going to start costing us jobs, both in terms of production for domestic consumption and lost exports. They’re selling a lot of laptops domestically—in their country, I mean—but they don’t let us into the market, even though we’ve got ’em beat in terms of performance and price. We know for sure they’re taking part of their trading surplus with us and using it to subsidize their computer industries. They want to build that up for strategic reasons, I suppose.”
“Plus selling weapons to people we’d prefer not to have them,” POTUS added. Which they also do for strategic reasons. “Well, doesn’t everybody need an AK-47 to take care of his gophers?” A shipment of fourteen hundred true—that is, fully automatic—assault rifles had been seized in the Port of Los Angeles two weeks before, but the PRC had denied responsibility, despite the fact that U.S. intelligence services had tracked the transaction order back to a particular Beijing telephone number. That was something Ryan knew, but it had not been allowed to leak, lest it expose methods of intelligence collection—in this case to the National Security Agency at Fort Meade. The new Beijing telephone system hadn’t been built by an American firm, but much of the design work had been contracted to a company that had made a profitable arrangement with an agency of the United States government. It wasn’t strictly legal, but different rules were attached to national security matters.
“They just don’t play by the rules, do they?”
Winston grunted. “Not hardly.”
“Suggestions?” President Ryan asked.
“Remind the little slant-eyed fucks that they need us a shitload more than we need them.”
“You have to be careful talking like that to nation-states, especially ones with nuclear weapons,” Ryan reminded his Treasury Secretary. “Plus the racial slur.”
“Jack, either it’s a level playing field or it isn’t. Either you play fair or you don’t. If they keep that much more of our money than we do of theirs, then it means they’ve got to start playing fair with us. Okay, I know”—he held his hands up defensively—“their noses are a little out of joint over Taiwan, but that was a good call, Jack. You did the right thing, punishing them. Those little fucks killed people, and they probably had complicity in our last adventure in the Persian Gulf—and the Ebola attack on us—and so they had it coming. But nooooo, we can’t punish them for murder and complicity in an act of war on the United States, can we? We have to be too big and strong to be so petty. Petty, my ass, Jack! Directly or indirectly, those little bastards helped that Daryaei guy kill seven thousand of our citizens, and establishing diplomatic relations with Taiwan was the price they paid for it—and a damned small price that was, if you ask me. They ought to understand that. They’ve got to learn that the world has rules. So, what we have to do is show them that there’s pain when you break the rules, and we have to make the pain stick. Until they understand that, there’s just going to be more trouble. Sooner or later, they have to learn. I think it’s been long enough to wait.”
“Okay, but remember their point of view: Who are we to tell them the rules?”
“Horseshit, Jack!” Winston was one of the very few people who had the ability—if not exactly the right—to talk that way in the Oval Office. Part of it came from his own success, part of it from the fact that Ryan respected straight talk, even if the language was occasionally off-color. “Remember, they’re the ones sticking it to us. We are playing fair. The world does have rules, and those rules are honored by the community of nations, and if Beijing wants to be part of that community, well, then they have to abide by the same rules that everyone else does. If you want to join the club, you have to pay the cost of admittance, and even then you still can’t drive your golf cart on the greens. You can’t have it both ways.”
The problem, Ryan reflected, was that the people who ran entire nations—especially large, powerful, important nations—were not the sort to be told how or why to do anything at all. This was all the more true of despotic countries. In a liberal democracy the idea of the rule of law applied to just about everyone. Ryan was President, but he couldn’t rob a bank just because he needed pocket change.
“George, okay.