Announcer:
From the library of The New York Stock Exchange at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in New York City, you're Inside the ICE House, our podcast from Intercontinental Exchange on markets, leadership, and vision in global business, the dream drivers that have made the NYSE an indispensable institution of global growth for over 225 years. Each week we feature stories of those who hatch plans, create jobs, and harness the engine of capitalism, right here right now at the NYSE and at ICE's exchanges and clearinghouses around the world. And now welcome Inside the ICE House. Here's your host, Josh King of Intercontinental Exchange.
Josh King:
The New York Stock Exchange has a long heritage of engagement with our nation's defense, both through a regular presence of every branch of our armed forces here on our floor and as a source of capital for firms whose ideas and innovations keep our country, our allies, and our troops on the land, sea, and air safe, navigable, and open. I mean, think about it. The top 10 defense contractors are Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon, Northrup Grumman, United Technologies, Huntington Ingalls, Humana Harris, and BAE Systems. But to put it in terms we understand here at the NYSE, that's ticker symbols LMT, B, GD, RTX, NOC (formerly UTC before it merged with Raytheon), HII, HUM, and BA.L. So every day, their shares are traded here, reflecting the contribution of capitalism to ensuring peace and prosperity around the world.
Josh King:
So capitalism versus communism, the war of ideas and ideology, both the hot and the cold versions, have animated and driven our world for the last 76 years since hostilities between the United States and Japan ended on VJ Day. Ever since then, the Indo-Pacific Area has remained very much on the minds of war planners. Just a few weeks ago, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin issued a directive based on the recommendations from the DOD China Task Force, initiating department-wide efforts to address security-wide challenges posed by China as our number one pacing challenge, to borrow a little Pentagon parlance.
Josh King:
But our ongoing competition with China, of course, isn't limited solely to military readiness. Here on Wall Street just this week, for example, China's largest private education firms, many either publicly listed or funded by US venture capital, are seeing their value plummet after Beijing launched a sweeping crackdown on the $100 billion sector, demanding that they all become nonprofit. And to take a historian's view, is it sparks such as these that could give rise to a modern day version of the 1914 assassination in Sarajevo of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria that precipitated World War I? It's a question I've pondered as long as I've been conscious enough to watch newsreels of students practicing duck and cover in their classrooms. How will the next world war begin?
Josh King:
The permutations are infinite, and because of that, the war gamers' imagination really needs to be novelistic. And that's exactly what Admiral James Stavridis and former Marine Elliot Ackerman have done with 2034: A Novel of the Next World War, The New York Times Bestseller from Penguin Press that had my son and me riveted as we listened to it read by multiple voices on a long drive out West. Admiral Stavridis is a warrior, diplomat, strategist, teacher, thinker, and often a writer that I've admired for a long, long time. Our conversation with him on superpower competition, the promise and fallibility of technology, the importance of human judgment and leadership, and ultimately averting the next world war, that's all coming up right after this.
Public service:
Board diversity is important. Board diversity is important. Board diversity is important. Board diversity is very important. Not just because it's the right thing to do, but because diverse leadership at companies creates better companies. This is about value, not values. With board diversity, you build better companies. Diversity of thought, diversity of perspective. Different perspectives often yield better outcomes. You need to have different perspectives with different backgrounds to really inform and find the best solutions for organizations. Companies that have more diverse boards perform better. Diverse teams are better performers. That is absolutely true in the boardroom as well. It makes a difference to the employees who work for companies. It makes a big difference for the communities in which they work. Half of this is about building leaders for the future, and that talent cannot be only half the population of the world. What are you waiting for, 50% of the population for some reason isn't qualified? Let's put the smartest people we can in the boardroom, and why ignore people or exclude people for any reason other than that they're not qualified?
Josh King:
James Stavridis retired from the United States Navy in 2013 as a four-star admiral. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis in 1975 and embarked on a 37-year military career that saw him start out as a surface warfare officer, rising to command Destroyer Squadron 21, then the Enterprise Carrier Strike Group, SOCOM, and eventually the NATO Supreme Allied Commander, the role bestowed on Dwight Eisenhower in World War II, before passing command to Air Force General Philip Breedlove and then embarking really on a new shakedown cruise as Dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and as a businessman, working with my old boss, Mack McLarty, and now at Carlyle, the firm founded by a prior guest of this show, David Rubenstein. Oh, and he's also written, among a raft of other books, papers, and articles, this bone-chilling, seriously apocalyptic account of how the next world war will begin, the aforementioned 2034. Jim Stavridis, welcome Inside the ICE House.
James Stavridis:
Josh, it's a pleasure to be with you, and listening to you rattle off all those stock ticker designations, I guess my stock ticker designation would be USN, US Navy. Great to be with you.
