- On more than one occasion.

We've welcomed guests to the show who engage in speculative or useful fiction.

Today's guests are the latest, their new book titled 2034 looks at what a war between the United States and China might look like in the not so distant future.

They are Elliot Ackerman and Admiral James Stavridis.

This week on Story in the Public Square.

(bright upbeat music) Hello, and welcome to a story in the public square, where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Lewis from the Pell center at Salve Regina university.

- And I'm G.Wayne Miller with the Providence journal.

- This week, we're joined by two accomplished authors who have collaborated on a remarkable new book, 2034, a novel of the next world war.

Admiral James Stavridis spent more than 30 years in the United States Navy with assignments that included the commander of us Southern command and Supreme allied commander at NATO and Elliot Ackerman is an accomplished author who has been a finalist for the national book award.

Earlier in his life he served as United States Marine and was a white house fellow.

Gentlemen, thank you both so much for being with us.

- What a pleasure .

Thanks Jim.

- Well 2034, again, is the book a novel of the next world war I'd mentioned before we started recording that once I picked it up, I couldn't put it down.

Admiral, would you like to just give us sort of that 30,000 foot overview of what the book is?

- Let me actually spin the question slightly about why this book and then Elliot, I think has the best grasp on the characters.

So I'll start by just saying people, ask me why a novel and the answer is I came to write a novel about the future by looking at the past.

And what I mean by that, Jim, is that I looked at this very rich body of cold war literature from the US Soviet times.

Dr.

Strange, Love on the Beach, the Bedford Incident, red storm, rising on and on.

And it occurred to me that one of the reasons we avoided stumbling into an actual war, why did it stay a cold war was because we could imagine how terrible the consequences would be.

So, I had this idea of writing a cautionary tale, I read cold war literature, took it to my publisher, my editor, Scott Moyers, knowing that I had never written a novel.

This is my 10th book, but first novel Scott Moyers suggested a collaboration between myself and a truly accomplished novelist finalist for the national book award.

My very good friend and fellow Fletcher graduate, Elliot Ackerman.

So if I could, I'd turn to Elliot and sketch the characters, which in many ways sets up the novel.

- Elliot - Yeah, sure.

Just sort of, as Jim mentioned, we already, before this book came about shared an editor at penguin press and we also both are graduates from the Fletcher school of law and diplomacy.

And when the Admiral was the Dean there, he had me come and serve as the writer in residence for one semester.

And I bring that up because when he sent me an email, I said, what are my duties going to entail?

There's a list of bullets.

And one of the bullets was talk with the Dean about books when he feels like it.

We already had a friendship and I think very much knew one another sensibilities.

When it came to the types of books we enjoyed reading and the types of books, we both wrote, and on this book, we were immediately in alignment that we wanted a story that obviously engaged with all of these geopolitical themes, but one that was character driven and really structured.

The book is structured around five principle characters.

And I just kind of mentioned that to you because it gives you an entry point to the book.

So, when the book opens you meet the first of those characters and she is Commodore Sarah Hunt, a career female Navy officer, you meet her she's on the bridge of her ship, the USS John Paula Jones.

And she is leading two other ships on a freedom of navigation patrol through the south China sea, which are contested waters, at least from the Chinese point of view, the Chinese claimed them to be territorial waters.

Whereas the rest of the international community certs that they are in fact international waters.

And this is a body of water that is half the size of the continent of the United States.

It's vast.

So we today run these front of navigation patrols and all one of these patrols Commodore Hunt comes across a fishing trawler.

That seems to be in duress with dark smoke billowing off of the bridge.

And she goes to investigate when she goes to investigate, she finds out that it is anything but a fishing troll.

So, now sort of cut to halfway around the world, the street above The Strait of Hormuz, to body of water, that parts Iran.

And we meet the second of our principal characters and that is Marine, fighter, pilot, Major Chris Wedge Mitchell.

And he is flying in a state of the art stealth fighter right up against Iranian airspace.

