Ultimatum (60 page)

“Mr. President,” said Larry Olsen, “I don’t think we should put you out there. I’ll go.”

“Larry, you’re the one who said the Security Council vote didn’t matter. And this isn’t even a vote.”

“There’ll be pictures of this. Out there in the real world, no one cares about the Security Council. It’s not real. No one recognizes anyone there, it’s just a bunch of people sitting around a table. But I’m with Jodie on this. I think images of you standing up in front of an empty General Assembly, that’s something else completely. It’ll be bad. People will look at it, and it will say to them . . . America is standing alone.”

“Well, we are.”

“But we don’t want to be.”

“It’s the image,” said Ames. “It’ll say more than a million words.”

Benton didn’t care about the General Assembly meeting one way or the other. If everyone thought it would be better for Larry Olsen to address an empty hall—or a near-empty hall, because surely some people would stay, even if it was only the Pakistanis and Colombians—that was okay with him. It wasn’t the idea of standing up there that worried him, or the emptiness of the hall. It was the reality it reflected.

Where was the support? Not one major leader had come out in public and said they would support the Carbon Plan. They hadn’t even been prepared to say it in private.

He had given them a deadline of sixty days before sanctions would be applied to their countries as well. A quarter of that period was gone. The more time that passed, the less likely it would be for others to join. If he had to apply sanctions to everyone, foreign competitors would simply step into the places forcibly vacated by U.S. business. Withdrawal of American trade would throw the global economy into recession, but that would be nothing compared with the scale of the downturn that would occur within the United States itself. Benton had told the American people they would have to absorb pain, but it wasn’t meant to be pain on this scale, and America wasn’t supposed to be absorbing it alone.

Still Larry Olsen was telling him that he had to wait, that he just had to wait and eventually Wen would make a wrong step.

He thought about the empty hall waiting for him, or for Larry Olsen, at the United Nations. Alan Ball, Al Graham and a host of other people were telling him he couldn’t afford to keep waiting. If he wanted to go back into Kyoto with authority, he had to do it now. With every additional day that went by, the more it would look as if he was being forced to go back because he couldn’t get any support, not because he was choosing to do it. Time was his enemy. If he waited sixty days and went back into Kyoto because no one had joined up to the plan, he’d have no authority at all.

~ * ~

Monday, October 10

Princeton University, New Jersey

The Columbus Day address at Princeton had been scheduled months before. In the circumstances, Benton could have cancelled the speech. Instead, he decided to use it.

He was still waiting on the rest of the world, and the rest of the world was still waiting on him. For four weeks now, there had been a kind of standoff, no one prepared to make the first move. Yet something had changed, if only subtly. People had begun talking about Kyoto again. In the first days after the Carbon Plan was announced, it seemed that Kyoto was dead and buried, and Joseph Nleki had begged him to come back and resurrect the process. Now ministers in various countries were asking why the Bangkok agenda meeting for the Kyoto 4 round shouldn’t go ahead in November as planned. If the United States chose to boycott the round, that shouldn’t stop others moving ahead with it. Nleki was becoming openly supportive of that line. In a speech made in Sao Paulo, he remarked that the only way to overcome the demands of a unilateralist was for multilateralists to continue their work. But the door would never be shut, he said, as if this was some great concession, as if the power balance had now tipped to the other side, and it wasn’t up to the United States to return to the table, but up to those still at the table to decide whether the United States could return.

And when he looked at it, Joe Benton couldn’t see where his support was going to come from. Pakistan, Colombia and Sri Lanka hardly counted, nor did the impoverished countries of the developing world who had offered their commitment. They were signing up only because the Carbon Plan absolved them of the need to take any action and they stood to lose more from cessation of U.S. aid than from a loss of trade with China. None of the world’s leading emitters nor the second tier polluters had joined. Olsen had managed to set up a visit for the president to Tokyo later in the month and claimed the Japanese could well come out in support. But Benton knew that Olsen was just trying to keep him going. He didn’t believe Nakamura would go out on a limb, not with forty percent of Japanese exports going to China, even if he offered support on the Kurils. And he couldn’t offer Japan support on the Kurils because of the effect that would have on Russia.

In China, Wen still seemed to be in control, keeping the screws turned on his domestic opposition. He was waiting, watching as American democracy turned on itself, as its media and its business groups and its unions and its political parties jabbed accusatory fingers and yelled at their president and at each other. He was keeping his head down, doing nothing to remind the world what kind of a regime he headed and whom the rest of the world had chosen to get into bed with, content to stay silent as long as the world viewed America as the villain, seeing how much self-inflicted pain America could bear. If something was going to happen, as Larry Olsen kept saying, if Wen was going to make a mistake, there was no sign of it yet.

The right-wing press, initially so supportive of Benton’s action, was backpedaling now, accusing him of taking the country into a trap, saying that America needed to wield a big stick and that this showed a liberal wasn’t capable of doing it. But his center-left support hadn’t come back and showed no signs of doing so unless he abandoned his position.

