and experts in the field. But the national security advisor’s life is very different; there are spikes, brought on by crises that make you drop everything else until the danger passes. And they almost always begin with a phone call that seems like it came out of nowhere.
“Dr. Rice, the Situation Room is on the phone for you. You can take it in the commander’s office.” I always dreaded those words from the Camp David steward, particularly at 10 P.M. as we watched a Saturday-night movie in the Holly Cabin theater. Something had to be wrong.
I got up, went to the commander’s office, and called the Situation Room. The senior duty officer said that the Pentagon was reporting an incident off the coast of China. The details were sketchy, but a U.S. maritime patrol aircraft on a routine surveillance mission had collided with one of two Chinese fighter jets. Both aircraft had been damaged in the collision, and the U.S. plane had made an emergency landing at an airfield on China’s Hainan Island. Twenty-four crew members had been detained. I was told that the plane had been over international waters when the incident happened.
The crew was safe but in captivity, and they’d performed emergency security measures before going down. Those are steps to prevent the plane’s technology from being stolen if it falls into foreign hands. The crippled U.S. plane had issued an emergency “Mayday” alert as it descended toward the airfield. A phone call among all relevant agencies of the government (called a “noiwon,” for National Operations and Intelligence Watch Officer Network) had been convened and was in continuous session.
I started to go through my mental checklist as I sprinted back to Holly Cabin just as the President was coming out. I said that I would call Colin and Don and get back to him. I reached the two. Don had only the information that I’d been given but was following up urgently. Colin began trying to reach the Chinese foreign minister.
The eleven days from April 1 until the release of the crew on April 11 were completely dominated by the Hainan Island crisis. Needless to say, that was not the way we’d hoped to start off our relationship with Beijing. In the campaign, we had referred to China as a strategic competitor, making clear that our first priority in Asia was to strengthen relationships with our longtime democratic friends Japan, South Korea, and Australia. It was not meant to be a signal of hostility to the PRC but some commentators in Beijing—and in Washington—took it as such.
The President was preparing to authorize a large arms sales package for Taiwan and there was press coverage already. The package would be significant enough to obviate the need to deal with the issue annually. Beijing would be angry but at least we wouldn’t have to go through the upheaval every year. But the Hainan crisis came on the heels of the tensions over the arms sales and before we had established a productive basis for U.S.-China relations.
Still, neither China nor we wanted the crisis to escalate, but it was a very difficult one to defuse. First, the U.S. plane had been over international waters and it was important to defend freedom of navigation. The problem was exacerbated by the skewed information that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) fed the Chinese leadership. The PLA had every reason to paint itself as the victim and the United States as the aggressor. The Chinese civilian leadership appears to have been totally dependent on the military for information, especially at the start. That led to misplaced feelings of righteousness.
Second, and more important, the Chinese pilot who’d rammed our plane had been killed in the incident, making him an instant hero in the Chinese press. The Chinese wanted us to apologize for his death, something that we were unwilling to do—particularly once we learned that his hot-dogging had been a prime cause of the accident. But it became a matter of national pride in China. Time and again we would see this. China would stir up nationalist sentiment in the population through the state-controlled media, diminishing its own room for maneuver as it reacted to the very passions it had created. This tendency of authoritarian regimes to use manufactured “public opinion” is one of the most dangerous aspects of such regimes. In a democracy you don’t have to create a public voice; citizens do that without prodding.
Finally, we were simply unable to establish proper communications with the Chinese leadership for several days. That first night, Colin couldn’t get the foreign minister to return his phone call. We tried multiple channels for the better part of two days. Yet we were still having trouble maintaining consistent contact with the Chinese. On the second Sunday afternoon, I enlisted the Argentine and Chilean governments (the Chinese leadership was traveling in South America) to put us in touch with the Chinese by cell phone. In one bizarre incident, the Argentine put my counterpart on a cell phone, having tracked him down at a barbecue!
The reasons for this behavior continue to be a matter of speculation among those of us who managed this crisis. One theory is that the Chinese leadership was not on top of the facts and was trying to buy time until it could gather itself. That would correspond with what Clinton administration officials encountered in 1999 when the United States accidently bombed the Chinese Embassy in Serbia. That time, too, days passed before proper lines of communication could be established. Whatever the explanation, this behavior made the first few days very tense.
