Admiral James Stavridis on Fiction, History, and Service

Transcript:

ADMIRAL STAVRIDIS: the only viable way to shape that international system in ways that enable our economy to work and allow us to engage in the world in sensible ways is through alliances

MARK HANNAH: Welcome to None of the Above, a podcast of the Institute for Global Affairs at the Eurasia Group. My name is Mark Hannah.

Today, we’re speaking with Admiral James Stavridis, who has probably the loftiest title of anyone who’s been on our show before. He served as Supreme Allied Commander of NATO during the war in Afghanistan. Admiral Stavridis spent more than three and a half decades in the United States Navy, rising to the rank of four-star admiral. But when he’s not working as a military strategist, he’s a bestselling author. His latest book, 2054, is a futuristic imagining of the aftermath of a catastrophic war between China and the US filled with intrigue, and cover-up, and civil war. We discussed the relationship between facts and his fiction when it comes to US national security, and his reflections on NATO at a moment when that transatlantic alliance is being reshaped by the war in Ukraine.

MARK HANNAH: Give us a quick 30 seconds, a spiel of your background, both in the United States Navy and afterwards. And within this answer, there aren't a lot of Supreme Allied Commanders of NATO writing novels, writing fiction. What drew you to that personally?

ADMIRAL STAVRIDIS: I'm a Florida native, went to the Naval Academy and then did 37 years in the US Navy, concluding with four years as the Supreme Allied Commander in NATO, which is a bar none best title in the world. The only problem is when you leave the job, then you go home and you try and get your wife to call you Supremo at home and it doesn't often work—loved my time in the military, loved my time at NATO. Then I did five years in higher education as the Dean of the Fletcher school of Law and Diplomacy of Tufts University, where I had gotten my own Ph. D. some years before, really enjoyed higher ed, and then, after that, for the last seven years, I've been in international finance, working with the Carlyle Group, where I'm Vice Chairman of Global Affairs, and a partner. So that's kind of the professional sketch, personally. Fabulous wife, been married to her for 40 years, met her when I was eight and she was three years old in Athens, Greece. Long backstory. We have two beautiful daughters who are, you know, in a stroke of financial genius on my part, they both married doctors and we have, each of them had three tiny little grandchildren. So that's kind of the personal piece.

And so finally, novels! Yes, I wrote 10 books of nonfiction, including a lot about geopolitics and the oceans and leadership and character or Latin America. And then I thought, I want to try writing a novel. And, and the reason is threefold in writing a novel, you, you get rid of that straitjacket of fact, you don't have to footnote everything.

You don't have to be precise. You can kind of make things up obviously. so one was to get away from the hard rigid requirements of specific fields of fact. And then secondly, bigger audience, you know, you, you write a scholarly book under the auspices of the Council on Foreign Relations in which you and are both members and it's great and maybe a thousand people actually read it if you, if you write a novel that really hits, the audience is huge. I wanted to illuminate the challenges of a war between the U. S. And China. So I could have written a nonfiction book. Few thousands of people would have read it. I wrote instead a novel co-authored with a wonderful writer, also, Elliott Ackerman.

Second reason, big audience, 2034, 250, 000 and counting. It'll probably sell half a million before it's all over. You know, that's not Stephen King or a book by Oprah, but it’s a much bigger audience.

And third and finally, this is really important. In fiction, you have characters, you have real people who carry the story, and as humans, we all learn the best from the stories of others. So that helps illuminate a topic, for example, like a war between the US and China. That book is called 2034. So Elliot and I were matched up because he is a fellow graduate of the Fletcher School.

He was my writer in residence. I selected him, when I was Dean of the Fletcher school, he's an extraordinarily accomplished. writer, combat veteran, Silver Star recipient, CIA officer in Afghanistan, White House fellow, very complete person. So we were pre existing friends, talked, thought a lot about books and our editor, who we shared, At Penguin Press Random House suggested we work together on a novel. That's how it came about.

MARK HANNAH: Fantastic. And the novel you did write, which is fantastic, and I'm, I'm gratified to hear it's, it's reached such a wide audience because one of the things we do here at the Institute for Global Affairs is to try to bring these topics to a broader audience. It's a bit ominous to say the least.

It's a downright apocalyptic. 2034, is, you know, without giving too much away a scenario by which the United States and China end up with a kind of nuclear confrontation, do you see that as, I mean, there's, there's a lot of threat inflation going on in Washington and people that are writing nonfiction.