Josh King:
Know it well, sir. Let me warn our listeners, there are going to be spoilers, so if you want to put this episode aside until you brief yourselves with 2034, now's your chance to press Pause and maybe listen instead to our non-spoiler, Episode 46 with then Chief of Naval Operations, my old friend from my White House days when he was military aide to the president, John Richardson. But otherwise, all ahead full, Admiral, as the captain tells the helmsman on the bridge.
Josh King:
Let's start with some breaking news. About nine months ago, you wrote this piece for Bloomberg, Too Many Ships Could Swamp America's Military, noting that our amphibious assault carriers could take on some of the missions of our supercarriers, given the advanced capabilities of weapons systems like the F-35. But this morning, sir, comes news that the devastating fire that we watched a year ago aboard one of those ships, the Bonhomme Richard, was a case of arson by a junior sailor. What does this tell you about unit cohesion today?
James Stavridis:
I think it would be a mistake to try and extrapolate from one individual and his or her actions to opine on whether or not the Navy is cohesive. But I will say this, as someone who's commanded at every level, commanded multiple ships, one of the worst things that can happen in a ship is for one of your shipmates, as we say in the Navy. We invest a lot in that term, the men and women we stand shoulder to shoulder with. We're very proud of those relationships. Occasionally a sailor makes a terrible mistake. This is clearly going to be a case of that, if he or she is convicted in courts martial.
James Stavridis:
Let's take a look more broadly. I think the Navy, like all the armed forces, is stretched pretty thin right now, particularly in the case of the Navy, because of our ongoing participation in these forever wars. We've been forward deployed as long as any sailor on active duty today can remember. And now, Josh, as you know well, and to the point of writing 2034 about the potential for war with China, add on to those burdens the idea of the return of great power competition, a great part of which will be conducted at sea. So yes, the Navy is stretched thin. Whether or not this particular individual was under those kind of pressures, we'll know more after his or her courts martial. But we need to be mindful of those pressures on all of our armed forces.
Josh King:
A very different kind of breaking news, we have a bunch of companies here at the NYSE that represent a successful exit from private ownership by the Carlyle Group, of which you are Vice Chairman. Yesterday Kewsong Lee, your firm's CEO, reported a nearly 25% increase in assets under management from just a year ago, to $276 billion. And we're going to get to 2034 in a minute, but another $50 billion in AUM can go a long way to investing in technologies that allow private sector companies to help avert the next war, can't it?
James Stavridis:
It can indeed, and I think all of our investment on the private side, when I say "our," I mean a private sector in the United States, needs to be working with the public sector in the United States to find the right technologies to keep the nation safe. We don't have the model that China does, for example, where there's state-run directed energy that goes into particular systems. Everything in China is a moon shot, in a sense, everything that goes into defense.
James Stavridis:
Here in the United States, it's a balance between those terrific defense companies you mentioned at the top of the show, serving the customer, the government. You've got to find that balance between private and public. I think the role that investors play is to help encourage the search for the new technologies, and these are things we talk about a lot in 2034, cyber, space, hypersonics, unmanned vehicles, special forces. That's where the needle has to move.
Josh King:
Now let's get on to this troubling book of yours, Admiral. I called it apocalyptic in the intro, but that's not really accurate, because while nuclear weapons are deployed rather extensively in the book, the world doesn't end, but it does become a pretty surreal place. That's brought home in the final pages, when Sandy Chaudry, one of our heroes if you can call him that, heads out from the UN headquarters in Mumbai on a humanitarian mission representing the High Commission for Refugees, to of all places, San Diego and Galveston. How hard was it to put pen to paper and write about the destruction of those two cities?
James Stavridis:
Well, let's start with a fundamental fact about 2034. It's not a work of predictive fiction. Often people say to me, "Oh, you've written this novel to try and tell us what's going to happen." It's not. It is a work of cautionary fiction. There's a big difference. In cautionary fiction, what you seek to do as a novelist is set up the worst imaginable outcome to sound a clarion call that if we don't pay attention to the trends that are driving us in this direction, then this novel, this cautionary tale, could one day be predictive. I don't think it will. I hope it does not. But again, in your intro you mentioned 1914 and World War I and the idea that these European powers managed to stumble into a war that is to nobody's benefit.
James Stavridis:
The reason we wrote 2034 was to show a dark future in which China and the United States stumble into a war, thinking they can control the ladder of escalation and avoid nuclear use. Pretty soon, tactical nuclear weapons are used at sea. Next, tactical nuclear weapons are deployed ashore, another strike. And at that point in the novel, again spoiler alert, it's not apocalyptic, but in the real world, would it be possible that that led to a strategic nuclear exchange? Sure, that would be possible. That would be apocalyptic. In this particular novel, the two nations come right to the edge, the precipice of strategic nuclear exchange. They look into the abyss, and they take a step back. Let us hope, A, we never get into that situation, but B, if we do, the nations would be smart enough to step back before that strategic nuclear exchange.
