PART 5
THE CHINA OPTION
49.
HAD THE SECRETARY OF STATE BEEN DELIBERATELY excluded from our Dormigen discussions, as she would later allege? I saw absolutely no evidence of that. True, the only credible alternative explanation—that no one thought to include her—suggests an almost unfathomable incompetence. In her congressional testimony, the Chief of Staff took responsibility for this oversight, explaining that the Secretary of State would have been briefed before any meetings began in Australia. The National Security Adviser was more direct: “I just assumed she knew,” she testified.
I can attest that there was never a grand strategic plan with regard to who was in the room. One thing just led to the next. The Capellaviridae challenge was compounded by the fact that the principals making decisions always felt that a solution would present itself—that the planes headed for their targets would turn around, figuratively speaking. They believed—we believed, if I am being honest—that something would save us: an antidote, more Dormigen from our allies, or something else at the eleventh hour. Or with one call to Beijing we could make the Capellaviridae problem go away. With the China option on the table, the Secretary of State should have been involved from the beginning. In fact, she boarded Air Force One for the flight to Australia with no knowledge of the crisis the White House was trying to manage. She learned about the Outbreak only when the story went public and Air Force One started doing 180-degree turns over the Pacific.
Imagine the Secretary of State’s surprise and dismay when she was awakened abruptly, ushered into the conference room, and told for the first time that the South China Sea Agreement might be scrapped because China was the only country with enough Dormigen to save the Americans afflicted by a deadly virus. She would later write in her autobiography, “At first I thought I was dreaming. This had to be some kind of nightmare. I had spent the previous week in Tanzania and Kenya. I was still taking anti-malaria medicine. One of the benign side effects of that drug (Malarone) was particularly vivid dreams. What other explanation could there be? Would the President of the United States really withhold this information from his Secretary of State, even as we were flying to sign the most significant international agreement of his presidency?”
Yes. Though I am not convinced that “withhold” is really the right word, nor that gender had anything to do with it, as the Secretary of State has often alleged. In any event, this bad situation was made worse by ongoing turf battles between the Departments of State and Defense and a personal animus between the two Secretaries. The Secretary of Defense had been involved in the Capellaviridae meetings from the beginning, in part because of his close personal relationship with the President, but mostly because he happened to be at the White House on the morning of that first meeting. The Secretary of State, paranoid on the best of days, rejected that benign explanation. The suspicion between these two cabinet members was inflamed by political differences. The Secretary of Defense was a New Republican; the Secretary of State was a Democrat. (The President’s cabinet was a mix of independents, New Republicans, and moderate Democrats.)
To put a cherry on top of it all, the Secretary of State was highly sensitive to being treated differently as a woman. By all accounts, including everything I experienced, the President was gender-blind, in a good way. His appointments going all the way back to his early days in Virginia were always reasonably inclusive. There was nothing to suggest he would exclude a senior cabinet member from some discussion because she was a woman. (He had, after all, picked her for one of the most important jobs in the cabinet.) Having said that, I should say also that the Secretary of Defense was more, well, old school. He had been dogged with charges of sexism for much of his career, including his infamous remark (disavowed aggressively at his confirmation hearing) that women are less fit for senior military positions because “maternal instincts could cloud their judgment in the heat of battle.”[15] That is really what he said; I have watched the video.
Also, one could not help but notice that the President and Secretary of Defense—both tall, fit, middle-aged white guys—gave off a certain fraternity brother vibe. If you were to see them chuckling comfortably as they walked into a room together, you might assume they had just come from a weekly squash game. All of this is relevant if one is to understand the dynamic on Air Force One in those first hours after the Outbreak became public. The Secretary of State had gone to sleep after a light dinner, assuming she would wake up when the plane landed in Australia. As America’s top diplomat, she would accompany the President as he signed the South China Sea Agreement, arguably the most significant international agreement of the twenty-first century.
The Secretary of State had spent much of her earlier career working to reform the United Nations. She had negotiated on behalf of the U.S. for the enlargement of the Security Council and the adoption of an updated charter that breathed new life and relevance into the UN. There was serious talk that she might be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, most likely to be shared with some of the world’s other senior diplomats, for having revitalized multilateral diplomacy and repaired much of the damage done during the Trump presidency.
The reality on board Air Force One turned out to be radically different than the Secretary of State’s serene expectations. She walked into the conference room and encountered a handful of adrenaline-addled advisers trying to manage a situation that was spinning out of control. The Chief of Staff briefed her quickly on the Outbreak and the impending Dormigen crisis. We do not know exactly what was said, other than that the Secretary of State used “inappropriate language,” as she would later describe it. We know for certain that the Secretary of State quickly joined the other foreign policy advisers in making the case that the President must continue on to Australia to sign the South China Sea Agreement. Any other tack, she argued, would alter the course of international affairs in ways that would limit American influence, sell out our key allies in the region, and give a green light to some of China’s most nefarious activities.
These arguments had been made before, but the Secretary of State brought three things to the room. First, she knew the South China Sea Agreement better than anybody on the American team. She had been negotiating the most niggling details for years; she could literally recite the rise in carbon emissions that would result if the harmonized carbon tax among the signatory nations were not implemented.[16] Second, the Secretary of State was walking into the room with fresh eyes. Those of us who had been involved from the beginning were partially blinded by a “fog of war.” We had made decisions, told each other those decisions were sensible, and then made more decisions based on what we had done earlier. The Secretary of State described this as going “deeper and deeper into a maze.” That seems overly harsh given the unprecedented nature of what we were dealing with. Still, the Secretary of State brought new and much-needed perspective to the situation. We were slowly persuading ourselves that it would be unacceptable to let Americans die if the Chinese were willing to throw us a lifeline. This was a moral calculation, not a political one. The Secretary of State dismissed our reasoning almost as soon as she walked into the conference room. “By that logic, Churchill should have cut a deal with Hitler,” she said. “That would have saved English lives, right? Does anyone here believe that would have been the right thing to do? Look out the window, people. There is a reason we fought at Kiribati and Guadalcanal.”[17] By all accounts, she paused and stared intently at the President before continuing. “With all due respect, sir, your responsibility is to do what is best for the long-term interests of the country, and that may well involve extraordinary sacrifices in the short run. Abraham Lincoln was not—”
15
My inner scientist compels me to point out that recent research has found clear gender-based differences in decision making, particularly in life-and-death situations (or the simulation thereof). There is no evidence to substantiate the Secretary of Defense’s assertion that women are less capable military leaders. However, his implicit suggestion that there might be systematic differences between how men and women make battlefield decisions is defensible. Of course, it is entirely possible—and perhaps likely, according to my amateur reading of history—that less testosterone makes for much better military leadership.
16
Unless you are a policy wonk, you may not have any interest in this: One feature of the South China Sea Agreement was a uniform carbon tax to be implemented in all of the signatory nations ($42 per ton of CO2 emission, to rise at 2 percent annually). Commonly called a “pollution tax,” this was a measure that economists had recommended for years as a tool for discouraging the most carbon-intensive activities. The signatory nations also agreed to impose a “carbon tariff” on countries that did not adopt a similar carbon tax—namely China. The net effect was likely to be a huge reduction in carbon dioxide emissions, albeit at a high cost to Chinese manufacturing.
17
As a matter of basic geography, Air Force One was still east of Hawaii, so no one was going to see Kiribati or Guadalcanal out the window. But, to paraphrase the iconic twentieth-century film