And he is lamenting the fact that, he doesn't really feel like much of a pilot at all because these new aircraft, like they basically fly themselves.

And just as his sort of lamenting at this golden age of aviation has finished, his aircraft literally begins to fly itself.

The controls are non-responsive and it diverts into Iranian airspace on a glide slope down to bond or boss airfield in Iran.

Now we go to our third principle character who is in the white house, and that is Dr. Sandeep Chowdhury a first-generation Indian American who is working on the national security council staff.

And he is monitoring these two developing crises, the one in the south China sea and the one above The Straits of Hormuz simultaneously when his telephone rings on the other end of the line, is our fourth principle character, which is Admiral Lin Bao a Chinese Admiral and the military attache to the United States.

And he has a message for Chowdhury and the white house, which is these two incidences are in fact not unrelated.

They are interrelated that the Chinese government will no longer endure these freedom of navigation patrols for the south China sea.

And at that moment, a massive cyber attack is launched on the United States in which basically the entire Eastern seaboard is in effect blinked.

The power goes off, it comes right back on.

And when the power does come back on, things aren't working as they once did.

And that basically no spoilers that's basic sort of the first 20, 30 pages of 2034.

You know, I would only add that when the second chapter opens you meet the last and fifth principle character in the book, which is Brigadier Qasem Farshad And he is a veteran of the Iranian paramilitary Coots force.

And when Wedge is forced down on bond or boss airfield waiting for a ham on the tarmac is this bristled Iranian general, who is a veteran of the forever wars, except he fought on the opposite side of the United States.

In places like Iraq and Syria and Afghanistan, certainly through those five characters as the reader you're taken into this world of 2034, as we watched the most powerful nations on the globe, kind of sleepwalk into a massive war.

- So we're gonna do our best today to avoid any spoilers because the book is really worth the read Admiral.

You mentioned why you wanted to tell this story or this kind of story, I guess the question that leaps to mind given your background, given your career in the United States Navy, are you worried that this is a path that we're on?

Is there some sort of change in the way America engages with the world that your advocacy is the wrong word, that you're talking about in this book.

- I'm very worried and I'm worried because of current events, we see China and the United States with a rich basket of disagreements, cyber, trade.

tariffs, human rights, the treatment of Wiggers, governance of Hong Kong.

It goes on and on, and it keeps coming back to the south China sea to this dispute over this enormous body of water, full of oil, gas, fisheries, surrounded by vulnerable neighbors.

It's a dangerous fact set.

And then secondly, Jim, I think that history is against us.

And what I mean by that, I'm sure you've had on this show, Graham Alison of Harvard university, who wrote a terrific book called Destined For War, can the US and China avoid the Thucydides's trap?

the Thucydides's trap, named after the ancient Greek historian.

I know that because I'm ancient and Greek, (both laughing) that Thucydides's trap is the situation in which an established power is challenged by a rising power in a global situation.

He goes back 2,500 years ago to Athens and Sparta and plays it forward.

And out of 18 instances, two-thirds of the time established power, rising power leads to a global war.

When did it happen last?

A hundred years ago, established power, great Britain, rising power Kaiser's Germany.

How'd that turn out ?

Well, world war one, great depression, world war two, call it 80 million dead in the 20th century.

So history is against us.

The Factset is against us.

What I wanna do is sound a call that says if we don't figure out how to reverse engineer this thing, how to look out 10 to 15 years and walk back to the present and make changes both on our side and on Beijing's side, the chances are way better than even that we will end up in a catastrophic war.

That's what we wanna avoid.

- Elliot, the Admiral spoke at the beginning of the power of story in shaping opinion, decided many of the various works during the cold war.

Talk about the power of a novel in terms of storytelling, in terms of both informing the public.

This is the course all in addition to scholarly research and other papers of life, but the novel has a unique power.

Talk about that.

You're a novelist.