Josh King:
Before we really get into the book, give us a battle damage assessment. By the end of the book, roughly how much damage have you wrought in men and materiel from your and Elliot's imagination?
James Stavridis:
Certainly trillions of dollars, and I think that's unfortunately all too realistic if the US and China go to war. Even if they avoid a strategic nuclear exchange, you're going to see hundreds of billions of dollars of military capital stock destroyed. I think unfortunately you have a likelihood of a tactical nuclear exchange that destroys one or two major population centers, probably a fleet concentration spot like San Diego, California. And certainly the human cost is almost incalculable. One way to think about this is 9/11. At 9/11, World Trade Towers, two skyscrapers, are knocked down. The Pentagon is hit. What was the damage there? Most estimates would say $1 to $2 trillion, when you're done with all the economic impact, all the follow-on destruction, the lives lost, and the follow-on wars. I think 9/11 would be a rounding error compared to what it would look like if we ended up in a war between the US and China.
Josh King:
And then there's the economic productivity. I mean, in Galveston alone, one of the energy capitals near Houston where so much of the world's petroleum is conveyed, is reduced to rubble. What would the impact be to our transportation and energy infrastructure, to say nothing about the damage wrought on China's economic engine in those retaliatory strikes?
James Stavridis:
The bottom line is, both countries would come out significantly diminished in every dimension. At the end of the book, you see it's not the United States is the winner or China is the winner. I mean, this is not Tom Clancy, good guys fight the bad guys, good guys win in the end. This is not that story. I think this is a much more realistic story, along the lines of World War I, where you have all of these intertwined economies that collide after a spark, as you mentioned, the assassination of a member of the royal family of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in an obscure corner of that empire, in Sarajevo in Bosnia.
James Stavridis:
That assassin's bullet in August of 1914 culminates in the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the end of the Russian Empire, and the end of the Ottoman Empire. And all of those nations are severely diminished. As the saying goes, the lights went out in Europe, 20 million dead on a population a third of what exists today in Europe. So don't underestimate what a single incident could do in terms, your point, the one you're making, of the longer term aspects of this. This is not good guys and bad guys. The villain here is war, unintended consequences, and miscalculation.
Josh King:
We recently hosted a seminar on capital markets at the NYSE for students of the Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Whether there, Admiral, or at the Navy War College in Newport, young officers are taught how to prosecute wars, but also to prevent them. How much of the action in 2034 was your speculation and creativity, and how much of it is drawn from established doctrine of the effects of military escalation?
James Stavridis:
It is firmly grounded in current military thinking and doctrine. It, however, then adds to it a dimension of imagination to say, what would it be like, not today but at the time we were writing it, 15 years later, 2034? What would the changes in quantum computing bring? What will artificial intelligence bring? What about cyber? What about space? What about unmanned? What will the role of India be as the century unfolds, a very important and I think surprising aspect of the novel. So this is grounded in fact, and based on my 37 years, as well as Elliot Ackerman's deep combat ground experience, sort of like the old Jerry Maguire movie, we complete each other in terms of our military backgrounds, we brought all that to the table. But then it becomes a work of imagination.
James Stavridis:
And here I'll close by saying, as is often observed, 9/11 was less a failure of intelligence, more a failure of imagination. The idea of 2034 is to imagine the destruction, the pain, the mistakes, the miscalculations, while we still have time to reverse engineer ourselves to the present and avoid the events that are parked in this cautionary tale.
Josh King:
Talking about you and Elliot completing one another, let's do a quick rewind before we meet the other characters, to those first creative meetings between the two of you. How were you introduced to this guy, and why?
James Stavridis:
Let's start with where I came up with the novel idea to write a novel, because this is my tenth book but my first novel. I'd written nine books. I went to my editor at Penguin Press, and I said, "Okay, Scott, I'm ready to write a novel," and he said, "Admiral, you're a great guy, you're a really good writer, but you're not a novelist. Why don't you go write another book of nonfiction?" I was like a little eight-year-old kid. I said, "Scott Moyers, I can write a novel. I know I have it in me. Here's what I want to do. I want to write a kind of cautionary tale about the devastation of a war between the US and China, so I've sketched it out." He said, "Okay, give me a sample chapter. Give me a detailed outline."
