Ellman nodded. Oakley gazed at her. Gary Rose had told the defense secretary about the meeting with Ehrenreich. The defense secretary thought it had about as much relevance to the crisis they faced as a seminar on quantum physics.
‘So I don’t know what to do. I do know that I don’t want to fight a pitched battle with a hundred-odd ships out there on the Indian Ocean. I’ll do it if I have to, I’m not saying I won’t. It’s my role as commander in chief to make that call and I’ll make it if I judge it’s in the best interests of this country. And if I thought it would put an end to this, I’d certainly do it. But I don’t see how it does put an end to it. It seems to start a whole bunch of other things, and to be honest, I’m damn scared those other things will get out of hand and anything can happen. On the other hand, if I don’t do it, I don’t see how that puts an end to it either, and it just raises the prospect of a whole bunch of other things that might happen.’ He paused. ‘In all honesty I don’t see the way out. And that makes me think, maybe we are in this historic confrontation between two powers, and maybe there is no choice and it’s going to end up in a fight. But that’s a damn depressing thing if you can see the fight coming and you can’t do anything to stop it. It puts us back into the way World War One started. It means we haven’t learned a thing in all the years and all the wars that have happened since then. And I know if something like this starts it’s going to be a long fight and a hard one and I don’t know that anyone’s going to win, but I do know we’re all going to suffer. Economically, militarily, in every damn way.’ He shook his head, then threw up his hands. ‘So that’s where I am. I’ll fight them there on Tuesday if I have to, but I don’t want to do it. I don’t know if history would look on that as a good judgment or a bad one. So that’s it. Now I want to know what you all think.’
There was silence.
‘Mr President,’ said Oakley, ‘I think you can get completely lost in trying to figure out where things will go over time and what history’s going to say when what you’ve got to do is deal with a real, live situation in front of you. We need to deal with that first and let the historians write their books later. There’s a military situation right now and we have to resolve it. That’s the first thing. And if you do want to consider some new way of doing business with China, you have to do it from a position of strength. So in resolving this military situation it’s all the more important to do it strongly, decisively, to win it clean, so they know who’s boss. Let’s win the battle, then start talking about the war.’
‘We might lose the war,’ said Abrahams.
‘We don’t have a war yet, all we have is a battle. Do the battle right and we may not have a war.’
‘Mr Secretary,’ said Ellman, ‘I would argue that the war, if we’re going to talk in those terms, has already started. The conditions for it started years ago when China overtook us as the biggest emitter of carbon, when it became the biggest holder of our government debt. When its interests and our interests became inextricably entwined and we didn’t develop a new way of solving our problems.’
‘Ambassador, that’s your view and you’re entitled to it. Personally I haven’t noticed too many battles being fought since those things happened.’ Oakley turned to the president. ‘Mr President, let’s deal with this first, show how strong we are, then you can start addressing these other things.’
‘Hold on, John,’ said the president. ‘Let’s back up. You said you hadn’t noticed too many battles being fought in the past few years, so why are they doing this now?’
‘That’s a good question. We’re in Uganda, that’s one thing.’
‘That’s a sideshow,’ said Gary Rose. ‘They chose to escalate there. If they didn’t want to escalate, they would have handed our boys back the minute the LRA took them across the border into Sudan.’
‘It depends on what really happened with Fidelian,’ said Roberta Devlin. ‘We pretty much assume the political leadership gave orders to the PIC to bring Fidelian down. They may not have originally planned to.’
‘But by the end they knew they had to take action.’
‘And the fact they didn’t may well have been opportunistic.’
Marion agreed. In her view that was the most likely way it developed. But if it was a matter of opportunity, then it would only have been a matter of time. ‘If it hadn’t been Fidelian,’ she said, ‘sooner or later it would have been something else.’
‘Is this relevant?’ demanded Oakley impatiently. ‘It’s here. It’s now. We have to deal with it.’
‘So you would go an immediate repulse when their carriers arrive?’ said the president.
‘I’d even consider an aerial attack out of Diego Garcia. I know we’ve taken that off the table but maybe we should put it back on.’
