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How did your partnership in a work of fiction come to be?
Elliot Ackerman: We’ve known one another for a number of years, the two of us being alumni of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, where Jim later served as dean and where I was writer-in-residence for a semester during his tenure. We also share an editor at Penguin Press, Scott Moyers. When Jim first had the idea for this book, he brought it to Scott. Scott knew Jim and I were already friends and suggested we team up. The rest is history.
Admiral James Stavridis: I had written nine works of non-fiction by 2019, but of course – like all self-described and self-appointed “writers,” my real ambition was to write a novel. I kept pestering my editor at Penguin Press, the aforementioned Scott Moyers, and he kept politely bunting me off. I think he knew that I could bring a lot to such an effort, but it would need someone experienced in creating and sustaining fictional characters. As Elliot said, he and I have been good friends since 2013 when I got out of the military and met him at a Fletcher alumni event. We’ve had a marvelous time bringing the characters in the book to life, and putting them in an impossible situation – all as a cautionary tale for the world. It’s been a rewarding partnership.
While it’s a work of fiction, 2034 involves many real-world complex political situations—what were you trying to achieve by doing this as a novel?
EA: A novel gives you the opportunity to create the inner lives of its characters. We wanted to imagine a complex, paradigm-shifting global war but we wanted to do it in a way where the humanity of the individuals wrapped up in these seismic events isn’t lost. Even the most high tech war is essentially a human contest of wills, its outcome decided by flawed and complex individuals, and we wanted to show these individuals, someone like Sarah Hunt, a senior female naval officer who presides over the first deployment of a nuclear weapons since the Second World War; or Qassem Farshad, a hardened veteran of the Iranian military, who toward the end of his career finds himself a reluctant warrior. We wanted the reader not only to understand the geo-political and technological complexities of the story, but to also inhabit the emotions and inner thoughts of those wrapped up in this war.
JS: Elliot has it exactly right: this is a character-driven novel, not techno-thriller (as fun as those kind of books can be). The frame I had in my mind as I crafted the idea was the old Cold War novel, “The Bedford Incident.” It is set entirely on a small destroyer in the pitching seas of the north Atlantic at the height of the clash between the US and the Soviet Union. As the two adversaries, an American destroyer (the USS Bedford) and a Soviet sub play cat-and-mouse, the stakes for the world rise higher and higher. The outcome is purely character driven, based on the personalities of the destroyer captain, a German commodore, and several other memorable people. I love that novel, but the frame is very tight, almost claustrophobic. So I played with the idea of expanding the size of the canvas to a conflict that may come to mirror that Cold War – today’s fraught relationship between the US and China.
Many now feel the next theater of war will not be land or sea, but cyber, and it’s certainly a central part of the novel—is the U.S. ready for that?
JS: The short answer is “no, but we are improving.” But just as coronavirus took us entirely by surprise, we should realize a massive cyber-attack could suddenly blind us. It is commonplace to talk about “black swans,” low probability but high impact events that we don’t see coming. I’d say both pandemics and cyber-attacks are “black elephants.” In retrospect they were huge, brooding presences all along, but we didn’t open our eyes to see them. There is much we can do to be ready, and some of it is currently underway. But the shortfalls worry me deeply.
EA: I would only add that throughout the writing process, I wasn’t prepared for the many ways the U.S. is vulnerable to cyber-attacks and learning about our vulnerabilities from Jim opened up the story in chilling ways that I wouldn’t have anticipated as we first began writing it.
How do you think the political divisiveness that’s so apparent in this 2020 election informs our future when it comes to hostilities and potential military conflict with China or Russia?
EA: I’ll let Jim speak to the specifics of China and Russia, but having covered wars as a journalist and fought in them as a Marine, one lesson I’ve taken from those experiences is that the division we’re witnessing at home is not that many degrees removed from the types of tribal, religious and sectarian divisions I’ve witnessed in places like Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. Division leaves any society vulnerable to myopic thinking and in recent years our leaders have certainly stoked animosity at home for political gain, but at the expense of turning our national attention toward the very real threats that face us abroad.
JS: Exactly – the expression “playing with fire” doesn’t begin to get at the danger here. We are juggling chainsaws, and it feels like one of them is going to cut us very deeply if we can’t slow down the pace of animosity rising in the nation today. It weakens us deeply, particularly in the face of rising competition from China, which is much more aligned society than ours. There are historic and cultural reasons for that, and it’s a mistake to oversimplify the degree of Chinese unity, but in comparison to the US, their society runs far more smoothly: exhibit A would be their extremely effective response to the virus, albeit using authoritarian tools we don’t have. The longer term danger is if other nations see that as an advantage and begin to sheer away from democracy. Then we have problems not only at home, but in the world. Fortunately, I do believe Joe Biden has the right tool set in terms of personality, maturity (here age brings perspective), and style. Hopefully having lanced the boil of 2020, we can begin slowly to pull back together. Time will tell.
