Ultimatum

by Matthew Glass

  “You think someone’s picked up a hint about talks between us and the Chinese and jumped to the conclusion it’s about Taiwan?”

  “That would be logical,” said Olsen. “Any substantive talks between us would be assumed to include Taiwan.”

  “You think the Norwegians have leaked?”

  “They’re usually pretty good.”

  “Anything could have happened,” said Eales. “Some journalist in Oslo spots us coming or going…”

  “John, we don’t exactly line up at immigration.” Olsen turned to the president. “Let’s remember, Mr. President, we’re in a negotiation. Everything’s a weapon for your adversary.”

  “Larry, seriously, you think Wen’s behind this?” Benton smiled. “You’re starting to worry me.”

  “It’s like a pressure valve. Mr. President, don’t fool yourself. Wen can turn the pressure up on you just by getting his people to put out a hint to the Taiwan lobby that we’re talking. We don’t have that kind of weapon to use against him in China. But he has it here, and he’ll use it.”

  “I don’t buy it,” said Eales. “Larry, it works against him. Pressure from the Taiwan lobby makes it harder for us to do a deal with him.”

  “Does it?” Olsen looked at Eales knowingly. “Or does it makes us want to do it quicker? Wen’s smart. If the pressure’s getting too much for us to bear, maybe we’ll give him more in Oslo just to get it done.”

  ~ * ~

  Tuesday, July 12

  Eidsvoll, outside Oslo, Norway

  It happened quicker than Pete Lisle expected. Less than four weeks after the last, aborted meeting in Oslo, they were back again. That was encouraging. What happened next wasn’t.

  Pete Lisle opened his briefcase and reached inside.

  “We are pleased to say we are authorized to receive your proposal,” said Lin, “even before you provide the data we requested last time.”

  Lisle stopped, hand on the file with the U.S. proposal. Neither of the Chinese delegates seemed to be getting anything out of their briefcases.

  He let go of the file and closed his case. “We’re exchanging proposals, right?”

  The Chinese pair looked at him blankly.

  Lisle glanced at Oliver Wu, then turned back to the Chinese negotiators on the other side of the table. “We’re swapping proposals. That was the deal we agreed.” Lisle made a giving movement with one hand, and a taking movement with the other.

  “We give you ours, you give us yours.” “We are authorized to receive you proposal,” repeated Lin. “As you remember, last time we asked for further information and the raw data so that we could perform an independent analysis, but out of consideration for the seriousness of the matter and his regard for President Benton, President Wen is prepared to consider your proposal even without receiving this, although we must later receive this as well.”

  Pete Lisle stared at Lin. “Let me get this straight. You haven’t brought a proposal?”

  “Please show us your proposal,” said Gao Jichuan. His English was more heavily accented than Lin’s. “The reason we are here is we understand you have a proposal.”

  Pete Lisle took the briefcase right off the table. “We swap proposals. That’s the reason we’re here.”

  “Are you saying you don’t have a proposal?” said Gao.

  “I’m not saying that. I’m asking you for yours.”

  “President Wen has made a very generous concession to consider your proposal even though the data has not yet been given to us,” said Gao. “To ignore the gesture of President Wen is a great insult.”

  Pete Lisle glanced at Lin. The other man didn’t meet his eyes.

  Lisle turned back to Gao. “We have no intention to insult President Wen.”

  Gao smiled. “Then please show us your proposal.”

  “I’m unable to show you anything unless you provide your proposal as well.”

  “Do you want me to insult President Wen with that answer?” said Gao.

  “I’m not insulting President Wen.”

  “Then hand it over,” said Gao peremptorily. “Give us the proposal and we can move on.”

  “I’m not handing anything over. You provide your proposal as well, like we agreed, and we can talk.”

  “Are you stopping the talk? Is that what you want to do? You came to us! You came to us and said you want to talk and now you want to stop it? The fault will be on your hands.” Gao lapsed into Mandarin, talking rapidly to Lin. Wu listened. It was meant for him, he knew.