James Stavridis:
So I went back and did all that. Gave it to Scott, and he said roughly the following: "Admiral, you're a great guy, and you're a really good writer, but you're not a novelist. But I know a novelist." He suggested the idea that Elliot and I join forces to write this novel. Now, here's the interesting part that actually answers your question, how did I meet this guy? I did not meet him through Scott Moyers. When Scott threw his name out, it was terrific, because I had known Elliot for almost a decade. We are both graduates of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and when I was the Dean at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, after retiring from the Navy, I wanted to have a writer in residence. I asked Elliot Ackerman to be our writer in residence. This, by the way, is Elliot's sixth novel. He's a very experienced, highly craftsman-like novelist. So I've known Elliot for the better part of a decade. We share sensibilities, ideas. We have this common background from the Fletcher School. So the partnership was terrific.
James Stavridis:
We then took my detailed outline. Elliot would then do a draft on a first chapter. I would go back and forth. When we were happy with the first chapter, we'd then modify the outline so it would reflect what we'd come up with. Repeat, rinse, recycle. Did that through the chapters in the book. Worked out wonderfully, and I'll close on this by saying, the book hit number six on The New York Times Bestseller List, number nine on The Wall Street Journal Bestseller List, only because there were three Doctor Seuss books above us, and The New York Times breaks them out separately. Hit number four on the Amazon combined fiction-nonfiction. So point being, very successful book in terms of sales, and Penguin has us both under contract to write a two-book sequel to it, 2054 and 2074, which will follow the storylines and the surviving characters deep into the 21st century.
Josh King:
And the reviews have been stunning as well, Admiral. I'll let you set up the opening scene as we get to know the main characters of 2034. Let's start with the Wen Rui incident in the South China Sea. The time, 14:47, March 12, 2034, GMT-8, as you remind us constantly in the book. Gender aside, I imagine Commodore Sarah Hunt as you. She is after all the commander of Destroyer Squadron 21, the same command you had in the late 1990s. What kind of leader is she, and what are the John Paul Jones, the Carl Levin, and the Chung-Hoon doing out there?
James Stavridis:
Most Americans don't appreciate how big the South China Sea is. This is a body of water. It's roughly the size of the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico combined. Another way to put it, it's half the size of the continental United States. It's vast, and it's parked all around the periphery of China. China claims it as territorial seas. This is an immense body of water. It's full of hydrocarbons, oil, gas. 40% of the world's shipping passes through it. We, the United States, along with pretty much every other nation, disagree with China on their claims of territorial ownership. Therefore, we conduct what are called freedom of navigation patrols. We sail our warships right through what we consider international waters, high seas.
James Stavridis:
So as the novel opens, Commodore Sarah Hunt, coming toward the end of a very distinguished Navy career, is in command of a small flotilla, a group of three Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, and they're conducting what is a fairly routine freedom of navigation patrol, when they come upon a Chinese vessel, apparently in distress. They go to render aid, as they are required to do. Sarah Hunt feels that something is not quite right. She goes anyway, investigates. Events spiral in a terrible direction, and by the end of that day, all three of those destroyers are sunk. They're at the bottom of the South China Sea. Most of her sailors are dead. She survives. She is the opening act, a miscalculation, frankly on the part both of the United States and of China, which result in this conflagration.
Josh King:
Let me ask a follow-up question on Admiral Hunt, because she earns the nickname The Lion Queen. I've just finished two seasons of For All Mankind on Apple+, in which by this quirk of alternative reality when the Soviets are the first to the moon, one of the results is that women rise much faster through the leadership ranks of NASA. Admiral Mike Mullen, the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, recently looked back on his career and noted, "When you have white guys picking, they pick other white guys." He worked to address this as best he could. By 2034, it seems his mission was complete, but what's the current status of diversity and inclusion in the upper ranks of our armed forces?
James Stavridis:
We still have a distance to go, but we continue to do better and better. We just had the first African American male become the head of the US Air Force, first member of the Joint Chiefs. We've obviously already had a chairman in the form of Colin Powell. The Navy just had a four-star woman Admiral, Michelle Howard. I could go on and on, but when you aggregate it, we still are not where we need to be at the very highest levels. If you think of African Americans as 10 to 13% of the US population, we don't see 10% of the admiralty, for example, as flag officers. So clearly, we have work to do. Same with Latino numbers, 15% of the population. Same with Asian American. We're getting better. I would say intuitively, we're better than many sectors of American society, because we got here quicker in desegregation, but we still have work to do.
Josh King:
Our current National Security Advisor is Jake Sullivan, all of 44 years old, and he's got a deputy in the White House named Jon Finer, he of the same age. A lot of Yale and Harvard and Oxford in their resumes. And for the record, President Trump had four national security advisors in four years, in Generals Flynn and McMaster, followed by John Bolton and Robert O'Brien. Where on the spectrum do you put West Pointer Trent Wisecarver, the cadets' one-time tailback, and his number two, Sandy Chaudry?