But it is helpful to hear something that is apocalyptic and, and yet plausible. What was your goal other than engaging Americans in these kinds of, in this kind of content? Like, are you trying to, is it a wake up call for Americans that we need to pay more attention? Or do you, do you actually see a kind of new Cold War where the risk of nuclear confrontation is more than plausible but probable?

ADMIRAL STAVRIDIS: Very much in my mind was the literature of the Cold War. So if you think back to the really close apocalyptic moments we faced in the Cold War, there were big books that warned us how terrible it would be. Doctor Strange Love, Red Storm Rising, the Third World War by Sir John Hackett, the Bedford Incident on the Beach by Neville Shute.

We had a rich literature of cautionary fiction. And that was my intent, our intent in writing 2034, of which the subtitle is a novel of the next world war. The idea was exactly, as you say, to strike a warning bell, because I believe that we can avoid a war with China. I think there is a fair amount of, I love the expression, “threat inflation” going on with US-China. But we have to be mindful that a miscalculation could in fact spiral into a world war.

The other thing I had in mind in addition to Cold War literature, Mark, was 1914 and the events in Europe, Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August scenario where the nations of Europe stumble into a war in 1914. Four years later, 1918, 20 million dead, Ottoman Empire destroyed , Austro-Hungarian Empire destroyed, Russian Empire destroyed, a remarkable lights-go-out-in-Europe moment. So bottom line, as we looked, Elliot and I, at global challenges in this 21st century, we saw really a trilogy 2034, war with China, 2054, which has just come out and is about artificial intelligence and civil conflict.

And the final book in the trilogy will be 2084 about a global war as a result of climate change. It is all cautionary fiction.

MARK HANNAH: And, and I love this, these sort of analogies to different moments in history. The Cold War, you mentioned 1914, there was also that, that book Sleepwalkers about how Europe kind of just drifted into war. I guess the question I have, the president in his State of the Union used the analogy of World War II, where there was a land war in Europe and you know, Imperial Germany.

But if you had to pick a moment in history as a student of military history that kind of matches where we are now, would it be pre-World War? What would it most look like to you?

ADMIRAL STAVRIDIS: 1939. It would be, we've seen the rise of fascism. We see authoritarian regimes, in today's case, President Xi taking power for life, President Putin taking power for life, Kim Jong Un creating a dynastic scene in North Korea, the Mulas driving Tehran, all of that ought to set off those alarm bells the way fascism should have in the United States and in Great Britain, but like 1939, we are not, the big “We”, all of us are not as yet sufficiently attuned to the dangers that Vladimir Putin is showing us every day in his attack on Ukraine. It's a 1939 moment.

MARK HANNAH: So you're trying to shake Americans by the collar to get them to, you know, stand up and pay attention to these threats that do exist. And yet some of the novels you mentioned, I'm thinking of Dr. Strangelove in particularly, in particular, do have a critique of people in Washington who might be more enthusiastic, than is warranted or more zealous than is warranted when it comes to these confrontations and, and contribute to these miscalculations.

So are there, the miscalculations you chronicle in your novels, is there an implicit, criticism of, of the leadership of the national security apparatus in, in the United States?

ADMIRAL STAVRIDIS: Of course, and no administration is immune from any of this, but people can learn from history. A classic example would be one we discussed a moment ago, August 1914. Complete failure of governance, leadership, military advising to leaders, all failed and the lights go out in Europe. Flash forward to 1962. John F. Kennedy faced with a potentially truly apocalyptic moment, calls together the committee, his brothers advising him, Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara, the brightest and the best. What's the book they talk about? They talk about, literally they talk about Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August so we can learn.

And yes, there's criticism. But by the same point, what we ought to be learning is that we can reverse engineer these moments and avoid them. And that was certainly the story of 2034 and I hope is the story of 2054 as well.

MARK HANNAH: Yeah. I mentioned we had Elliot, your coauthor for 2054 and for this trilogy on the podcast to discuss his, how his experience of war contributes to his, his writing, and his authorial voice. You've had some of the high experience at the highest levels of the American military, at NATO, obviously. Is there, is there a particular weight that you carry around with you that shapes your stories and, and how you want Americans to understand war and the domestic politics and emerging technologies that are, you know, that, that, that are connected to war?

ADMIRAL STAVRIDIS: In my experience, war has been shape shifting throughout my entire career. So I start off in arguably the most dangerous war America never actually fought, and that would be the Cold War. And people often say to me, well, you know, we, we, we feel like we lose wars now. We lost the war in Afghanistan. We lost the war in Vietnam. Yeah, we won World War I. We won World War II. We won the Cold War. The smaller conflicts since then is a mixed bag. but the point is war has shifted in, in the, the potential war I encountered in the Cold War, very, very different from the 20 years of the forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. So without pulling all that apart. I'll simply say that, point one, war is going to change, it's going to evolve, and hopefully over time we can reduce the number of major wars in which we find ourselves.