  “They know the risk they’re running,” Wu whispered, translating Gao’s words for Lisle as the Chinese negotiator gesticulated. “They know the risk they’re running and they still want to do it. President Wen won’t send us back again. This is their last chance and they refuse to go on.”

  There was silence.

  Lin Shisheng smiled at Lisle. “Pete, you should give us the proposal. Then we can see what happens. Don’t let us finish like this. President Wen has made a big concession.”

  Asking for something he was never going to get, thought Lisle, and then trying to gain an advantage by conceding that he wouldn’t demand it after all. Like that was a trick he hadn’t seen before—about a thousand times.

  “I’m sorry, I’m not in a position to do that,” said Lisle.

  “Then please consult your president.”

  “No. I can’t consult the president on this. I have clear instructions. Lin, we have an agreement.”

  “President Benton would not want to insult President Wen,” said Gao. “I can only imagine President Benton is not aware of the concession President Wen has made.”

  “President Wen would not want to go back on a deal he has done,” said Lisle. “I can only imagine, therefore, that President Wen’s instructions have been misunderstood.”

  “You should consult.”

  “You should consult.”

  Gao smiled derisively.

  There was silence.

  Suddenly Lisle stood up. “This is impossible. We’re leaving.”

  Oliver Wu scrambled to his feet.

  “All right,” said Lin hurriedly. “Nothing’s impossible.”

  Lisle waited, still standing.

  “Let us consult. Give us an hour.”

  “One hour?”

  Lin nodded. Gao stared on, stony-faced.

  “Okay. One hour.”

  Lisle and Wu left the room. They stood in the corridor. “Let’s get out of here,” said Lisle. “I’ve gotta cool down.”

  They strode out into the July sunshine.

  “First law,” said Lisle. “Never get angry.” He was silent for a moment. “Damn these guys!” he muttered through clenched teeth, slamming a fist into the other hand.

  “Were we going to walk?” said Wu.

  “Absolutely! We were walking. I’m not bluffing these guys. I’m not going to bluff them even once, and pretty soon they’re going to understand that. We’re going back in there in exactly sixty minutes and if they’re not there then we’re leaving.”

  Oliver Wu was impressed by Lisle’s decisiveness. And somewhat scared by it.

  “If we walk out, could we come back?”

  “You can always come back,” said Lisle darkly. “Once someone wants to do a deal, you can always come back. Until that time, there’s no point being here.”

  They sat down at a bench across the lawn from the front of the house.

  “They don’t want it,” said Wu suddenly.

  Lisle looked at him. “How do you know?”

  Wu shrugged. “They don’t. I can tell.”

  “I don’t think you can. Not yet.” Lisle’s anger had passed. “That little performance in there, that could have been one last ruse. Wen might not even know. Our friend Lurch might just have thought he’d try one last time and see if he could be a hero.”

  “Well, they don’t want it enough, anyway,” said Wu. “They have to want it as much as us, and they don’t. And they can see that. Everything President Bento
n does shows he’s desperate to do a deal.”

  “Not everything’s visible to them, Oliver.”

  “I’m talking about what is visible to them.” Now it was Wu who was angry. He felt they weren’t working with a strong hand because of the president’s approach. “We shouldn’t have sent Knight. What was the point of sending Knight? They come back once with nothing, we’re not happy, we send Knight. It’s like begging. Way too fast.”

  “That was my idea,” said Lisle.

  Wu looked at him in surprise.

  “I don’t think we’d have even got what we’ve got if we hadn’t sent Knight.”

  “What have we got?”

  Lisle smiled. “Listen, Dr. Wu, at this stage, we’re not trying to do a deal. We’re trying to see if they’re serious enough to want to do one.”

  “And you think we’ll be able to tell that?”

  Pete Lisle looked at his watch. “I think, in about fifty minutes, we’ll have a pretty good idea.”