- Well, I think one of the things that the novel really does that other mediums don't effectively do is it really allows you to plot the interior lives of characters in a way that you can't necessarily do in film, for instance.

So, again, the story that we're telling, with the characters such as Admiral Lin Bao, this career Chinese Naval officer or custom far shot, a hard fit in veteran of the forever wars who fought on the Iranian side.

And these are individuals who at first blush might seem very foreign to readers, might seem to even be antagonistic of the U S interests.

But I would tell you, in the writing of this book, I think I speak for, I would say I speak for both of us where we found, really deep connections with many of these characters who at least on the outside don't resemble us.

So, you know, again, I'm a veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

There are plenty of overlaps between myself and cussing far shop, just like there are also plenty of overlaps between myself and Major first Wedge Mitchell, who was a Marine fighter pilot.

So I think what the novel does is by mob mapping, the interior lives of the characters.

It also allows the reader to find those same areas of overlap.

And I hope that, anyone picking up this book would see loud and clear that, there's no villain in this book in terms of the characters.

our ambition was very much to draw five sympathetic characters so that when you are reading the chapters that are told from the perspective of Lin Bao, he, as a character is stepping onto the stage and he's making his case to you, the reader.

Except though he's making his case before God.

And so really if there's a villain in this book, the only villain is war itself.

And that's something that we clearly needed to avoid.

And simply because you mentioned the cold war, And I think that we had told many stories in books and in films, as we alluded to during the cold war and centered our Soviet counterparts.

And although we couldn't agree upon much, the one thing all of the imagining we did on that conflict led us to, was a conclusion that neither us nor the Soviets wanted to fight that fight.

And I don't think the same amount of imaginative work has gone into imagining what a conflict with China would look like.

- We always like to talk craft on this show and Admiral, let me start with you.

What was the process of collaboration like between you and Elliot?

How did it work?

How did it unfold?

Was it meeting in person drafts back?

Give us that overview and then Elliot, you can chime in after the Admiral finishes.

- Yeah, I think there's no set path for collaborating on writing, be it non-fiction or fiction.

And I'll describe ours with the point being made that there are a lot of different ways you could do this.

I had the initial idea and I wrote a detailed outline, took it to my editor who said, in effect, Stavridis you're a nice guy.

You've written nine books, but you're not a novelist.

Let's find a novelist you can work with.

And I was lucky that it was Elliot.

And by the way, our editor had no idea that we had fairly deep pre-existing relationship.

So for us, it was, I would say a very joyful collaboration given particularly the subject matter of the book that somewhat ironic.

Anyway, we had the detailed outline and then we did get on the phone, get on Skype.

This is during pandemic times, of course, and we're going back and forth.

And we agree verbally on the first chapter and there's only six chapters in the book and a code up.

So we agreed verbally on the characters and the sketch.

And then Elliot took the first crack at it, did a terrific job.

And then he, and I just went back and forth till we were both happy with the first chapter and then rinse and repeat six more times go through sketch meetings, if you will, discussions, where are these characters going?

And we didn't have, I wouldn't say a precise idea how the storyline was gonna turn out, but it landed fairly close to the broad strokes of the initial outline that I had.

Elliot, what can you add to that?

- Yeah, I would stop writing that.

So, we had sort of the, an overall conception of the book we sat down and met and we knew what the first chapter was going to be, outlined it in a great deal of detail.

And then again, like I think a good analogy is we would sketch it out.

so all the lines were on the sheet of paper and someone will go color first.

I would sort of be the first one to color and then the Admiral would color and we'd go back and forth until we sorta liked how it looked, I think, but one of the joys of writing a novel in my experience doing it is that surprising things happened.

It's one of the reasons I like doing my work is I'll be sitting there at my desk one day and the characters will be taking on this life of their own.

And they will do things that literally surprise you or, again, no spoilers, but there's, for instance, Wedge likes to smoke Marlboro reds, and that becomes significant in the book in ways that, we could never have sat there and plot it out.