Once we returned to Washington from Camp David, we established a pattern for crisis management. I would talk to Colin at about 5:00 A.M. each day. As Colin noted, the Chinese seemed to make decisions at 4:30 P.M. their time because they always called him at 4:30 A.M. our time. I would then
go to the White House at 6:00 A.M. or so, and at 7:00 A.M. the President and I would meet with Karen Hughes and Andy Card. Colin would often join us. We needed to keep our message under tight control while Colin sought an acceptable solution.
One problem in managing a crisis in today’s media environment is that you are forced to say something each day. If you are not careful, your rhetoric escalates little by little and you create demands that must then be met by the other side. Since the other side is doing the same thing, it’s easy to have the crisis spin out of control pretty quickly. For example, Dennis Blair, the head of the United States Pacific Command, reprimanded the Chinese air force for failing to intercept aircraft in a professional manner and playing “bumper cars in the air.” We had to disavow that statement.
We were also concerned about the well-being of our people. We sent warnings privately to the Chinese not to do anything provocative, such as parading them in public to embarrass us. Our very able ambassador, the former Admiral Joseph Prueher, worked to get consular access to them so that we could reassure their families, and the nation, that they were safe.
The crux of the matter was to find a face-saving way out for the Chinese. We could not apologize for what was not our fault. But after several days, the Chinese sent a signal: if Colin would send a letter that said that we were sorry for the loss of their pilot’s life, we could end the crisis. Don quipped that perhaps if Colin would say “pretty please,” that would do it. The next days were consumed with efforts to find acceptable language. In the end we acknowledged the loss of life and the need to prevent further incidents without a hint of any wrongdoing on our part.
Word came that our people had been released early on the morning of April 11. I was with the President in Concord, North Carolina, later that day when he announced that he would shortly be visiting the family of one of the servicemen on board the plane. The nation’s attention had been riveted on the fate of the crew, and when the President made the announcement, the crowd broke out into a chant: “USA, USA!”
My eyes welled up with tears, and I was pretty emotional when we met the crew several weeks later in the Oval Office. It was a relief to have them home. Eventually, a U.S. Air Force crew deployed to China and dismantled the aircraft so its pieces could be flown back to the United States. That was after a lot of back-and-forth about whether Beijing would return the plane at all. Chinese military personnel “monitored operations closely,” according to the air force report, continuously photographing and videotaping the operation and reviewing photos and videos made by the Americans.
…
THE REMAINDER of the spring was, for the most part, relatively straightforward. Though the Balkans flared up, with violence in Macedonia that threatened stability in the region, it was not the kind of crisis that dominated the agenda of the White House every day. The State Department worked with the allies to defuse the crisis by the summer of that year.
And the Summit of the Americas in late April provided a much-needed second opportunity to highlight our agenda for Latin America. The meeting of the thirty-four countries of the Western Hemisphere (Cuba was excluded because it did not have a democratically elected president) took place in Quebec against a backdrop of anti-globalization demonstrations. As a result, security was tight as we drove along downtown streets that were eerily deserted, merchants largely having closed their doors for the day to avoid trouble.
However, inside the convention hall where we gathered, the meeting was surprisingly smooth. The summit declaration enshrined the support of the gathered for free enterprise and free trade, reaffirming the need to create a Free Trade Area of the Americas. The major governments of Latin America were center-right and like-minded. Hugo Chávez was a troubling but not yet central figure in the region. When we met him at a session for the Andean nations on the margins of the summit, he was all smiles and desperate to be seen in a photograph with the President. When George W. Bush entered the room, Chávez almost leapt across the table and offered a few words about their common interest in baseball. The President remarked afterward that Chávez was a “street thug,” insecure in the clothing of a national leader. I thought he might be worse than that because he was animated by a certain crude charisma. Ultimately, the “street thug” would become a ruthless and surprisingly effective dictator, and his “insecurity” would give way to a relentless campaign against democratic principles, free markets, and, most important, U.S. influence in the region.
