Ultimatum

by Matthew Glass

  “In the end there was nothing we could do. Hugo wanted to withdraw. In fact, confidentially, he wanted to withdraw a week ago but I told him we could fight it through. But you have to know when you’ve lost.”

  “Will it hurt you?”

  “Honey,” said Heather. “It’s your birthday.”

  “Daddy, I want to write him something to say I’m sorry it turned out like that.”

  “That’s sweet of you, Amy. I’m sure he’d appreciate it. I’ll get someone to send you his details.”

  “So will it hurt you? Have you got another nominee?”

  “We’re working on it.”

  “So what else is news, honey?” said Heather.

  “Nothing, Mom. Dad, are you planning to nominate another Latino in the role?”

  “I’ll go for the best person I can get.”

  “I think that’s right. You’ve got Angela, and the Latino community couldn’t ask for more high-profile representation than vice president. Particularly because you’ve pledged she’s going to play a real part. And the Latino vote is a natural constituency for you, so you don’t need to give them too much. They’re not going Republican next time round.”

  “I can’t take that for granted, Amy. I still need to recognize their contribution.”

  “Honey,” said Heather, “we can talk about this another time. It’s your birthday.”

  “Mom’s right,” said Joe. “We shouldn’t talk about this.”

  “Why not? What should we talk about?”

  “Tell us about you,” said Heather.

  Amy laughed. “What do you want me to talk about? My classes? I’m not in junior high, Mom. Daddy, what are they saying on the Hill? I guess they wanted him to withdraw.”

  Joe glanced sheepishly at Heather. Heather shook her head, then shrugged in resignation.

  He turned back to Amy. “There’s strong Democratic support for the withdrawal. Confidentially, there was a general feeling in the caucus that we had to do it.”

  “Well, everyone loses a nomination, don’t they? It won’t make a difference in the long run.”

  “It makes a difference to Hugo.”

  “I didn’t mean that. But in terms of your administration, in four years, this isn’t going to make any difference.”

  “Agreed. But it might make a difference to what I can achieve this year.”

  “But this wasn’t a critical role. It wasn’t like he was your secretary of state.”

  “What should I have done if it had been?”

  “That depends,” said Amy.

  “On what?” said Joe.

  Beside him, Heather sighed. So much for the idea of having a conversation in this family—just one—that wasn’t consumed by politics. It was one of the things that kept Greg away, she knew. But Amy and Joe both reveled in it. Talking politics with Amy wasn’t work for Joe, it was sheer enjoyment, like a game they had played together for years. It was a game that Greg had never been able or willing to play, and Heather felt helpless to do anything about it. Amy was the one who had always been on Joe’s wavelength, and as she matured, the more on that wavelength she seemed to be. There was a kind of informal agreement with the press to stay away from her while she was still in education, and Heather did what she could to stamp down on any talk in Democratic circles of a political career for her daughter. At twenty-three, Amy didn’t need that kind of pressure. But that was where she was likely headed, Heather knew, and it made her worry. Joe wouldn’t have understood why. In his mind, there was no higher calling than public service, and no mode of life more satisfying. Yet the thought of what that kind of life would mean for Amy brought out every maternal, protective instinct that Heather possessed.

  And yet despite herself, as she watched Joe and Amy dissecting and analyzing the implications of Hugo Montera’s withdrawal—Joe on the sofa beside her, Amy on the screen across the room—Heather couldn’t help feeling a satisfaction, a deep sense of warmth, at the naturalness of the bond that they shared.

  ~ * ~

  Friday, February 4

  Oval Office, The White House

  Joe Benton had just been on the receiving end of a harsh lesson in the art of keeping the press in line with presidential priorities. The Montera issue was over, but at his press conference, which had been scheduled to unveil the New Foundation package, the press was chasing Whitefish, sensing the Montana siege would pose an early test for the new president. As he had feared, the fate of a hundred-odd gun-toting fanatics was getting more interest than plans that would affect tens of millions of people. Benton almost wished he’d told Sol Katzenberger to send in the troops a couple of days earlier and to hell with the consequences. Just get the thing over and out of the headlines. Except that it would still be in the headlines if the attack had turned into some kind of Waco-style catastrophe. Well, he wasn’t going to let that happen over the next few days and take the agenda away from him entirely at such a crucial moment. On Monday he would be presenting the New Foundation package to a joint session of Congress. He was going to let the siege run until those idiots in Montana came in starving out of the snow.

  He came back from the press conference less than happy. He had a short conversation with Jodie Ames, Adam Gehrig and Barry Murphy, and they went away to work up a strategy to try to get the New Foundation message out again. Then he was scheduled for a meeting of the China group, which was now called the Marion group. Ben Hoffman had said they needed a name for it and there wasn’t much point calling it the China group, or the Emissions group, because that kind of defeated the need for secrecy. Somehow he came up with Marion. Joe Benton had no idea why.