It's just, he starts doing things.

And then we start to see what he or what other characters in the book are doing.

And to me, that's always kind of the fun of fiction is that the people that you create in the book really come alive and they start doing some of the work for you.

- Thanks.

I'll add one thought to that, which is just when we were getting ready to start the book tour, when the book came out, I hadn't really sat and read the book cover to cover since we'd written it and sort of sent it off to the editor, it's about a year process from when you send that final draft.

And so I thought, well, I'm going on a book tour I better reread this thing.

And I read the whole thing.

And here's my point.

By the end of the book, I was very emotional about the ending of a couple of these characters that was deeply felt to me.

And I hope other readers have that reaction.

And by the way, Admiral Lin Bao, perhaps it's counterintuitive because there's a woman surface warfare destroyer officer whose career looks fairly like mine.

She commands enterprise carrier strike group, as I did for example, but that character who touched me the most and has stayed with me the most is the Chinese Admiral, Lin Bao for a variety of reasons.

He's complicated.

He's stuck in Washington and doesn't wanna be there.

I had six tours of duty in the Pentagon.

All he wants to do is get back to sea.

I've been there.

And I think he also wanted then to become an educator at the end of his life.

And again, as Elliot said, it surprised me how emotional and how deeply felt the characters became to me by the end of our creative process.

- Sir, I found the book, not just a emotional book, provocative on a lot of levels.

Elliot, let me ask you about this.

There's I guess a bit of a secondary character.

Who's a retired Indian Admiral and he among a couple of characters makes reference to the idea that the United States isn't what the United States once was or what the Americans think the United States is.

And there was a sort of, there's a lot to unpack in that, in terms of what that says about America's role in the world, that what we did play and the role that we've played more recently.

And I'm wondering as you write that book, is that faithfully trying to project what an Indian Admiral might think about the United States circuit 2034, or is that also an implicit critique about some recent American foreign policy decisions?

- Well, I think it's a process of trying to stand in the shoes of someone else.

So in writing that character Admiral Patel, it's the idea of, in 2034, what would an Indian Admiral see when they looked back at the trajectory of American policy over the last, 30, 40, 50, or even a hundred years.

And you get that critique in the book that doesn't necessarily say that you mean that, the Admiral and I are trying to be didactic and say, this is how it is.

We're basically trying to give the reader the also the ability to kind of hear the story from a number of vantage points and also to interrogate, I think, ideas that are interesting to us, the Admiral mentioned the Thucydides's trap, right?

The idea of that you have an emerging power that challenges, or a rising power that challenges an established power.

And so the last time we saw that obviously was Great Britain in Germany, in the second world war.

I think one thing that's interesting is if we look back at the last 100 years, right, we can say the last 100 years have certainly been an American century.

And there were an American century that was forged in the configuration of these two European wars, the first and the second World War.

And those rewards at the United States did not start but the United States certainly finished them.

We finished them to our great benefit and the result has been this pox Americana.

So I think, when we start interrogating some of those ideas, like Thucydides's trap, right?

There's this assumption that exists.

I think when you begin reading the book and also on assumption Thucydides's trap, right?

Which is that you have a rising power that we said, Germany, challenging, established power Britain.

Well, who won that war ?

Wasn't Germany and are either it wasn't really Britain, Britain didn't come out in the mid 20th century.

That was the United States.

We won that war and it wasn't a war that we started.

So, these are the conversations that we're having as we're writing the book, they're the ideas and the themes that come up.

And it's not, again, it's not to be didactic, but it's to try to engage with the reader and tell the story that is character driven, But it's also getting at some of these larger macro political themes that we need to engage with.

If we're gonna be talking about what the world looks like in 2034, - Let me add to your point, Jim.

Yes, in terms of, if you look at the trajectory of the American political system and the tensions and the way things are pulling us apart today, that is very much a woven into the fabric of the book.

And remember in the book 2034, the president of the United States is neither a Republican nor a Democrat.