And then a second thing that's always in my mind. is the Spanish American War. You might think this Mark, but I'm actually not old enough to have fought in the Spanish American War in 1898.

MARK HANNAH: You were just a kid. then, right? Right.

ADMIRAL STAVRIDIS: I was just a kid. There you go. Every office I've been in, in my military career and my home office in Florida, I have a big picture of the Battleship Maine and the Battleship Maine was a big, beautiful warship that pulled into Havana Harbor and on February 15th, 1898, it mysteriously blew up and sank in Havana Harbor. 200, 300 sailors were killed. And it started the Spanish American war. You may recall William Randolph Hearst's, yellow journalism newspapers flogged this. And we went to war with the motto, “Remember the Maine.” So the question becomes Mark, why do I keep a doomed ship on the wall in my office? And there are two reasons, and this answers the question, what would I like Americans to understand about war? One is, you better realize your ship can blow up underneath your feet at any minute. You're going to be surprised. No one could have predicted a war in Afghanistan that lasted 20 years. For example, war surprises us. That's parable number one of the Battleship Maine.

The second one is more subtle. You have to understand this piece of it. The battleship sinks.

We don't, we, the Navy don't go down and salvage the battleship. until 1948 after World War II. What we discover, we the Navy, when we finally salvage this ship, is that it did not sink as a result of Spanish terrorists who supposedly put a mine on the ship and sank it. It sank because of an internal explosion, either an ammunition or possibly a boiler. But once we took a hard look at this, we realized we launched into a major war with another great power at that time, colonial Spain, on a false premise. And so the second lesson of the Maine is, don't make decisions in haste or anger or rage. You may come to make significant mistakes.

MARK HANNAH: That's fantastic. Yeah. And, and, and also to be somewhat skeptical of, you know, a media culture that might be goading the United States into war. We don't have the same yellow journalism today that we did back then. And yet,

ADMIRAL STAVRIDIS: I would argue we, I would argue we do. We need to come up with a new color for it perhaps. But what we have instead is we have irresponsible fake journalists flooding the internet with nonsense and conspiracy theories and they build on each other. And that's about as far from true journalism.

And of course you have a PhD in journalism and media, but we need to recognize there is this dark twisted journalism style that's puncturing the internet and they build on each other. They find big audiences, it's full of lies, but it's, it's, it's a throwback to the 1898 Remember the Maine. That was conspiracy theory.

MARK HANNAH: I can't have the Supreme Allied Commander, the former Supreme Allied Commander on, of, of NATO without asking some questions about NATO. You've written that NATO is a good value for our engagement. and obviously we've seen as Russia's invasion of, of Ukraine has, if it's done anything, it's, it's, you know, reanimated and, and revived, alliance that has, has, you know, was, by some critics estimation, you know, designed for an earlier geopolitical era. And we now see that it is, you know, stepping up here. So can you talk a little bit about what you mean when you say it's a good value for our engagement? And then also what we've seen is some NATO member countries like France stepping up and suggesting maybe we would support with ground troops or Finland said something similar recently, Germany is stepping up and increasing its contributions is, is.

You know, is there an argument to be made that member countries on their own are, are, also have, an ability to support Ukraine in ways that they don't? don't necessarily align with a broader strategic plan for NATO.

ADMIRAL STAVRIDIS: Let's begin with NATO. Broadly speaking. I think a smart way to think about it is like a computer program. So NATO 1.0 is pretty obvious. It's the Cold War, it's US led, NATO versus, Warsaw Pact led, by USSR. It's 3 million troops ready to fight along the fold, the gap in Europe, it's two massive battle fleets playing fRA Red October all around the world. It's two massive nuclear arsenals, 25,000 strategic nuclear warheads on a hair trigger alert. That's the Cold war. NATO 1. 0. We won that war.

NATO 2. 0 is NATO following 9/11, I think had 9/11 not happened, conceivable to me that NATO would have just sort of spiraled down, but that's not what happened. And so we embarked on a series of out of area operations in NATO 2.0, famously in Afghanistan, where I commanded 150,000 NATO troops, but also NATO had a significant presence in Iraq, the Libyan war, six month intervention, the Balkans. Counter Piracy. We had these out of area missions in NATO 2.0. That's a mixed picture, at best.