  Larry Olsen reported on his meetings with Chen Liangming. The Chinese suggestion of an invitation to visit Beijing in September got an enthusiastic response from Alan Ball.

  “It’s a delaying tactic,” said Olsen.

  “So we let them delay a little at the start,” said Ball. “Let them save some face.”

  “They haven’t lost face yet.”

  “This way they don’t.”

  Olsen turned back to the president. “Mr. President, there is simply no way you can leave this until September. If you start like that, you’ll go on like that. They’ll know you’ll go with their timetable. We have to impose our timetable, and we have to do it from the start.”

  “I don’t think we’re going to get anywhere trying to impose anything on the Chinese,” said Ball.

  “I accept that, Al. Bad choice of words. But we become the junior partner in this negotiation if we accept their timetable. We become the supplicant at their table. At the very least, we’ve got to share the table. Mr. President, a meeting with President Wen has to be a reward. We make progress—he gets a meeting. He does nothing—he doesn’t get a meeting.”

  “Maybe I should call him,” said Benton.

  “That should be a reward as well. Our job is to get you to the point where you talk to him. You’re not there yet.”

  “I’m sorry, I think a meeting is something to consider,” said Ball. “Admittedly, September’s a long time to wait. We could try to make it earlier.”

  Benton wanted to know whether his Iraq-Syria intervention had had any effect. Olsen thought the Chinese side had got the message. Hoffman, who had sat in on the meetings with Chen, agreed that they had.

  “Now they’re testing us,” said Olsen. “They’re saying, sure, you’ve shown us you can pick a fight with the hundred-pound weakling, now are you going to come after the two-hundred-pound bully?”

  “I suspect they think we’re the bully,” murmured Alan Ball.

  “Whatever,” said Olsen impatiently.

  Benton thought about it. His immediate instinct was that a visit to Beijing must be a good idea, although, as Ball had said, September was a long time to wait. But Olsen was presenting him with an entirely different perspective. First, that a visit should be an outcome, not merely a step in the process. And second, that accepting a delay until September wasn’t only undesirable
but would send a message to President Wen that he was prepared to go at whatever pace Wen set.

  “Mr. President,” said Ben Hoffman, “I think we should get something on the table here. Larry, correct me if I’m wrong, but I think you believe we’re in an endgame, and I think that’s where your perspective is coming from. And my feeling is that Alan doesn’t really have that view. Alan, would that be fair?”

  Alan Ball nodded. “I’d like to know how Larry defines an endgame if he thinks we’re in one.”

  “Let’s not worry about definitions,” said Olsen. “The point is, we have got to do something, and this time it has to be a good, final answer. We don’t have the luxury to come back and revisit this in another five or ten years. Whether you call that an endgame or not, I couldn’t care less. We have to get a solution. Now, God knows we’ve been remiss in living up to our obligations, I think all of us will admit that, and I don’t think we should try to hide it. But China has never lived up to anything it’s agreed to, and we shouldn’t try to hide that either. They’ve been the biggest emitters for twenty-five years, and they’ve been the biggest economy on the planet for going on five years. That position carries some responsibility. They simply have never accepted the discipline of global responsibility, and they simply have not lived up to the leadership position they claim for themselves.”

  “A lot of people would say the same about us.”

  “And they’d be exaggerating. In the Chinese case, I’m not exaggerating. Sometimes they claim to be global leaders, sometimes they claim to be global paupers who are still the victims of colonial policies. Showing global leadership means sometimes you have to think beyond the purely parochial interest of your domestic agenda. Show me one example where the Chinese government has ever done that.”

  “Africa,” said Ball. “We failed on aid for Africa for decades on end. Many people would say any prosperity that does exist in Africa is because of Chinese investment.”

  “Out of which they’re done very well.”

  “Unlike us in our investments.”

  “Al, that’s not the point! I’m saying that with that level of global leadership comes responsibility, and it’s about time we asked them to accept what that means. We have to be prepared to demand more.”

  Alan Ball shook his head. “We’re never going to get anywhere if we’re thinking like this.”

  Benton intervened. “We have to live up to everything we’ve signed up to. That’s the policy of this administration, period. I don’t care what anyone else is doing. We live up to our commitments.”

  “Then, Mr. President, we should show that,” said Ball. “Let’s show that before we start laying down the law to the Chinese.”

  “Agreed. We’re way behind on Kyoto 3. I’ll announce an immediate program to bring the worst offenders in our industries into line in the course of this year.”

  “Mr. President, with respect,” said Olsen, “I understand your desire to comply with what we’ve promised, and on principle we should always do that, but at this time, it sends the wrong message to Beijing. It’s unilateral. It says, you guys, you’re in breach, that’s fine, stay in breach. We’ll do the right thing. That rewards them for misbehavior.”