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THE MIDDLE EAST
THE MIDDLE EAST WAS the exception to the sense of normalcy that spring. The low-intensity war between Palestinians and Israelis dominated our security agenda. The explosion in the region predated us. In 2000 the Clinton administration had convened the two sides at Camp David in a dramatic effort to solve the decades-old conflict. Ehud Barak, a former general who had become the leader of the Labor Party and was now Israel’s prime minister, wanted a deal badly. The record is sketchy to this day, but he was apparently ready to withdraw from almost all of the West Bank and all of Gaza, permit a certain number of Palestinian refugees to return to Israel, and find a solution for Jerusalem that would cede, in some fashion, Israeli sovereignty over parts of the Holy City. It is easy to forget how far out on a limb Barak was at Camp David. After all, in 2000 there was no consensus in Israel that there should even be a Palestinian state.
In the summer before the failure of Camp David, I witnessed firsthand the ferment in Israel. I’d been invited to lecture at Tel Aviv University by my good friend Shai Feldman and took my first trip to the Holy Land in July of that year. For me it was literally a religious experience, visiting the Sea of Galilee and the Mount of the Beatitudes and walking where Christ had walked. But since it was well known by that time that I was advising George W. Bush, the visit took on a distinctly political character. I met with Barak and several of his ministers and discussed their efforts to make peace.
The air in Israel was thick with expectation that Camp David might succeed in ending the conflict with the Palestinians. I can well remember sitting with friends from the university in the courtyard of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem on a warm summer evening as they discussed how the Jewish state of Israel would develop in conditions of peace with the Palestinians. So much of Israel’s young history had been defined by wars with the Arabs. “What would life be like without that conflict?” they asked.
On another occasion I sat with members of Israel’s burgeoning high-tech community, drawing on my own experiences in Silicon Valley to engage them about Israel’s economic future in the absence of permanent conflict. It was a time of uncertainty and questioning but, without a doubt, a time of optimistic anticipation.
Then I went to see Ariel Sharon, the leader of the conservative Likud Party, and his advisors, who were preparing to challenge Barak in upcoming elections. The encounter made it crystal clear that not all Israelis were willing to end the conflict on the basis of a deal like Camp David.
I met Sharon in the tiny offices of Likud, located on the top floor of a miserably hot building in Tel Aviv. I was immediately struck by the fact that he was as wide as he was tall. He had a slightly lazy eye and thick features, and he spoke in heavily accented English. Over the years I came to understand that Sharon was one of the few people who spoke English better than he understood it. This often led to misunderstandings and Sharon’s tendency to repeat phrases over and over, whether they were connected to the conversation or not. But at the time I was impressed with what I took to be his fluency in English.
I also knew Sharon’s reputation as an uncompromising defender of Israel and the terrible history of his role in the attack on Palestinian refugee camps at Sabra and Shatila, where many innocent Palestinians died during the war with Lebanon in 1982. He was the Israeli leader whom Arabs (and many liberal Israelis and Americans) hated most. Nothing in that first meeting suggested that his uncompromising hard-liner reputation was undeserved, but I was a bit drawn to him nonetheless. He seemed to embody the
Israeli experience because, in truth, without toughness, perseverance, and even ruthlessness, Israel would have ceased to exist in a neighborhood bent on its destruction.
When the conversation turned to Governor Bush, Sharon spoke warmly of him. George W. Bush had visited Israel two years before with several other American governors. Sharon had been his personal guide by helicopter of the West Bank and Gaza. Sharon’s emphasis on the fragility of Israel’s security situation had made a major and lasting impression on George W. Bush. The governor’s sympathy for Israel’s plight had an equally important impact on Sharon.
The meeting I had with him was taken up with Sharon’s presentation of “maps” that essentially laid claim to all of the territory of the West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem. It was very clear that he would not support dividing the land and creating a Palestinian state, and I remember thinking that Barak would have a tough adversary to overcome if he succeeded in getting a deal with the Palestinians.
Sharon was especially anxious for me to meet his close advisor, a woman near my age, Tzipi Livni. She too exuded toughness and an uncompromising view of Israel’s right to exist on the totality of its biblical lands. Sharon proudly noted that she was a child of the Irgun, the armed Israeli militia that had helped drive the British out of the Middle East after World War II. Her mother had been a “freedom fighter” who had spent time in a British jail. Her father had been an operational commander of Irgun at the time of the famous bombing of the British headquarters in the King David Hotel in 1946. Needless to say, the entire meeting was in stark contrast to my encounters with the intellectuals of the Israeli Left with whom I spent most of my time during that trip.
No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington Page 7