I would gamble to say most Americans don’t really understand the significance of the South China Sea. The novel make very clear why they should care—can you talk a little more about why it’s so important?
JS: The South China Sea is the size of the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico combined – it is a huge sea space, and 40% of the world’s trade sails through it. It is also loaded with hydrocarbons – billions of barrels of oil and trillions of cubic feet of natural gas. And geographically, China looks at it as the barrier sea it must control to defend itself from long-range US military power (our carriers and strategic bombers). China claims it – essentially in its entirety – as territorial seas. This would be like the US claiming the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Sea as our waters. It is a preposterous claim that has been rejected by the international courts – but China will continue to press it home. It is the single most vexing conflict between the US and China, and thus it is where this story starts – and where a shooting war with China could start in the real world, with a miscalculation by both sides.
In the novel, Dr. Sandeep “Sandy” Chowdhury, the U.S. deputy national security advisor, muses to himself when war with China looks imminent, “The America that we believe ourselves to be is no longer the America that we are . . . ”—what does he mean?
EA: Every country tells itself a story about its values, identity and place in the world. Historically, whether it’s the Romans, the British, or we Americans, when a nation—particularly an empire—tells itself a story of its preeminence that no longer tracks with its true position in the world, such delusions can lead to profound miscalculations. In 2034, such miscalculation leads to a war with China in which America presumes certain military advantages that it no longer possesses. Miscalculation is built into every war, that’s because both sides begin the war believing they can win it. In this passage, Chowdhury is musing that perhaps his side is the one guilty of miscalculation.
JS: I think of Sandeep as the conscience of the novel in many ways. His moral compass works, albeit slightly imperfectly at times, almost lagging a bit as the compass point vibrates and spins before settling and pointing true north. His immigrant’s story is so central to that of America overall, and speaks to our future as well.
At one point in the book, soon after things escalate in the South China Sea, a high ranking Chinese military minister makes this assessment of America: “Our [the Chinese] strength is what it has always been—our judicious patience. The Americans are incapable of behaving patiently. They change their government and their policies as often as the seasons. Their dysfunctional civil discourse is unable to deliver an international strategy that endures for more than a handful of years. They’re governed by their emotions, by their blithe morality and belief in their precious indispensability. This is a fine disposition for a nation known for making movies, but not for a nation to survive as we have through the millennia. . . . And where will America be after today? I believe in a thousand years it won’t even be remembered as a country. It will simply be remembered as a moment. A fleeting moment.”
It’s pretty sobering, especially sitting where we are now, in 2020. Do the Chinese really feel this way?
EA: This novel is as much a book about America as it is a novel about a global war with China. America is not a blood and soil nation, like China, or Iran, or Russia. What makes a person American is that they believe in the ideals this country was founded on. One of the central questions of the novel is how enduring is a nation founded on an ideal? Will it be consigned to only a “moment”, as the above passage suggests? Or is it more enduring?
JS: China has consistently thought in far longer cycles that we do. They literally ask themselves about the two hundred-year future. And we are not good at thinking beyond the next election. Still, I wouldn’t bet against America. We have a vast land of natural resources, access to enormous oceans, huge reserves of fresh water, seemingly endless arable land, the top network of higher education in the world, silicon-valley resourcefulness, and yes, democracy. Is that an advantage? I guess there I’m with Winston Churchill who said “democracy is the worst form of government … except for all the others.” I would refer you to the cover story in TIME magazine from 2017 that I wrote: “Democracy Will Prevail.”
In the novel the Chinese and Iranians are in sync to an extent—spurred on the by the Chinese “Belt and Road” initiatives, and Iran’s financial collapse after the COVID pandemic. How do you think COVID is affecting the balance of power across the globe?
JS: Coming out of the pandemic, there will be winners and losers. I think China will come out strong, and the “Belt and Road” initiative will get a boost. China’s recovery will be “V-shaped,” meaning it will bounce back quickly. Europe and the US will stagger through, but our economies will be damaged and take a year or so longer to fully recover. In the emerging markets (sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and South Asia), we don’t know yet how the balance between their youthful populations (a good thing with COVID) and the lack of strong health care systems comes out. Russia and Iran will both be weakened, and look for China to use the moment to strengthen ties between them and Beijing. For the US internationally, much will depend on how quickly the Biden administration can undo the damage by Trump’s withdrawals from treaties, international organizations, and military commitments. I’m optimistic we can bounce back quickly in terms of global leadership, but there will be scar tissue and our allies, partners, and friends will be watching our domestic politics closely for clues about our internal cohesion as well as international activity. It will be a complicated several years.