  “I’m not rewarding them. This is for us, not them. We need to be clean. We need to be completely clean in the global court of public opinion.”

  Olsen shook his head. “You’re giving them something for nothing.”

  Benton didn’t reply to that. Larry Olsen seemed to see every action either as a reward or punishment toward the Chinese government. Joe Benton didn’t share that view, and Alan Ball obviously didn’t either. That was one of the differences between Olsen and Ball. Another was becoming clearer as the meeting went on.

  “You know,” said Benton, “I think one of the things I’m hearing here is there’s a difference between you, Larry, and you, Alan, on the question of timing. Alan, I don’t think you believe we don’t need to do something, but you think we’ve got time, right? And you think we might be more effective if we use that time. And Larry, you think we don’t have time, and that if we take time, we become ineffective. Now, my instinct is to say, like Alan, I’ve got four years here. One thing that counts against that is the fact that with every day we delay, the physical reality of what’s happening out there gets worse, and therefore the scale of the task gets bigger. Let’s set that aside. By the yardstick of diplomacy alone, Larry, why don’t I have four years to deal with this?”

  “Mr. President, it’s what I said to you before. You let them start like this, this is how it will go on. No matter what you do, they will never believe you’re serious. You’ll never be able to convince them of that again. We’ve started by saying, give us an answer quickly, and by the way, take a look at what we’re doing with Syria and Iraq to see how quickly we’re prepared to act. And what do they do? They say, okay, let’s get together in seven months. You agree to that, game over. They’ll think you carry a big stick only when you’re up against a weakling. You let that go on, eventually you’ll have to start a war to make them sit up and take notice.”

  Joe Benton smiled. “I don’t think I’ll be starting a war.”

  “Larry here might,” muttered Ball.

  “No, what I’m telling you, Alan, is how you don’t start a war.”

  Ball’s eyes narrowed. He gazed coldly at Olsen.

  Olsen turned back to the president. “Another thing, sir, every day that goes by, you become vulnerable to this being made public. They could do that, and you’d look like you’re deceiving the American people. That’s an enormous weapon to leave in their hands.”

  “They’ve already got that,” said John Eales.

  “Sure, John, but only up to a point. If it does come out, it’s one thing to say, all right, we’re doing stuff, we’re on the case, and the reason we’ve kept it quiet is so we can make progress. That’s an argument. You can sell that. It’s another thing to say, well, actually, we’re doing nothing. We’re just waiting until Beijing decides to roll out the red carpet in September. Just think what that looks like. That’s the weapon you give them.”

  “Unless we put it into Kyoto,” said Ball.

  Olsen rolled his eyes. He wasn’t even going to respond to that.

  The president exchanged a glance with Eales. Then he turned to Rubin and Hoffman to see if they had any further thoughts. Rubin said she lacked the diplomatic experience and knowledge of the Chinese government to comment. Hoffman didn’t have much to add either. He just thought that after two weeks in office, it might be a little hasty to conclude that they couldn’t proceed cautiously for a while longer.

  Joe Benton was inclined to agree.

  “Let’s try to get to a conclusion on this,” he said. “Alan, you first. What do you suggest?”

  “I think we should accept President Wen’s invitation on principle,” said Ball. “I think we try to bring it forward, but we accept it. And in the meantime, we continue talking with Chen, or whoever they’re using, to see if we can make progress.”

  “And what do I take when I meet Wen?” asked the president.

  “We’ll take him some kind of proposal. It depends on what will have happened before that.”

  “Nothing will have happened before that,” muttered Olsen. “Once you accept the invitation, everything freezes.”

  “So? That wouldn’t be a disaster. Mr. President, it’ll be a first meeting. A first meeting doesn’t have to produce anything. People understand that. Besides, there’ll be the usual cooperation agreements and business deals set up for you to sign. You won’t come out of it empty-handed.”

  Benton turned to Olsen. “Larry?”

  “It’s what I said. We ignore this invitation. We set out a timetable to Chen by which we expect to reach an agreement.”

  “How long?”

  Olsen shrugged. “Six months? We can work out the details. But this can’t be indefinite. Both sides know the facts of the case, it’s only a question of how we accommodate
each other.”

  “Larry,” said Eales, “if you give them a timetable, what’s to stop them procrastinating around it like they’re already doing now?”

  “It includes an escalating set of penalties.”

  “Wait a second.” Benton looked at Olsen. “Penalties? Larry, what do you mean by that?”

  “Sanctions. In three months, say, if we haven’t achieved progress—a certain set of sanctions. Three months after that—another set of sanctions.”

  This was new. Benton looked around at the others.

  “Larry, what kind of sanctions are you thinking about?” asked Jackie Rubin.