‘John, that’s unbelievably aggressive,’ said Rose.
‘So is shooting the hell out of a bunch of guys who were only trying to rescue their buddies. So is sending two carrier strike groups across the Indian Ocean to attack a force carrying out a UN-sponsored mission. And by the way, what were they doing waiting in such close range? Two of them? We can have our bombers out of Diego Garcia over their ships in six hours. Six hours and it’s done. No one will even know about it.’
‘John, I don’t think we’re going to destroy a bunch of ships out there and no one’s going to find out.’
‘Whatever. We issue the ultimatum, they might turn them around. In that case, we don’t destroy them and they back down. That’s good enough.’
‘They’ll be back for more,’ said Ellman.
‘That’s your assessment, Ambassador. What’s the intelligence you base it on?’
‘Nothing we know suggests they’d be prepared to slink away and forget.’
‘Nothing we know suggests they won’t.’
‘Zhang is under some kind of internal pressure over this. He can’t just back down and pretend it never happened.’
‘Or so you think on the basis of a single conversation with one of their ambassadors, if I recall correctly. A conversation that may well have been staged precisely to lead you to that conclusion.’
‘Secretary, is there some reason you want to go to war with them?’
‘We need a fact-based discussion here, Ambassador. If you’ve got facts rather than conjecture to present I’d be keen to hear them.’
‘John, all of this is subjective,’ said Abrahams. ‘Let’s not pretend otherwise. Mr President, let’s step back and look at the options in broad terms. We can drive for a naval victory at Lamu Bay, whatever plan we use, and we can win it. Fine. Do we create an enemy that’s going to look for another pretext or do we put them back in their box? That’s a judgment and frankly I don’t think anyone in this room has the answer. If we choose to go that way, time will tell. Second, we can look for a non-military solution. We can try to negotiate, but so far that hasn’t worked. There’s still time to try that again. Or we can call their bluff, and if it turns out it isn’t a bluff we can back down then. Release their ships, try to work through some kind of deal over our men. Okay, that could take months and personally, in terms of your standing with the American people, you would take a terrible hit. More importantly, does that give them the sense they can do anything they want if they show a little military force? Do they progress to something else? Will we have to do something even more drastic next time to prove we won’t be pushed around?’
‘Ed,’ said Rose, ‘all you’re saying is what the president said at the start. Whichever way you look at it, there’s a risk this escalates. Whether we stand up and fight or back down, whichever way we do it, the risk is there.’
‘And I would say,’ said Devlin, ‘that the fact that we can’t get a negotiation going suggests we’re on the path to an escalation. This military situation is all around a pretext. If they didn’t want it, Dewy and Montez would have been returned to us at the very beginning. And that doesn’t even begin to deal with the economic issue.’
‘Let’s not forget that we’re the ones who created the naval standoff,’ said Ellman. ‘If I understand it, we did that, right?’
‘In response to their ambush.’
‘But that’s an escalation. Is it proportionate? Two destroyers against seventy-three men? Why didn’t we take one?’
‘Does it make a difference?’ demanded Oakley.
‘It may to them.’
‘Jesus Christ!’
‘Okay,’ said the president. ‘Stop. This isn’t helping right now. I’ve got to make a decision.’ He paused. ‘I think from what I’m hearing, on balance, is that I’m with John. We have to look at what’s in front of us. If they’re set on using this as an opportunity to prove something, that they can either beat us or they can stare us down, then the only thing we can realistically do is not allow them to prove whatever point they want to prove. And that means beating them.’
‘Beating the crap out of them,’ said Oakley. ‘Then they can go back to Beijing and figure out some other point to make.’
‘I disagree,’ said Ellman. ‘I think that’s the wrong conclusion.’
Oakley snorted.
The president looked at her. ‘Tell me why.’
‘Listen to us. We’re not looking more than an inch in front of our nose. We’re saying, they want to prove this point, we won’t let them. How do we know what point they want to prove? And by the way, what’s the point
we
want to make?’
Oakley rolled his eyes. ‘I think we know what point we want to make.’
