Ultimatum

by Matthew Glass

  “I don’t think that’s possible on the numbers,” murmured Jackie Rubin.

  “I’ll need to know what is possible,” said Lisle. “If they need to understand what isn’t possible for us, it goes without saying that I do. But the other thing is, we need to think broadly about what they need to satisfy their base. It could be that it’s something outside the narrow confines of this particular issue. What else do we have that they want? In this case, it would have to be something really significant. If we can give them that, then that might be the thing they represent as a victory, and the fact that they don’t get much on actual emissions might not even figure.”

  The president glanced at Wu. “What else do we have that’s important enough to them?”

  “Only one thing, sir.”

  There was silence. Everyone knew what it was.

  Joe Benton took a deep breath, let it out slowly. “I can’t sell them Taiwan,” he said quietly.

  “If that’s the case, and that’s all we have. . .” Pete Lisle shrugged. “Well, we’ve given them the data. Now they have to produce a proposal. When we see it I guess we’ll know if they really believe they have to do a deal.”

  ~ * ~

  Friday, June 17

  Hotel Kirchhoff, outside Cologne, Germany

  Joe Benton was taking a hammering. He had been expecting it, but that didn’t mean he was enjoying it now that it was happening. He had been invited to attend the final day of the European Union summer summit. The morning had started amiably enough with a breakfast at which he sat next to Ruud Blok, the Dutch prime minister. Blok impressed him. The Dutch had taken an early decision to retreat from virtually all the land reclaimed since World War Two and were the first country in the world to implement an explicit relocation program. After breakfast, the initial working session on trade issues passed off without much dispute. Then it started. Kyoto. The German prime minister, Ingelbock, introduced the topic and set the scene with a vigorous attack on unnamed leaders whose commitment to the Kyoto process never seemed to get beyond generalities. Suddenly they were lining up, Rumain of France, DiMarco of Italy, Blanco of Spain, Pavel of the Czech Republic, Vidic of Serbia and a dozen others. Hugh Ogilvie exchanged a knowing glance with Benton. The European leaders wanted a clear statement on the U.S. president’s commitment to Kyoto as the one and only channel through which to deal with the world’s major environmental concerns. Benton stuck to his “primary role” line and refused to be drawn further. One leader after another lauded Kyoto and attributed its shortcomings to America’s failure to engage fully on previous occasions. China, India and Russia didn’t get a mention. The style varied from leader to leader but the content was pretty much the same.

  Larry Olsen, who was sitting with a number of aides behind the president, leaned forward.

  “Mr. President,” he whispered, “I’ve got to step out for a minute.”

  Joe Benton turned to him and smiled ruefully. He wouldn’t mind stepping out as well, and not just for a minute. Olsen got up and one of his aides moved forward into his seat.

  Outside, Olsen walked across the grounds and sat on a bench under a tree. The hotel was surrounded by parkland. In the distance, a squad of soldiers stood beside an armored vehicle at a point on the perimeter of the zone that had been closed for the meeting.

  Olsen tapped on his handheld and raised it to his ear.

  “Mr. Secretary?” It was Pete Lisle, calling on an encrypted line from Oslo, where he and Oliver Wu were meeting the Chinese delegation for the first time since their initial meeting three weeks previously.

  “Go ahead, Pete. What’s happening?”

  “Mr. Secretary, we don’t have the result we want.”

  “What’s in their proposal?”

  “They don’t have one.”

  Olsen wasn’t sure he had heard right.

  “They say they want more information.”

  “We don’t have any more information.”

  “They say they want to see the raw data.”

  “They can’t see it. The raw data doesn’t tell them anything different.”

  “I told them that.”

  “Did you tell them you expected them to come back with a proposal? That was the agreement, right?”

  “They know that. They say they need to see the raw data.”

  “You haven’t given them our proposal, right?”

  “No, sir,” said Lisle. “I haven’t given them our proposal.”

  Olsen frowned. He watched the soldiers across the park. A couple of them had got into the armored vehicle, and it was moving away, leaving four of them behind.

  “What’s really going on, Pete?”

  “They may not believe we don’t have any more,” said Lisle. “But if they do believe us, it’s one of two things. Either they’re stalling, or they’re trying to figure out where the data’s coming from.”

  “What’s the atmosphere like?”

  “Same as last time. Lin and Lurch. Lurch isn’t saying much. Lin’s friendly. It’s like, we need more, help us out here. It’s not our fault, Beijing’s making us ask. Please just give us what we want.”

  “You think maybe they don’t believe we’ve interpreted our data correctly?” said Olsen.

  “I guess that’s possible as well. They might figure we’ve gone too far in our interpretation.”

  Olsen thought about it. It was possible they really did want to check the raw data for themselves, but it was more likely they were stalling. Anyway, they couldn’t see the raw data. Doing that would be as good as revealing the existence of the ESU.

