Trigger Point (38 page)

He could ring Zhang again, but what would he say? What had changed in the past twelve hours? Nothing except that their ships had got closer. Maybe Zhang was bluffing. Maybe not. He was probably surrounded by people who were telling him that he, Knowles, was bluffing. If he rang him again, they’d just say that was extra proof that he was. If he and Zhang weren’t careful, they’d bluff each other so well they’d end up fighting a war that would rage across three continents.

But he couldn’t back down. He couldn’t leave seventy-five men in Sudan. If he didn’t get them back soon – and soon meant days, not weeks – he’d be Jimmy Carter. That was it. He’d be Carter.

Knowles gazed at the rug.

What did Zhang
want
?

His ships. That’s what he had said, about a dozen times. But his ships were in danger only because he was allowing seventy-five US servicemen to be held in Sudan. What possible good did that do him? He couldn’t use it as a bargaining chip over, say, South Africa. It was too crude, even for him. You couldn’t hold a bunch of guys to ransom like that and expect the US government to give you what you wanted.

But surely Zhang realized that. So that left the same question: what did he want?

Knowles mind went back to the conversation in the Jefferson City graveyard, to the words Marion Ellman had thrown at him in that cold, bone-chilling mist. She had asked that question. She had said a lot of other things besides.

He glanced at his watch. Then he picked up the phone to his chief of staff.

‘Roberta, did Hale say what time he wanted to talk to me about the other plans he has for this world war he’s about to start?’

‘I’ll find out,’ said Devlin.

Tom Knowles didn’t know if he was clutching at straws, if he was going to make a world-class fool of himself in the process. He hesitated a moment longer. ‘Roberta, before he does, there’s a couple of people I want to see.’

54

THE WHITE HOUSE steward poured coffee. There were cookies on the table and a bowl of fruit.

‘Cream?’ said the president.

Joel Ehrenreich shook his head. It felt utterly surreal. Four hours earlier, he had been at home in Connecticut, looking forward to a Sunday afternoon with a book in his hand in front of the fire. Then came a phone call, a car from his house to a local heliport, a helicopter to La Guardia, a plane that was waiting to fly him and Marion Ellman to the National Airport in Washington, and a car to the White House. Now he found himself sitting in the Oval Office with Ellman, the national security advisor, the president’s chief of staff and his closest political advisor, being offered cream by the president.

The steward withdrew. Knowles had already thanked Ehrenreich for coming, but he thanked him again.

‘Pretty short notice,’ he said. ‘I appreciate it, Professor Ehrenreich.’

‘It’s an honor,’ said Ehrenreich for the second time, although it also felt a little imperious, being summoned like that. The rebel-for-its-own-sake in Joel Ehrenreich, never far from the surface, was already battling with the part of him that was flattered by the president’s call.

‘I guess you’re wondering what the big rush is.’

‘I wasn’t doing anything that couldn’t wait.’

The president smiled. He took a sip of his coffee. ‘You don’t want to eat anything?’

‘I’m fine, sir.’

‘You don’t want to wait. You never know if anything’ll be left once Ed here gets started.’

Ed Abrahams grinned. He had already put a couple of cookies on his plate.

‘I’m fine,’ said Ehrenreich again.

‘Okay. Don’t be shy.’ The president paused. ‘So Marion here tells me she thinks a hell of a lot of what you have to say.’

Ehrenreich glanced at Ellman. ‘That’s kind of her.’

‘She also tells me you probably voted for my opponent in 2016.’

‘Well … what can I say?’

‘Nothing wrong with that. Fine man.’ Knowles chuckled. ‘Almost would have voted for him myself but Ed thought it would be inadvisable, didn’t you, Ed?’

Abrahams nodded.

‘Anyway,’ said the president, turning back to Ehrenreich, ‘I’d like to hear a little more about what you have to say.’

‘What in particular, Mr President? I’ve got a lot to say about a lot of things.’

Knowles nodded, as if that was what he’d heard. ‘You published a book recently.
Switch
, right? I like the title.’

‘It was the best I could think of.’

‘I haven’t had a chance to see it but I understand it’s very insightful. I’d like to hear a little more.’

The president waited for Ehrenreich to speak. Roberta Devlin had had a staffer do a speed-read of Ehrenreich’s book and the president had been handed a summary fifteen minutes before Ehrenreich arrived, but he had no real idea of what to expect now that Ehrenreich was sitting in front of him. Getting an academic down here in the midst of a crisis with the only rival superpower to the US was an eccentric thing to do, as Ed Abrahams had put it when he heard who the president wanted to see. But Tom Knowles was desperate enough now to try just about anything, eccentric or otherwise, and Abrahams didn’t seem to have any better ideas. If it meant there was a chance he was going to waste an hour of his life with this professor, it was a chance he was prepared to take.