‘Then articulate it!’ Ellman looked at Oakley angrily. She was getting more than a little irritated with his air of superiority. Besides, she had spent the last two days thinking she had resigned and she still believed that she was going to, so her mindset was that she had nothing to lose. ‘Mr Secretary, I believe the way you put it was “we want to beat the crap out of them”. Personally, I’m not sure that’s quite a sufficiently well-developed analysis, but perhaps the president will think it’s okay when he stands up to explain it in front of Congress.’
Roberta Devlin suppressed a smile.
Ellman turned to the president. ‘Sir, we need to be thinking way broader here. What do they want? Not in terms of whether they want to blow up three ships or four ships, but what do they want from this whole situation they’ve created, the economic as well as the military, which I suspect very much they feel has got just as much out of control as we do?’
‘I suspect it’s turned out exactly like they planned,’ said Oakley.
‘Well, if I can use your own words, Mr Secretary, that’s your view and you’re entitled to it. We need to ask, what do they want out of this? What do we want? Where’s the overlap? Or if there isn’t any, where could we create an overlap if we’re both prepared to move a little?’
‘They’re not prepared to move,’ said Rose. ‘We know that.’
‘That’s what they say.’
‘They want to prove a point, and beating us, or even standing up to us and getting beaten, allows them to do that. The point they want to make is they’re not intimidated by us.’
‘That they have military power,’ added Abrahams, ‘to put alongside the economic power they’re already exerting.’
‘Probably,’ said Ellman. ‘If they could make those points, they’d love to.’
‘Well, great,’ said Oakley. ‘Isn’t that just a convoluted way of saying what I already said?’
‘No. Because the question is why? Why make these points about your power? Why now? And what are you going to do with them once you’ve made them?’ She paused. ‘Mr President, we know they want greater say in international institutions. We know they feel they were short changed after 2008. We know they want to be seen as a partner in world leadership.’
‘Then they need to learn to act like one,’ said Oakley.
‘Exactly. That’s what
we
want. We want them to act like a responsible leader in the world. A responsible leader that doesn’t destroy the financial markets of a friendly country just for the hell of it. That doesn’t imprison its servicemen. That works with us on climate change instead of rejecting every proposal because it isn’t enough. But to paraphrase Joel Ehrenreich, they’ll be looking at us and saying similar things about what we should be doing in relation to them. Now, somehow getting those things together, that’s our objective. To come out the other end of this process – and it’s a long process, it’s not one month or one year – as partners solving global issues from one perspective. So the question is, how can this situation help us get there? How do we take this crisis and use it? Not how do we use it to slap them down as hard as we can, but how do we use it to start turning them into a partner? How do we use the fact that they want to make some kind of a point about their power or about their lack of intimidation – whatever it is – to help us advance
our
agenda, to help start making them behave in the way we want them to?’
‘We beat the crap out of them,’ said Oakley, ‘so they’ll listen next time when we start talking.’
‘And that’s exactly the wrong attitude.’
‘And what we have exactly from you, Ambassador, is a whole bunch of fine-sounding theory, and back down here in the real world, meanwhile, we have two aircraft strike groups bearing down and a bunch of guys surrounded in Sudan, and if you think backing down is going to get those guys out then, I’m sorry, but that’s just not the world anyone else lives in. It’s sure as hell not the world President Zhang lives in.’
‘Secretary Oakley, don’t twist my words. I never said we should back down. They have to be accountable. They absolutely have to be accountable.’
‘Well, you don’t want to back down and you don’t want to hit them, so I’d like to hear what you
do
want to do.’
‘I want to give them a way out.’
Oakley laughed.
‘If there’s going to be a way out of this, they can’t lose face. Zhang is facing pressure over this and he can’t lose face.’
‘ To hell with his face.’
‘You can say that, but if we’re asking him to lose too much face, he just won’t do it. That’s the reality. He can’t do it.’
‘Can’t he? Zhang chose to start this thing and it’s about time he learned what that means. I say we make him lose so much of his goddamn face he won’t dare ever come back for more.’
‘And our economy?’
‘The here and now is the military issue. We make them lose so much face they don’t dare touch our economy either.’