  They went back in when the hour was up. There was no sign of Lin or Gao in the room. Wu looked at Lisle questioningly. The other man smiled. “I’m going to be firm with these guys, but I’m not crazy.” They waited. Half an hour later, Lin and Gao turned up.

  Lisle watched them expectantly. Gao reached into his briefcase, pulled out a file, and handed it to Lin. Lin put it down on the table.

  “That’s the proposal of the Chinese government?” asked Lisle.

  Lin nodded.

  Lisle pulled the U.S. proposal out of his briefcase and placed it on the table as well. He left his hand flat on the folder.

  “Now, just so we’re all clear. This is not a commitment by the government of the United States. Nothing in this paper represents a commitment by the government of the United States until a final agreement is reached between our two governments, at which time, only the conditions in the final agreement will be those to which the government of the United States is committed. If there is no such final agreement, nothing in this paper represents a commitment by the government of the United States as the basis for any future discussions.” Lisle paused. The conditions were set out explicitly at the head of the paper. It was the oldest trick of the negotiating book for one party to pocket a suggestion made by the other as part of a proposal, despite refusing to agree to anything else, and to try to use that as the starting point for negotiations in a future round. “Do you understand these conditions, gentlemen? Do you accept them?”

  Lin nodded. Gao didn’t respond.

  “The same conditions are true for our paper,” said Lin.

  “That’s fair,” said Lisle. “We will read your paper on that basis. Now, what we’ve agreed—again, just to be clear—is that we will look at the two papers and we will then work together to produce an integrated version with the differences between us in brackets. Once we’ve done that, we will negotiate only on the parts in brackets. Are you still comfortable with that as the process?”

  Lin nodded.

  “Good. Then we’ll proceed on that basis.”

  Lisle pushed his file across the table toward Lin. Lin pushed the Chinese proposal in the opposite direction.

  The proposal that Pete Lisle had provided proposed a cut of thirteen percent in emissions in the first five years, followed by an eleven percent cut in the second five years, apportioned between the two countries on the basis of average national emissions over the three years previous to the agreement. Other clauses dealt with details of timing, verification, penalties and subsidiary issues. It came to sixteen pages. The document inside the file that Lisle now opened was only two pages long.

  The total global cut suggested by the Chinese side was fourteen percent over eight years. The apportionment between the two countries was according to GDP per capita. But the sting in the tail came when Pete Lisle turned to the second page. An additional weighting was to be applied in the apportionment, reflecting total emissions per capita over the previous fifty years, on the grounds that emitted carbon dioxide remained in the atmosphere for at least this period.

  Pete Lisle didn’t know—he would have to provide the numbers to Jackie Rubin in Washington so the figures could be analyzed—but he was guessing that if that weighting was applied, China probably wouldn’t have to cut anything at all.

  ~ * ~

  Saturday, July 30

  Lake Palace Resort, Udaipur, India

  Joe Benton glanced across the table at President Wen. It was a huge round table, and another seven world leaders sat around it, each backed by entourages of a dozen or more people.

  It was the first G9 to be hosted by India, which had been admitted to the club four years earlier. Consciously adopting the role of spokesperson for the still-developing world, the Indian government had stated that the focus of the meeting would be threefold: the final liberalization of trade in agricultural products, which would require termination of the remaining subsidies in developed countries; transition to a new patent regime for genetically modified crops; and support for environmental refugees by reception countries in the developing world, most of which lacked the resources even to manage the internal migrations being forced upon them by climate change. In the days before the meeting, as if to make the point, an early monsoon had put almost a fifth of the Bangladesh land surface under water and sent another four million refugees streaming toward the Indian border to join the estimated twenty million who were already living on the other side. Terrible scenes had taken place along the border until world opinion had forced the Indian government to let the refugees through. No one was prepared to admit it yet, but everyone knew that few of them would ever go back. Joe Benton had come armed with a generous aid package for the Bangladesh refugees and he planned to use his announcement of the funding as a spur to the other governments of the G9 to address the problem on a systematic scale. But the most important part of the meeting, for him, wouldn’t take place in the main meeting hall in the presence of eight other leaders and two hundred staff. It would take place in a private discussion, scheduled for later that day, between him and President Wen.