‘I’m guessing this relates to our current standoff with China,’ said Ehrenreich eventually.

‘The economic standoff, you mean?’ said the president.

‘Is there another one?’

For a moment Tom Knowles stared. ‘No,’ he said. ‘That’s the one.’

‘Well, it’s not an economic standoff, is it, Mr President? It’s a political standoff. The economic element is the instrument. It’s not the cause.’

‘That’s one way of looking at it.’

‘That’s how I do look at it. It’s an example of what we’re going to face more and more often. At an international level today, we’re in a mismatch. We have a set of global problems – but we deal with them through national governments. Every government – including ours, if you’ll allow me to say so – is perfectly unashamed about saying it puts the interests of its people first. And it has to. Any government that didn’t wouldn’t last very long. But the global problems can only be solved by global, coordinated action. Yet national governments want different actions because their national interests are different. Some want vigorous action. Some don’t want any action. Some have an election and change their government and want the opposite of what they wanted two weeks before. What we end up getting is either nothing, or only the most diluted, uncontroversial elements that everyone supports. But those are never enough to deal with the problem. At best, they deal with the immediate effect and leave the root cause to fester.’

‘Sounds like you think we need some kind of world government,’ said Gary Rose.

‘Dr Rose, it’s easy to ridicule what I’m saying, but I’m not saying that. Although whether we will eventually see a world government – or world governance, I should say – at some time in the future, in a hundred or two hundred years, say, I wouldn’t be surprised. With the level of globalization and interconnectedness we have even today, who could possibly be so naïve to imagine that the governance of our planet is going to look the same in a couple of hundred years? And why should it? If you’d asked the Native American tribes the day before the pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock whether there’d ever be a pan-continental government in what is today the United States, they would have laughed in your face.’

Marion Ellman winced. This was exactly the kind of big, sweeping historical sense of context that Joel loved to project, which would go down in the White House right now about as well as a Chinese fund manager. She also didn’t think it was such a great idea to tell Gary Rose he was naïve as soon as you opened your mouth.

‘In principle,’ continued Ehrenreich, oblivious to the glances Rose and Abrahams were giving the president, ‘I don’t know why something that works for a continent can’t work for a planet. What that might look like is something we can debate. I don’t think it looks like our federal government. It might look like a council that has the right to deal with certain issues – a defined set of truly global questions – in a way that is genuinely binding on everyone. Is that council elected through direct representation, nominated by national governments …?’ Ehrenreich shrugged. ‘The answers are a long way off. But our global problems aren’t. They’re here now. They’re not waiting, they’re growing. And if we don’t deal with them in a global fashion, if we continue to deal with them competitively like a bunch of schoolkids trying to guard their piece of the pie, I’m not sure that anyone’s going to be around in a hundred or two hundred years to even laugh at people who suggest we may end up with some kind of global government.’

‘What are these global problems?’ asked Knowles.

‘I’m sure you know them as well as I do, sir.’

‘I’m interested in your thoughts.’

‘I count six.’ Ehrenreich numbered them off on his fingers. ‘Climate change and other environmental constraints; allocation of natural resources, especially water but also arable land and of course industrial commodities; financial regulation; communications; epidemic disease; terrorism, organized crime and corruption. There’s more, but at a high level those are the flashpoints. There are no borders for these things, Mr President. Every country’s interests in them extends around the world, because every country is affected by what every other country does. Those are the ones over which we’ll go to war.’

‘That’s a big statement,’ said Rose.

‘Dr Rose, you’re a student of politics like me. When the interests of human societies conflict, they fight. They might talk a lot first, they might try to find a way out, but when they genuinely conflict, in the end we return to our primitive instincts and fight.’

‘Our interests conflicted with the Soviet Union and we didn’t fight them.’

‘We did. We fought them in the Middle East, we fought them in Afghanistan, we fought them in Africa, we fought them all over the world. Through proxies, I grant you, but we fought them. And in fact, our interests didn’t even conflict. Our interests were the same, which is why in the end that empire dissolved.’

‘That’s not how I’d put it,’ said Rose.

‘Who will we fight?’ asked the president, who was a lot less interested in the last war than in the next.

‘Us?’ said Ehrenreich. ‘The United States? China.’

‘No one else? Not India? Not Brazil? Russia?’

Ehrenreich shook his head. ‘China.’

The president glanced briefly at Abrahams, then looked back at Ehrenreich. ‘Why? Neither of us wants to fight.’