James Stavridis:
Well, many people have observed, the only real villain in the piece is the national security advisor, Trent Wisecarver, and he is a West Point graduate. As an Annapolis graduate, I'll just put that out there. He is exactly what you don't want in a national security advisor. He hides the ball. He keeps vital information away from Madame President, the first female president, by the way, and neither a Republican nor a Democrat. He manipulates information as it goes to her. So I would say he's the opposite of what you want.
James Stavridis:
His deputy, Sandy Chaudry, another principal character, Indian American, part of his role in the novel is to represent the immigrant experience in the United States. He wants to do the right thing. He's younger than Wisecarver. He's frequently jammed by Wisecarver. He's got child care problems. He's a very real character. I put him there to show that sometimes big doors swing on small hinges. You know this, Josh, that a relatively junior staffer can influence policy, or fail to, at a critical moment. In the novel, Sandy Chaudry fails to get the information across the Wisecarver line, if you will. The president makes a fatal decision. Escalation continues. There are so many moments in this novel where, as a reader, you ought to be just screaming, "Don't do it. Get the keys. Take them out of the car. Stop." But real life has a momentum of its own.
Josh King:
I mentioned, we talked about a little bit, the major defense contractors in the introduction, including Lockheed Martin, which is our ticker symbol NYSE-LMT, makers of the F-35 Lightning II, great plane configured for service in the Air Force, Marines, and to fly off the decks of ships like the Enterprise, whose strike force you commanded. Tell us about the overall awesomeness of this plane and why and how it was rendered helpless over the Strait of Hormuz at exactly the same time that Captain Hunt's flotilla was knocked off the grid.
James Stavridis:
Yeah, the joint strike fighter F-35 Lightning, the rest of its call sign, if you will, is in fact an awesome aircraft. It is battle-dominant. It is fifth generation plus. Nothing else on the planet can compete with it. That's the good news. The bad news is, a lot of effort has gone into bringing it out on time. It is out, it is flying in the fleet. It's being distributed across our alliance structure. The Brits are flying it. Many other nations are going to operate this aircraft. When the novel opens, the most extraordinary thing happens that you can imagine. This aircraft, flown by Major Chris, call sign Wedge, Mitchell, he's right out of the volleyball scene in Top Gun. He's flying this plane, and all of a sudden, he's not. It's being flown by somebody else, and it is forced down over Iran. It is an act of offensive cyber intrusion that takes control of his aircraft. Is that realistic? I'd say by 2034, unfortunately, it is.
Josh King:
Talking about Top Gun, Admiral, I read a remembrance the other day of an F-14 pilot name Dale Snodgrass, who died at the stick of a single engine aircraft at age 72 after takeoff from an airport in Lewiston, Idaho. He reminded me a lot of the father of Wedge Mitchell piloting his A-4 Skyhawk during the Tet Offensive. The Mitchells are a military family, specifically a family of military aviators. You write that Wedge hardly ever felt "it." That pronoun "it" can be used to describe an infinite number of things, but in your context for Wedge, what did "it" mean?
James Stavridis:
It is the feeling that a pilot has in driving that aircraft and physically controlling it. It's the old poem, "I slipped the surly bonds of earth and touched the face of God." Pilots feel that. It's a beautiful phrase that captures what I think most pilots want. We get a fraction of that, by the way, in sailing and driving surface ships. But I think when you're at one with an aircraft in the air, that's it. And that's what Wedge feels like increasingly in aircraft. The computers are driving it. You flip a switch, it lands on the carrier deck. He just wants "it," the way his father, his grandfather, and his great-grandfather did in this long lineage of these Marine Corps fighter pilots. There's a lot to like about Wedge.
Josh King:
Yeah. As a surface combatant over the course of your career, did you ever feel the equivalent of "it"?
James Stavridis:
You do. You feel it when you're driving a ship in a very precarious situation, say alongside another ship. You know that your reflexes, your orders to the helm are going to keep your ship safe. And when you turn a ship and it's under your command, you look at the horizon as it spins, and you feel as though you've made the Earth move in front of you. I think that's similar to what we tried to convey with Wedge.
Josh King:
Great movie over the past year, Admiral, was Tom Hanks's movie Greyhound, in which he plays this World War II destroyer skipper escorting a convoy through the Black Pit of the North Atlantic. What would you describe as the "it" that Commander Ernest Krause was experiencing? And for you as a destroyer guy, was it satisfying to see the role of those ships given their due after decades of watching Tomcat pilots and submarine captains get all the hero roles?
