New York City
BARONESS JANET DRUMMOND was exhausted. The Permanent Representative of the United Kingdom Mission to the UN in New York had, along with her team, been up most of the night. It was almost 5 a.m. when she finally left the UN headquarters building on East 42nd Street. As she climbed wearily inside the black diplomatic limousine waiting to take her back to her modest apartment in Greenwich Village she couldn’t help casting a glance northwards. There, twinkling at her in the pre-dawn gloom, was the towering edifice of 50 United Nations Plaza, the luxury forty-three-storey condominium where Britain had paid nearly US$16 million for a penthouse on the thirty-eighth floor. It was so near she felt she could almost reach out and touch it, yet this residence was not for her. Instead, it was reserved for the UK’s Consul General and Trade Representative in New York, while she was obliged to commute halfway across Manhattan to her place of work. It rankled with her every time she looked at it but this morning she had other, more pressing, thoughts on her mind.
The emergency session on China and Taiwan had, as she had predicted, lasted well into the small hours. Her US counterpart had, in her eyes, been quite magnificent. Against the backdrop of that famous green and white marble slab, Thomas Kettinger III had delivered a robust and rousing speech, slamming China’s actions in the Kinmen Islands and calling on ‘all civilized nations’ to pass the French-sponsored resolution condemning them.
‘We must, and we will, push back on Chinese aggression and intimidation in the South China Sea,’ he railed, gripping the podium with both hands and staring hard at the Chinese delegation over the half-moon glasses that perched on the tip of his nose. ‘What the People’s Republic of China has attempted to do on Lieyu Island is totally, I repeat totally, unacceptable! That country’s rulers may think that invading and planting their flag on a small and geographically insignificant island the world hasn’t heard of somehow doesn’t count as an invasion. Well, I am here, along with my counterparts, to tell you that it most certainly does.’
Baroness Drummond had watched the delegates for their reactions. Not a flicker from the China contingent but vigorous nods from many of the Europeans and some long faces from the Russians. But in the end, exactly as she had told her team, the vote went the way she had feared. Not even a watered-down version with amendments submitted by Canada could pass. It wasn’t so much that China had friends in that great chamber, it was more a case of interests, mostly commercial. And an awful lot of countries knew exactly where those interests lay.
The resolution condemning China’s invasion of Lieyu Island was vetoed.