  In Oslo, Pete Lisle and Oliver Wu had been negotiating intensively with Lin and Gao for nearly three weeks.

  The initial proposals were a million miles apart. For the first few days the two pairs of negotiators ignored this as they worked on creating an integrated document with an agreed scope and set of clauses, leaving all the differences in brackets. This itself had proved a demanding task. The Chinese proposal, for example, had said nothing about verification, while the U.S. paper offered suggestions about the method, frequency and depth. Should verification go into the paper at all, and if so, what level of detail was appropriate? Eventually the two sides agreed that the paper should include verification as an item, but every specific clause on the subject in the U.S. paper ended up in brackets, like so much else, to be negotiated later. The integrated paper that emerged out of those first days was little more than a framework on which these sets of brackets could be hung. Yet those early days brought other benefits. By working together without having to settle the important differences, the two pairs of negotiators got to know each other. Solving a problem together—even a trivial problem over wording or location in a text—builds trust and a sense of shared purpose. Lisle tried to find ways of engaging Gao. He had forced him to back down when Gao claimed the Chinese government wouldn’t provide a proposal, and Gao had lost face. Lisle wanted to repair that damage, but it wasn’t easy. He made a point of giving in to Gao on a number of small issues. Gao remained aloof. Lin, on the other hand, needed no encouragement. He had obviously been embarrassed by the charade over the proposals and was relieved to be working collaboratively, and he found every means of letting Lisle and Wu know short of actually saying it.

  By day six, there was a single paper, approved by Olsen in Washington and, Lisle assumed, by whoever Lin and Gao were talking with in Beijing. Then the hard part began.

  They sat down to start talking about the contested details in brack
ets. As a rule, there are two ways of doing this: start with the hardest part in the hope that everything else will fall into place if the greatest obstacle can be overcome, or start with the easy bits in the hope that early success will make it easier to resolve the biggest problem. Either way, everything has to be settled. Lisle chose to go straight to the most difficult part, the formula for the emissions cuts. A week later, they were still talking about it. As Lisle had guessed, the Chinese suggestion, combining a relatively low level of cut with a per capita apportionment, and an additional weighting for historical emissions levels, meant that China ended up with a two percent cut in emissions over the next ten years, compared with around forty percent for the U.S. That simply couldn’t work, and Lisle said that to Lin and Gao at the beginning. They asked for a counterproposal. Lisle wouldn’t give them one—they would take the new proposal and pocket it, so that he would have given something away while getting nothing in return. If he was going to provide a counterproposal to their position, he asked them to provide a counterproposal of their own to the U.S. position. They refused, saying the U.S. position was so historically unfair there wasn’t any way even to begin to address it. Lisle tried to explore ideas without putting anything in writing. What if he agreed to consider taking some account of GDP per capita— would they agree to remove the weighting for historical emissions? Would they increase the total size of the cuts? Lin spoke about the historical injustice of a developed country asking for equivalence from a developing country. Wu asked if they would agree to equivalence if China was considered a developed country. A futile debate ensued, taking the best part of a day, over the definition of a developed versus developing country and whether China should be considered one or the other. Lisle asked for an exchange of counterproposals once more. Lin said no counterproposal was possible until the American position became more realistic. After a couple more days of this, in consultation with Olsen in Washington, Lisle decided to give the Chinese side a new proposal incorporating a number of concessions as a means of seeing whether they could unlock the process. They realized the Chinese would pocket the proposal but the concessions were ones which Lisle knew he would have to make anyway. Predictably, Lin and Gao welcomed the concessions and then said the proposal was still so far from acceptable that they couldn’t come back with anything new from their side. They asked for another proposal. That triggered one of Lisle’s rules of negotiations. You can let the other side pocket something once, but never more than that. You can’t give them another proposal until you get a proposal back. Six more days of talks went nowhere.