Why is that?

Because these two political parties are pulling each other apart, pulling us apart.

The extremes are dominating.

And I have two daughters who are millennials, both married to millennials.

They look at both political parties and just shake their heads.

We sometimes think that somewhere in the constitution, it says there shall be two political parties.

One shall be Republican.

The other shall be democratic.

It's not in there, news flash.

We didn't start with Republicans and Democrats.

We started with wigs, nationalists, Federalists.

We end up eventually with Republicans and Democrats, I would say by 2034, 50/50 chance, one of these two political parties is gone.

Maybe two, we'll see.

And it's legitimate to say, nah, it's too soon.

That's more like mid-century maybe, but I'll make a fearless prediction on the show that the Republican, nor the democratic party survives this century.

- Wow, well sir, we've got about four minutes left in the show here, and we could probably spend a week talking about this question, but I'm going to call it a troubling scenario that 2034 paints for the reader, what do American leaders and our allies need to do in the next 13, 14 years to make sure that that does not become a book of prediction?

- We start by honestly recognizing the high chance that this could happen and I've used the expression before, but we then need reverse engineer ourselves to the present.

And therefore we need a plan.

And a plan has elements in it.

One is military competence ensuring we don't fall too far behind in artificial intelligence and cyber.

As an economic component that uses trade and tariffs sensibly to protect our markets, but not with protectionism to ensure that China opens their markets has a diplomatic component of continuing to tend this garden of allies, partners, and friends.

And by the way, pulls India toward us India as you allude to crucial character diplomatic component, I think there is a communications component where we talk about why our values matter so deeply democracy, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, gender equality, racial equality.

Look, we execute them imperfectly.

They're the right values.

And then fifth and finally we need a technology strategy distinct from the military technology, but a broad technology strategy that ensures again that we remain competitive with China because I assure you, they wake up in Beijing every morning, thinking about a 200 year plan.

We better come up with a plan to deal with this rising China.

I think that's our best bet to avoid, as Elliot says, sleep walking into a war.

- Elliot, you're a decorated combat veteran of several years.

Do you worry about the toll the wars in Iran and Afghanistan and elsewhere have taken on the American military?

- I certainly have my concerns about the state of the U S military.

I would say those concerns are not necessarily that there has been a toll in terms of fatigue, because I think those wars have been fought by successive generations of service members and so distributed.

But I am concerned about the civil military divide that exists in the United States.

Right now it's so much is our military.

Increasingly our military has become a subculture.

And I think if we'd look at the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the terror wars, I think one of the reasons they've been on for 20 years is that every war the United States is far has been fought under some type of construct.

You know, for instance, the civil war was fought under a construct where it was sustained by a draft, the first ever draft this country had as well as first ever income tax.

You look at the second world war that was characterized by bond drives.

And again, a national mobilization, the Vietnam war was characterized by a very unpopular draft that ultimately led to the end of that war.

The war on terror has been fought and sustained through with an all volunteer military and funded largely through deficit spending.

So there's been no war tax.

And that construct has anesthetized the American people to war in ways that I personally believe are unhealthy.

When we go to war as a country, it should be an existential experience like we should be wanting to get out of the war as soon as we get into the war, because it's so disruptive to our lives.

And now going to war has become very, very easy.

And maybe you can get away with that in war, in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, but a war like a war with China that we imagined is not or that would be undisruptive.

And if the American conception of war has shifted, it makes it even easier to sleep walk into that tactical war.

If we all believe that war is something that other people fight and happens over there.

- Gentlemen, that is a profound and important point.

And unfortunately, that's where we need to leave it.

Elliot Ackerman and Admiral James Stavridis.

The book again is 2034.

Thank you so much for being with us.

That's all the time we have this week, but if you wanna know more about story in the public square, you can find us on Facebook and Twitter or visit Pellcenter.org.

We can always catch up on previous episodes for Wayne I'm Jim, asking you to join us again next time.

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