James Stavridis:
Yeah, indeed. I felt that we in the destroyer world closed the glamor gap a little bit. This, of course, is based on a brilliant novel, The Good Shepherd, by C.S. Forester, who wrote the Hornblower novels. I think Commander Krause, the captain of the destroyer in the book, what is "it" for him is finding and killing submarines, and therefore bringing his convoy safe across the Atlantic. And again and again through an exhausting 48-hour period where he barely leaves the bridge of the ship, he is putting every ounce of his energy and his tactical acumen and his leadership skills to roll those depth charges, to kill these predators, these wolfpacks that are slowly picking off his flock. Hence the title of the novel, The Good Shepherd. It's a very powerful film, a very powerful novel as well. I think that's probably as close as you really get to it in the destroyer force.
Josh King:
Thinking about Wedge, do our current crop of military aviators need to go back to the history books for a deeper appreciation of people like Pappy Boyington, Jimmy Doolittle, who we talked about at length on this show with Michel Paradis, author of Last Mission to Tokyo?
James Stavridis:
My sense is, our naval aviation community does pretty well carrying the mantle of aviation from days gone by. They're very traditionally oriented, and you can strap the technology on it, but they're still like Wedge. I think our nuclear submariners do a pretty good job of carrying the diesel mantle forward. To be candid, I think our surface line, our destroyer force, we could do better, and so a film like Greyhound is absolutely powerful and helpful in doing that. But I think that's true in the world of business as well. You want to have the tradition that you carry forward in a Ford Motor Company, that you carry in a Lockheed Martin and looking at its antecedent and its root, Northrup Grumman, where disclosure, I do some consulting. You want to pull those traditions forward, but you want to be firmly looking to the future as well. That's what we need our military to do.
Josh King:
The great thing about 2034 is this fair and equal portrayal that you give to non-American characters who are equally responsible for starting and ending the next world war. Let's start with Admiral Lin Bao of the Chinese People's Liberation Army Navy. He's got a great fondness for our M&Ms and also an appreciation of their history and military application. Did you come across leaders like Lin Bao over 37 years in uniform, and what are his motivations in 2034?
James Stavridis:
I absolutely did. You correctly said, "Oh, Admiral, there must be a lot of Sarah Hunt's character that came out of your experiences commanding DESRON 21, commanding the Enterprise." There's a lot of me in Lin Bao. Recall that Lin Bao as this novel opens is stuck at a desk in Washington, DC. All he wants is to get back to sea, to be around sailors, to be part of the seagoing navy again. And that was me. I had six tours of duty in Washington, four in the Pentagon, one at the National Security Council staff, one at State Department. All I wanted to do was get back to sea.
James Stavridis:
And then secondly, Lin Bao has this side of him that wants to be an educator, that wants to share ideas, that is deeply red. He dreams one day of coming to teach at the War College in Newport, Rhode Island. He's a complicated character with a significant backstory. He's my favorite character in the novel. And I'll tell you, as a novelist, what I discovered is how personally invested you get in these characters. They become deeply real to you. It's like they're standing at the desk as you're writing the novel, saying, "No, Admiral, this is a better way to do it and say it." You become very invested with them. I like Lin Bao.
Josh King:
I've talked to a lot of authors as we've done this show, and the thing that we always share is the fact that you may have to do all of your meetings at McLarty and Carlyle and going to the green room to do your hits on Morning Joe, but what you love most is your ability to just step back from all that when you get to your desk in front of your computer in your study and enter this world that you've created.
James Stavridis:
Indeed, and it's not just the writing part of it. The really significant part, and I've spoken about this and written about it a lot, is the reading part of it. Good leaders are good readers. As you may know, a previous book of mine is called The Leader's Bookshelf: 50 Books That Will Make You a Better Leader. It's not Jim Stavridis's approach to leadership, although I'm happy to share that. The Leader's Bookshelf picks 50 books and deconstructs them and recommends them, tells their story. The point of the whole book is that by reading, you become a better leader. And yeah, a very important part of my day every day is sitting down, pulling out a book, thinking about it, and then if inspired, turning to that computer and writing.
Josh King:
Let's head over to Iran and meet Brigadier General Qassem Farshad. Reading the book, I couldn't help but draw parallels to Qasem Soleimani, who was assassinated last year in a drone strike at Baghdad International Airport on orders by President Trump. Your character lost a pinkie and a ring finger putting together an IED for the Quds Force, presumably sometime early in the global war on terror. Are Farshad's and Soleimani's motivations similar, and how should we be thinking about Iran in the 13 years between now and 2034?