‘But we will. The global problems I talked about, we can’t solve them by ourselves and nor can they. But together, no one in the world can stand against us. Forget India, forget Brazil. Forget Russia. Forget the EU, which breaks down into its individual states as soon as a serious problem is on the table. No solution to any global problem will work unless both the US and China are signed up to it. You can call it a bipolar world, you can call it a G2, you can call it whatever you like. It may not be the way the UN likes to see it but that’s tough. Only two facts matter. One, any solution to a global problem that isn’t solidly backed by the US and China won’t work. Two, any solution to a global problem that is solidly backed by the US and China – and which they’re prepared to put their economic weight behind – can’t be resisted by anybody else.’

‘And why do we fight?’

‘Because we don’t agree on the solutions. In fact, most of the time we don’t even agree on the problem. So long as we persist in trying to deal with global issues through a competitive lens of national sovereignty, we’ll eventually come to blows. It might happen through proxies, but it’ll be over one of these issues. Take what we’ve got going on right now, this economic crisis. It is a crisis, a historic crisis that has arisen because we insist on forcing our interconnected, single, global economy into a framework of separate national sovereignties rather than managing it through an integrated set of common laws and regulations. Foreign state ownership of our corporations has enabled elements of our economy to become a weapon through which those tensions can be expressed. So now we have a crisis and potentially this crisis undermines the entire market system on which our economy is based. So what do we do? We take certain measures that we think will protect our economy, and they retaliate with others. We’re already fighting, aren’t we?’

‘That’s not exactly a war,’ said Gary Rose.

‘I’m not saying we go to war directly over this. I’m not saying we fire missiles at Beijing because Beijing brought down Fidelian Bank. But effectively, indirectly, that’s what will happen, because it creates the context. We’re in this crisis, and we’re trading economic blows, so we start to flex other muscles. Incidents happen. Where are we in proximity? Uganda. They have troops in Sudan, as we all know. We’re right across the border from each other. Now two of our men have been taken into Sudan. You ask me, we have a hell of trigger for a conflict right there.’

There was utter silence around the table.

‘No? Alright, say the South China Sea. Say they go after one of our planes. They say it was in their airspace, we say it was in international airspace. That happens all the time but normally we shrug it off. This time we respond. They do something to Taiwan, maybe some incident that results in a few Taiwanese soldiers getting killed. Things escalate. Normally they wouldn’t, but because we’re in conflict over this economic thing, they do. No one feels they can back down because the perception of weakness will translate itself into the financial arena and reduce their ability to get what they want. Or the arena of climate change, or epidemic disease control, or control of the blogosphere, or whatever the real issue of the moment is. So we do something, they do something, we do something, they do something – then we’re at war, or our proxies are. You’ve got what you wanted, Dr Rose.’ Ehrenreich paused. ‘If you ask me, Mr President, if I had to bet on a scenario, that’s how it’ll happen. Something like that.’

The president glanced at Gary Rose. Almost imperceptibly, Rose raised an eyebrow.

‘Marion,’ asked the president, ‘do you agree with this?’

‘I think there’s a lot of plausibility in it,’ said Ellman. ‘I do see us trading blows, sir. I said that to you before. If we continue to trade blows then I think at some point the blows are likely to leave the diplomatic arena and the financial arena and get to something more physical. I think Joel’s articulated a somewhat more pessimistic view of human nature than I hold but I do agree with him that there’s a route to that scenario that’s very plausible.’

Ehrenreich shrugged. ‘Human beings fight when they’re in conflict. We like to think they don’t, but they do. You look at every century, including our own. The way to prevent fighting isn’t to pretend that we don’t, but to admit that we do and deal with it by removing the cause of the conflict.’

‘As I said,’ said Marion, ‘Joel’s a little more pessimistic than me.’

‘Mr President,’ said Ehrenreich, ‘you may disagree with me that the issues I mentioned are intrinsically global in scope.’

‘No, Professor, I don’t disagree with you on that.’

‘Then if you don’t, it follows from that – it
absolutely
, one hundred per cent follows, inevitably, logically – that we have to deal with them globally. As one, single, global community. Otherwise, it’s like saying that here in the United States, state governments with conflicting interests can come up with whatever solution they want to a shared problem. That doesn’t work, which is why we have a federal government. At the global level, we need one coordinated, clear, explicit, shared set of objectives that everyone supports through actions everyone is prepared to take. Until we do that, we’re kidding ourselves. Take climate change. If this was a local problem, if one country alone could deal with it, don’t you think it would have been dealt with by now? Years ago, without any of the damage that we all know is inevitably going to happen? Of course it would. Well, if you accept that, you can’t accept that our system of decision-making at a global level is right.’