“Allow me to disagree with you, Mr. President,” said Nleki. “What you have done is more powerful than that. Take this step now, bring this back into the Kyoto process, sit down with your partners in the international community with the Carbon Plan as the basis for discussion, and there will be no vote on Thursday.”
There was silence.
Benton nodded. “All right. Thank you for your view, gentlemen. I’ll think about it.”
“Mr. President,” said Al Graham, “if I may. I think the mood genuinely is different now. There’s a lot to be said for what the secretary-general is suggesting.”
“Thank you, Ambassador,” said Benton sharply, without looking at him.
At the press conference after the meeting, Benton and Nleki kept things brief. The president said he was looking for any and all ways to work with the global community to implement the Carbon Plan. Nleki said he hoped that the Carbon Plan could form the basis for a genuinely new stage in multilateral discussions under the auspices of the UN.
~ * ~
Afterward, Benton sat down with Graham and Eales and had Larry Olsen patched in on a connection from the embassy in Kiev. He was so angry with Graham after the UN ambassador’s remark that he almost told him to get the hell out and go back to New York—on Nleki’s plane, if that would make him happy—and he had let Graham know it.
“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 with 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.