James Stavridis:
Very similar, and you'll recall in the book, he's actually a godson of Soleimani. When we started writing the book, Soleimani was very much alive, and we envisioned a scene in which Farshad would actually meet with his godfather. As we all know, Soleimani in real life was blown up on the tarmac, and good riddance as far as I'm concerned, at Baghdad International Airport. So we had to rewrite that part of the book, but yes, you can drop a plumb line from Soleimani to Farshad. He's not as talented. Farshad is not as talented as Soleimani. He's not as lethal as Soleimani. And again, there's a kind of a sympathetic backstory to Farshad.
James Stavridis:
Here Elliot would tell you, my co-author, he's the doppelganger of Elliot. Elliot, who fought in these forever wars, was both a CIA officer and a highly decorated Marine infantry officer. Farshad is kind of his opposite number through the glass darkly. Brings us to Iran today. There are a lot of Farshads in Iran, and the new regime there, which is led by President Ebrahim Raisi, is going to be even more hardline, I think, than any we've seen. I am less optimistic about things going forward in the Middle East than I was before the June election in Iran. Let's see what the fall brings. There's still a chance the US and Iran may conclude some kind of agreement. I think those chances are diminishing as we go forward.
Josh King:
Thinking about the action that took out Soleimani last year, it's perhaps tempting to read the accounts of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Mark Milley. His actions over the last year is in some cases questionable, such as when he walked with President Trump in his BDU across Lafayette Square. Sometimes heroic, when he convened the group to help assure the peaceful transfer of power. But to take a step back and consider the arc of the US military under multiple secretaries and acting secretaries of defense from 2017 to 2021, where did we move the ball forward and where were we flat-footed?
James Stavridis:
I think where we have moved the ball forward is to put more focus on the emergence of great power competition. The light is going on in the Pentagon that we've got to move from some of these legacy systems into these more advanced systems that we've been talking about today. In terms of a concern that I have, is the way in which the military appeared to be being dragged into the maelstrom of domestic politics. Here I think Mark Milley did well. He knew he made a mistake walking across Lafayette Park. He admitted that mistake. He did it on national television. I know Mark Milley well. He looks like a guy who ought to be a bouncer in a bar in Boston, where he's from. He's tough as nails. He's a Princeton graduate, captained the hockey team there, deeply read in history.
James Stavridis:
He knew he made a mistake. He admitted it, and by press accounts, was keenly aware that there was a possibility of being dragged into domestic politics, and I think, again according to press reports, sketched out a way that he and his fellow chairmen and the other members of the Joint Chiefs would resign if the body politic, read President Trump, tried to drag them into, say, overturning the election or declaring martial law. So I think General Milley stood and delivered when it mattered, and I give him a lot of credit. I think what occurred was a case of the system working. Having said that, Josh, that's my "watch out," is boy, we don't want a country where the military gets too involved in domestic politics. That's another novel, Seven Days in May. We want to avoid that.
Josh King:
Let's talk about Vice Admiral Anand Patel and his role in the book. As a military power, India isn't on everybody's radar, but it's the decisive factor in 2034. You have the Admiral's nephew, Sandy Chaudry, invoking Admiral Yamamoto after Pearl Harbor, saying, "I fear what we have done is awaken the sleeping giant." Is India the sleeping giant of 2034?
James Stavridis:
I think India is a sleeping giant in the 21st century. We picked 2034 because we think that's where the collision points between the US and China will be most acute. Will India be as advanced in 2034 as we depict in the novel? I think unlikely. But by the end of the century, I'd bet on India. And from an investment perspective, I think India has a very bright future over the course of the 21st century, because of demographics, because they're a democracy, because they're linked in so many ways to the West. Watch for this century, 21st century, in the end to be less about the rise of China, more about the rise of India.
Josh King:
Our relations with India are tenuous in a lot of ways. My old friend Tony Blinken was just with Prime Minister Narendra Modi in New Delhi just a few days ago. What are the key drivers of our military, diplomatic, and economic relationship with India that we really have to work on in the next 13 years before 2034?
James Stavridis:
Well, here China is helping us by the way in which they are push, push, pushing on India, not only in the Himalayas, but broadly across the entire swath of the Chinese One Belt, One Road strategy, which most listeners will know, believes that China can export finished goods across Asia, across the Indian Ocean, and bring back raw materials. I always say, One Belt, One Road has one big problem, and it's India. The Indians don't like being pushed around by the Chinese. That will encourage the Indians to work more closely with us. So number one driver is the relationship between China and India, which is bad and going to get worse. That will be helpful. Number two are all the economic linkages that we just talked about. Number three is alliances in the Pacific broadly. This is the idea of the Quad, which is Japan, Australia, India, the United States, counterbalance to China. Those are some of the key drivers in the relationship.
