May Bonus: Stavridis on 2034

By Josh Jones-Dilworth

Culturati member and keynote speaker Admiral James Stavridis is currently atop almost every bestseller list with his new book 2034, co-authored with Elliot Ackerman.

Jim and his publisher were kind enough to send along the first chapter for Culturati members to sample. To download the first chapter of 2034, please click here.

2034 is off-topic to this month’s theme of The Great Restart but we couldn’t resist a bit of fun on top. Buy and read the book — it is excellent.

I also had the opportunity to sit down with Jim for a short interview about the book; a transcript of that conversation appears just below.

Enjoy!

Like 1984 before it, I’m not going to be able to get 2034 out of my mind, likely ever. Tell our community: why did you pick the year 2034? What was it about that particular time?

Stavridis: it actually started out much deeper in the century, but as I looked at troubling events in the U.S-China relationship, the date kept getting closer and closer. And many of my contemporaries, both active and retired 4-star officers, have said, “great book Jim, but you got one big thing wrong—the date. War is coming much sooner than 2034.”

That ought to worry us all, and let’s all hope the book stays on the fiction side of the NYT bestseller list!

2034 has been called a “a disturbingly plausible work” and it most certainly is. Wow. Can you tell us a little bit about your forecasting strategy or the frameworks you and Ackerman used? The entire Culturati community is looking to the future right now, and wondering what it holds for us all.

Stavridis: both of us, of course, have military backgrounds with specific emphasis on strategic planning. I’ve had six tours in the Pentagon and also served on the NSC staff and at the State Department as well.

As always in looking to the future, begin by looking to the past. How does history inform us? Are there things about the U.S-Soviet Cold War or perhaps the start of WWI that might illuminate the challenges of predicting the possibility of war with China?

I’d also say WWI in particular is quite instructive in the way nations sleep-walk into war. It begins with a catalytic spark of an assassination in the obscure Balkans in 1914 — but by 1918 the Austro-Hungarian empire is gone, the Ottoman empire is gone, and the Russian empire is tottering. Big doors swing on small hinges.

Once you’ve mined the past, in predicting the future you have to ‘follow the technology.’ What are the key evolving tech changes that can cause discontinuities? What can be expected? In 2034, we look at cyber and quantum computing, advances in space that create the opportunity to truly “cloak” targets on earth, and the role of unmanned and special forces, as a few examples.

Finally, demographics is a key element and figures into the plot line of 2034. A young nation like India can be very robust and advance rapidly, while older nations may slow down. Alliances are part of this network of connection as well.

What is the #1 thing that leaders in the private sector can do to help make sure the book never comes true?

Stavridis: I’ll cheat and offer three key thoughts.

One, strengthen all elements of cyber security, both in the private sector and perhaps most obviously in the public space. Two, emphasize the importance of private-public cooperation, especially in STEM and cyber. And three, encourage the government to bend the relationship with China in terms of free and fair trade, but avoid protectionism at home or simply breaking the relationship altogether — down that path a war doth lie.

And finally, what is one thing that you learned about the future that you didn’t know before you set about collaborating on the book?

Stavridis: I learned how quantum computing, which will come into real force by the end of this decade, may utterly change everything we think we know about cyber — which in turn could reinvent global relationships, depending on what nation or alliance system gets there first.

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About 2034

“Consider this another vaccine against disaster. Fortunately, this dose won’t cause a temporary fever — and it happens to be a rippingly good read.” — Wired

“This crisply written and well-paced book reads like an all-caps warning for a world shackled to the machines we carry in our pockets and place on our laps . . .” — The Washington Post

From two former military officers and award-winning authors, a chillingly authentic geopolitical thriller that imagines a naval clash between the US and China in the South China Sea in 2034 — and the path from there to a nightmarish global conflagration.

On March 12, 2034, US Navy Commodore Sarah Hunt is on the bridge of her flagship, the guided missile destroyer USS John Paul Jones, conducting a routine freedom of navigation patrol in the South China Sea when her ship detects an unflagged trawler in clear distress, smoke billowing from its bridge. On that same day, US Marine aviator Major Chris “Wedge” Mitchell is flying an F35E Lightning over the Strait of Hormuz, testing a new stealth technology as he flirts with Iranian airspace. By the end of that day, Wedge will be an Iranian prisoner, and Sarah Hunt’s destroyer will lie at the bottom of the sea, sunk by the Chinese Navy. Iran and China have clearly coordinated their moves, which involve the use of powerful new forms of cyber weaponry that render US ships and planes defenseless. In a single day, America’s faith in its military’s strategic pre-eminence is in tatters. A new, terrifying era is at hand.

So begins a disturbingly plausible work of speculative fiction, co-authored by an award-winning novelist and decorated Marine veteran and the former commander of NATO, a legendary admiral who has spent much of his career strategically outmaneuvering America’s most tenacious adversaries. Written with a powerful blend of geopolitical sophistication and human empathy, 2034 takes us inside the minds of a global cast of characters–Americans, Chinese, Iranians, Russians, Indians–as a series of arrogant miscalculations on all sides leads the world into an intensifying international storm. In the end, China and the United States will have paid a staggering cost, one that forever alters the global balance of power.

Everything in 2034 is an imaginative extrapolation from present-day facts on the ground combined with the authors’ years working at the highest and most classified levels of national security. Sometimes it takes a brilliant work of fiction to illuminate the most dire of warnings: 2034 is all too close at hand, and this cautionary tale presents the reader a dark yet possible future that we must do all we can to avoid.

To download the first chapter of 2034, please click here.

This first chapter is from 2034: A New Novel of the Next World War by Elliot Ackerman and James Stavridis, published by Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2021 by Elliot Ackerman and James Stavridis.

To learn more about the book, click here.