  “What do you think?” he asked eventually.

  “We say yes to this, Mr. Secretary, and we’re opening Pandora’s box. We’ll end up in endless arguments over detail. They’ll ask for verification, they’ll ask for trends, they’ll ask to see the next set of data. They’ll probably ask to be involved in collecting it.”

  Olsen agreed.

  “I think we should indicate we have sources they’re not aware of. I think we should offer them to come on board and collaborate once we have a binding deal. We can even make the deal dependent on them seeing the raw data. But I don’t want to go down this path of questioning the data and verifying the data and anything like that before we get agreement. We’ve given them what we’ve got. They can go correlate that with anything they’ve collected, and if they see some kind of discrepancy with their data, fine, let’s get the experts together and work through what it is exactly. But if what we’ve shown them is in keeping with what they have themselves, then they’re just going to have to accept the rest of it.”

  “Did you tell them that?” said Olsen.

  “In a way. I’ll go harder when I speak to them again. One of the reasons I wanted to speak with you was to agree how hard I should go. Last time I told them if they didn’t come back with a proposal, that would be it. We’d have nothing to talk about.”

  “They didn’t have any specific discrepancy they wanted to clarify?”

  “No. Just a general request for more data, then the raw data.”

  Olsen gazed across the lawns at the soldiers on guard in the distance. “They’re stalling,” he said.

  “I think so.”

  “Go back and give it to them as hard as you want. They agreed we’d each come back with a proposal. Tell them they don’t have a proposal, that’s it. We walk away.”

  “Mr. Secretary, its not that simple. We need to find a way for them to give us a proposal. Once I go hard with them, if they don’t have a way back, this channel’s going to shut down.”

  “Pete, the president thinks Wen really wants to cut a deal. I think this is all bullshit. All they’ve done so far is deign to meet us and take away our data and then ask for more. We’ve got to push them till they bust. I want to find when that point is, and I want to find it quickly. If they don’t bust, fine, then we’ve got a deal and no one will be happier than me. But I won’t believe that until the ink’s dry on the paper.”


  “I have no argument with that, sir. But now they’ve tried it, and we’re showing them we’re not going to stand for it, they can’t just turn around and say, okay, actually, we had a proposal all along. They’re going to lose too much face. At the very least, they’ll have to go back to Beijing so they can pretend to convince Wen to make a proposal, and then come back with it. That’s at a minimum.”

  “Well they can do that,” said Olsen. “One more chance. But no misunderstandings now. There’s no more data. Tell them next time we sit down, that’s it. That’s it! If they don’t have a proposal there’s nothing and we walk away. If that’s not okay, they may as well tell us now and we can all save ourselves a lot of time and trouble.”

  “Okay. That’s fine. That’s what I wanted to check.” Lisle paused. “Mr. Secretary, I also had another thought. You said when we first spoke you’ve got someone with a direct line to Wen.”

  “Yes,” said Olsen.

  “I’m just thinking. We could go two, three rounds here with them coming back and still asking for more data or finding some—”

  “We’ll walk away,” said Olsen. “I thought we just agreed that.”

  It wouldn’t necessarily work like that and Pete Lisle knew it. “Let’s say they come back and say they’ve looked at our data and there’s a discrepancy with something they’ve got. We’ll have to look at that. And then there might be something else, and realistically, even with the line I’m giving them, they could find ways of stalling for three, four, six months, and each time we’d find it hard to actually be sure there isn’t something in it. Believe me, sir. I could do it. And if I could do it, they’ll be able to do it.”

  “Even if you tell them what we just agreed?”

  “Absolutely. Even if I tell them. So what I’m thinking is, if you’ve got someone with a direct line to Wen, maybe this would be a good time to send him back over there. He could say to Wen, our guys can work with your guys, but they’ve got to be serious. Now, even if there are small discrepancies in the data, it’s not material to the overall size of the problem. So if your guys come back one more time with these questions, with these tactics, we’ll know you’re not serious and it’s over.” Lisle paused, listening for a response from the secretary. “To your point of pushing the pace, I think we’ll get a better effect if we do it like that. And if they keep coming back with this stuff, after that, then we can be sure Wen’s not serious.”

  Olsen thought about it. The Oslo channel wasn’t going to work unless both leaders were fully committed to getting a deal. At the last Marion group meeting they had agreed that the Chinese proposal would indicate how committed Wen was. And the Chinese side had turned up with nothing.

  He could get F. William Knight to go back to Wen. That wasn’t a problem. But if Knight was going to go back, Olsen would have to get the president involved. Apart from unavoidable forays such as this one to the summit in Cologne, Benton was focused on driving his domestic agenda, which was requiring an enormous amount of congressional lobbying, and was leaving Olsen to manage the China track negotiation. That was exactly the way Olsen wanted it. It was driving Alan Ball crazy.