He knew what Democrats were saying. Marty Montag, about a week earlier, had come to see him in the White House and told him straight out. He was irresponsible to have launched an initiative like this without lining up support from key allies. And all things being equal, that was right That’s what he would have said himself had he been on the outside looking in. But exactly which allies would have given him support for the plan he put forward? He would have ended up negotiating with them, trying to establish a common position, and pretty soon everyone would have been protecting themselves and their interests and what he would have had would have been another Kyoto, a mini-Kyoto, a pre-Kyoto, with all the problems and constraints of the real one. So he still couldn’t see—much as he told Marty that he wanted to—how he could have done other than he did. And maybe he would fail, maybe in a year the U.S. would have to undo the sanctions and come crawling back to the table with its tail between its legs, but that was a risk he felt he had to take, unsavory and humiliating as it would be if it turned out to be true. But it was too early to make that choice, or even think about making it. Way too early. He wasn’t even thinking about it.

That’s what he said, anyway. But privately his doubts were almost unbearable. The pressure to change tack was enormous. And who was to say he was right to resist? Maybe he wasn’t. But until that moment came, until he decided to change tack—if that indeed was what he was going to do— he couldn’t show a hint of the doubt that he felt. If people detected that, even the faintest sign of it, the pressure would sweep him away. Right now, people had to believe his determination was unshakable. He was going to use the Columbus Day speech to reinforce that impression.

The auditorium at Princeton seated fifteen hundred. The speech was to be heavily covered, and there were a number of cameras in the hall. About five minutes into the speech, an obviously preplanned, silent walkout began. Students stood up and began to file out. Hundreds of them.

For a short time, Joe Benton kept going. Then he stopped. He wasn’t going to give them the victory of walking out while the president of the United States was speaking about the most important issue on the planet.

They weren’t in any hurry. Minute after minute it went on. It must have taken another ten minutes until they were nearly all gone. Benton stood at the lectern, face stern, watching them. As the last of the exiting students made their way up the stairs he began to talk off the cuff.

“Remember what you’ve just seen here today,” he said to those who remained in the half-empty hall and to the cameras that were streaming his image. “That’s what I’m talking about. That path . . .” he pointed up to one of the doors through which the last students were leaving, “we can all take that path, but it’s the path to defeat. That’s the door. Anyone else here, anyone want to go through that door? Do it now. I respect your right to do it. Do it now. I’ll wait.” He paused for a good ten seconds. “I won’t blame you, in fact I understand you. That’s the easy way. Because if you stay with me, I’m telling you, I’m not taking you down that path.” He stopped again. The last of the exiting students were gone. “All right, I’m taking you through a different door. But I can tell you one thing for sure. If enough of us choose to go that way, that easy way, that’s where we’ll all end up going, whether we want to or not. I can only show you the other door. I can only open it for you. You have to walk there yourselves. Now I trust—I trust—that despite what we have just seen here today, there’s still enough good people in this country to make sure we don’t end up going down that other way. And those people who
have
gone, I trust that when they see that, they’ll come back and come through this door with us. And they’ll be welcome. Because it’s natural to want to go through the easy door, but I can’t tell you that we should. And I know we won’t. If I didn’t believe that, if I didn’t believe that was the kind of country this is, I would never have run for office. I wouldn’t be standing here before you today.”

He went back to his prepared speech. As he came off the platform, he didn’t know whether his response to the walkout would play well or badly. When he saw Jodie Ames’s face, he thought it would probably be okay. News streams had cut to the speech as soon as the incident began and commentators were already reporting his handling of it as an exceptional display of presidential poise and steel.

But although he had managed to deal with the walkout, and even turn it to his purpose as a living demonstration of what he was saying in his speech, the episode had shaken him. Right in front of him, he had seen division.

If Joe Benton thought of himself as anything, it was a uniter, not a divider of the American people. Yet he had now seen, in microcosm, the greatest fear that any president can have. He was reminded of what John Eales had said about secession. For the first time, under his stewardship, he feared for the republic.

The second he came off the stage, someone was handing him a phone. It was Larry Olsen, congratulating him on the speech. Determination, leadership, strength. Exactly what was needed in case anyone wondered whether the president still had the stomach for the fight. The message would go not only to the American people, said Olsen, but to the government of China.

Benton realized why Olsen had called. Olsen knew what other people were saying to the president, he knew that Benton’s determination to carry on was a day-to-day proposition. He had taken to giving him milestones— just hang on another week, another ten days, until this happens, or that happens. Olsen feared the effect this walkout might have. He was desperate to get in first, before others could have their say.

“Hang in there, sir,” said Olsen. “At least until you’ve been to Japan.”

~ * ~

Tuesday, October 18

Air Force One, east of Japan

The briefing book summarized the Japanese position on the Carbon Plan. It covered a range of other issues as well. Benton worked through it carefully. Heather was in the office with him, reading a book.

There was a knock on the door. Jodie Ames came in.

“Sorry to disturb you, sir.” Jodie glanced at Heather and smiled briefly. She extended a handheld to the president.

“What is it, Jodie?”

“The Chinese government has just released a statement, sir.”

Benton took the handheld. He nodded Jodie toward a chair and looked at the screen.

The government of the People’s Republic of China views the unilateral visit of the president of the United States to its region as an aggressive act at this time, coming on the heels of his other actions, and contrary to a spirit of fellowship and common understanding. The actions of the United States government are contrary to respect for the Chinese people and their historical sovereignty. Consequently, the government of the People’s Republic of China has decided on the following measures.