Josh King:
You got a key character in 2034 named Lieutenant Commander Vasily Kolchak, who's the XO of a Russian corvette called the Rezkiy. I've got my 40-year-old copy here of Cap Weinberger's annual report on Soviet military power, and also this issue of Proceedings from October 1982, with its menacing image of the Russian bear surfacing with what looks like the Admiral Kuznetsov in the distance. What's the state of the Russian military threat today, especially as it relates to the Arctic, and where do you expect it to be in 2034?
James Stavridis:
Russia military is sort of ghettos and penthouses. Much of the Russian military is conscript-driven. It's old equipment. It's outdated tactics in many ways. But there's a few penthouses. The penthouses are their submarine force is highly capable, their offensive cyber is very, very good. We know that because of attacks on our domestic economic cycle, but militarily their offensive cyber is quite good. Their hypersonic cruise missiles, nuclear-tipped torpedoes. So they are investing in small niches where I think they can have a big, dangerous impact. And to the Arctic, they're waking up to the fact that as the ice melts, the Arctic becomes more strategic terrain. They will seek to militarize in the north. Not just the United States, NATO, this is Canada, US, Iceland, Norway, Denmark, by virtue of Greenland, partners like Sweden and Finland, all across that Arctic porch from Russia, we need an alliance approach there.
Josh King:
Finally, Admiral, there's John Hendrickson, the submariner who attended the Fletcher School, with a compact-sized design for the close quarters of an Ohio or LA class, and starred for the Fletcher softball team. Is he the closest approximation of Jim Stavridis in the book?
James Stavridis:
Well, physically he would be. He's about 5'5" tall. He's a hell of a good softball player. His nickname at the Fletcher School is Bunt, because he was a pretty good bunter. I can neither confirm nor deny those attributes apply to me.
Josh King:
As I finished 2034, I couldn't help but thinking about my high school and college readings in the late '70s and '80s, one of which was George Orwell's 1984, another book with an ominous year as its simple title, something we all feared back then at the time, when society would have irrevocably changed with the dominating power of Big Brother. 2034 comes conveniently 50 years later. With its tentacles in our semiconductors and our GPS systems, is China potentially the new Big Brother?
James Stavridis:
Absolutely, and throw in facial recognition, artificial intelligence, again, the advent of quantum computing, what that brings to the table. China is moving relentlessly in these areas, and we better keep up, because at the end of the day, the best way to avoid a war is to convince the other side that it's a losing proposition. We need to have our game on in all of those areas. And yes, the choice of 2034 was very conscious, in terms of an homage to George Orwell and 1984.
Josh King:
Jim, you said in a few places that part of your inspiration for 2034 came from the novelistic visions of doomsday scenarios like Peter George's 1958 thriller, Red Alert, which Stanley Kubrick turned into Doctor Strangelove. Have directors been reaching out to you and Elliot to turn 2034 into the next cautionary tale from Hollywood?
James Stavridis:
Indeed they have, and I think it's really a debate about not whether it'll hit a screen, but whether it would be better as a single feature film or as a miniseries. I think it'll be the latter, because of the complexity of the characters. It feels to me like a Winds of War kind of production. Let us hope that we can bring the spirit of cautionary tale to the small screen or the big screen, because what matters here, again, is the theme of the work, is the cautionary tale. We're not about good guys and bad guys, good guys win in the end. We're about how do we stay out of a war with China?
Josh King:
Well, congratulations to you, to Elliot, to Penguin as well, for coming up with what I think, in a world where it's hard to find new IP that is going to create a series like 2034, whether it's 2054 or 2074, or the miniseries approach. But it is an incredible work, certainly a cautionary tale, and teaches people like me a hell of a lot about what's going on in the world, both today and what might happen 13 years from now. Thanks so much, Jim, for joining us Inside the ICE House.
James Stavridis:
It's my pleasure, and my thanks to NYSE. I've stood up at the closing bell a couple of times. Honored to do so during Fleet Week some years ago. Vivid memories for me, walking that floor and meeting the traders and being up there as the day comes to an end. Thank you for those memories, and I look forward to another appearance on In the ICE House.
Josh King:
Glad to have you back anytime. Love to have you back in person. That's our conversation for this week. Our guest was Admiral James Stavridis, author, along with Elliot Ackerman, of 2034: A Novel of the Next World War, The New York Times Bestseller out now from Penguin Press. If you like what you heard, please rate us on iTunes so other folks know where find us. And if you've got a comment or a question you'd like one of our experts to tackle on a future show, email us at [email protected] or tweet at us, @ICEHousePodcast. Our show is produced by Pete Ash, with production assistance from Ken Able and Ian Wolff. I'm Josh King, your host, signing off from the library of the New York Stock Exchange. Thanks for listening. Talk to you next week.
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