  “This won’t change what I’ll tell the guys on the ground here,” said Lisle. “I’m still going to tell them, if they don’t come back with a proposal next time, that’s it. This is just to make sure Wen knows we’re really serious, that this is his last chance.”

  Olsen was silent.

  “So what do you think about sending your guy to Beijing?”

  “Do you really think now’s the time?” said Olsen.

  “Mr. Secretary, I can just see we’re going to have this sequence of stuff and it’s going to be very difficult to be sure we have enough evidence that they actually aren’t committed to enable us to talk away. I’ve seen it happen. A leader-to-leader contact, even through a trusted intermediary, is what we need to short-circuit that.”

  “You don’t think it might confuse things?”

  “No. You said you wanted to find the point where they bust. You said that was critical. Mr. Secretary, believe me, that’s going to take forever unless we do this.”

  There was silence again.

  “Mr. Secretary?”

  “Let me think about it.”

  ~ * ~

  Thursday, June 23

  President’s Study, The White House

  It was the heat coming from the Taiwan lobby that Benton found perplexing. For a couple of weeks they had been talking up, with a number of congresspeople who were in their pocket making statements calling on the president to affirm his support for the continuing autonomy of the island. Joe Benton had made no specific statements about Taiwan during the campaign, and it had never featured as a major element on his agenda. Why were they starting now?

  Otherwise, the news was better. F. William Knight was back from Beijing. He reported that it had taken him only a day to see Wen and their conversation had had a notably positive tone. Wen said he understood President Benton’s interest to advance to substantive proposals. He said he wasn’t aware his people had gone back to ask for more data and he promised to look into it and see whether any more data were really needed before progress could be made. If not, he would send his negotiators back with a proposal and the talks could proceed.

  “That sounds about as good as we could expect,” said the president.

  Olsen didn’t reply. He could have scripted Wen’s response himself.

  “What do you think we’ll get back?” said John Eales.

  Olsen shrugged. “Any proposal that does come back will likely have caveats about verification of the raw data. They have to do that to save face. They can’t demand access to the raw data one day and then turn around and say they don’t need it the next, not without paying some kind of lip service to that point.”

  “They can have their caveats,” said Benton. “We can live with that as long as they come back with a serious offer and we can see they want to do a deal.”

  Olsen nodded. The skepticism was in his eyes.

  “I realize we haven’t passed that test yet, Larry.”

  “They’re going to start with cuts on a per capita basis. The day we see them moving from that, that’s the day we know we’re in business.”

  Benton shook his head, smiling. He felt a lot more hopeful than his secretary of state.

  “How long until we expect to see their proposal?” Eales asked.

  Wen had told Knight he didn’t want to delay. “If he wants to show us he’s serious,” said Olsen, “probably two to three weeks.”

  “They must have had some kind of a proposal ready when they were talking to Gartner.”

  “Not necessarily. If they never treated it seriously, it’s possible they never formulated a position. Just kept saying no and watched Art Riedl turn up with something new every time. My guess,” said Olsen, turning to the president, “is that they do have something and have had for a while. But they can’t come back with it tomorrow. They have to make like they’re only doing it now because they only just accepted our data.”

  “Well, if they have to do it like that, they have to do it. Whatever. You think two or three weeks?”

  “I’d say that’s optimistic.”

  The president thought about the implications of the timing. The opportunity for a Fourth of July announcement had closed, but that had always been a remote possibility, and an arbitrary deadline. There were more important considerations. The budget bill, which was the linchpin of the New Foundation package, was still caught up on the Hill, and he and Angela Chavez were having to spend all the time they could find lobbying the waverers in both houses. The G9 meeting in India was coming up in a little over a month. Time-tabling meetings for the fourth Kyoto round were about to start, and the first UN-sponsored agenda discussions were due to begin in Bangkok in November. Benton was under extreme pressure to go further publicly in his commitment to Kyoto. His secretary of environment, Andrea Powers, was becoming increasingly frustrated at his unwilling
ness to do that. And now there was this sudden awakening of the Taiwan lobby. That disturbed him. It made him feel how vulnerable he was to a leak about the Oslo channel—not necessarily the content of the talks, but even a rumor that talks were taking place—and how painful the ramifications would be for everything he was trying to achieve.

  “What do we know about this Taiwan thing?” he asked.

  “I’m meeting Alderman and Tang tomorrow,” said Eales, naming two of the congresspeople who were most vocal on the issue. Eales had had people trying to find out why the lobby was talking up. He had put off meeting with the congressmen in case his interest fuelled their activity, but he hadn’t been able to get to the source of the matter any other way.