Now we come to the end of NATO 2.0. And again, I think it's a moment where NATO could have just kind of spiraled down. But the greatest salesman in NATO's history arrives, Deox Machina, and his name is Vladimir Putin. So Putin, single handedly completely revitalizes the NATO alliance, makes it the golden lottery ticket everyone wants. and convinces, most implausibly, Sweden, a nation that's been neutral for 200 years, to join NATO. Finland, which has always had a difficult but not completely estranged relationship from Russia, decides to join NATO.

So that's a quick snapshot. Of NATO, it's, its rises, it's near falls, and it's current rise . I think at this minute, NATO has never been stronger or more unified, and the reason is quite simple.

It's not just Putin, obviously. It's Russian tanks rolling west. Within living memory, German women remember the campaign of rape and terror perpetrated by the Red Army at the end of the Second World War. Russian tanks rolling west. Hungary, Budapest, 1956, Russian tanks crushed a revolution. Prague ‘68, Prague Spring destroyed. Gdansk, Every time Russian tanks roll west, it has a clarifying effect on the European mind. And that is what has happened now.

MARK HANNAH: Let's talk for a minute about, you know, what maybe your experience of trying to drum up more support from the Europeans, because this has been the policy of many presidents going back, the idea that we would get our wealthy European allies who, are newly sort of, have, have new agency, have new resources to, to chip in more, to do more burden sharing. That's been the policy of the american, of, of Washington, DC for a long time. Of course, now Donald Trump comes along and says some things that are, you grotesque and, and, you know, some, somewhat distasteful about our allies, but can you talk about the cajoling or the, or the, the sort of strategic work you did to try to bring those allies along and, and to increase their defense spending?

And any resistance you face to doing that. I mean, we're not in NATO 1.0 anymore. It's not just the United States that's providing a protection blanket for Europe. This is a, this is a collective endeavor at this point, right?

ADMIRAL STAVRIDIS: Yeah. Let me begin by just doing the numbers because very few Americans actually understand the numbers because they’ve listened more recently to a drumbeat of quote “freeloading Europeans,” end quote. And you would think listening to Donald Trump, for example, that the Europeans don't spend anything on defense and that we simply provide defense to them, that would be a mugs game and that's not what it is.

So just to do the numbers, the USdefense budget is $850 billion, ballpark. China's defense budget, which is the second largest national defense budget, I'll come back to that in a minute is about 300 billion. The Russian defense budget is much smaller, 90 billion. I think the Saudis are going to go by the Russians over the next few years in terms of defense spending, by the way. What do those free loading quote unquote Europeans spend on defense? Collectively, it's the second largest defense budget in the world. It's about 320 billion. It's more than China. For a period of time, it was larger than China and Russia combined until Putin really ramped up his defense spending.

So the point is, the Europeans, I fault them because they don't meet their own target of 2 percent of GDP devoted to defense. I caveat that, by the way, collectively, Europe does meet that target. If you add up all the GDP and all the defense funding, it's right at 2%. That's because Britain and a number of others spend more than 2%. But there are too many European nations that aren't even close. Spain is like 1.2%. Canada, our neighbor over here, quite shamefully, in my view, is 1.2%.

Here's the point. We need all the nations to at least hit 2%. US does about 3.3%, which makes sense because we're a global power. We're defending all around the globe. Europe doesn't have to do that. So I think it's actually a pretty good return on investment for keeping those allies with us. And so the alternative, I suppose, would be to pull out of NATO. Well, what would that look like? Europeans would probably spend more, but they would cooperate with us a hell of a lot less on a wide range of things. It would be self- defeating in the extreme. So bottom line, NATO is an effective alliance. The Achilles heel is ensuring the Europeans get up to 2%. They're already there collectively.

I think over the next few years, they'll all get there.

MARK HANNAH: Yeah. Yeah. Getting back to your novels, they focus a lot on the implications of emerging technology, both as opportunities and as vulnerabilities. Your characters romanticize the sort of long lost days of yore in 2034. Chowdhury, the NSC official, struggles to come to terms with the fact that the United States might not, the reality might not live up to the aspiration.

And, and Wedge, the pilot, feels he's missed out on some of the dogfights of World War II. It does seem like the military is in an era of transition, technologically.

I mean, we see that with the, you know, these little homemade drones coming, on the front lines in, in Ukraine. And yet, at the same time, there's tank and trench warfare that's reminiscent of World War I. This kind of strange juxtaposition of new and old technologies.

What, what is, the American reader that reads your book learning about, the technological, change and do nostalgia and hubris impair our ability to effectively respond to these, these changing, technologies.

ADMIRAL STAVRIDIS: I think you've got it about right. What I've been saying about Ukraine is it's, Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, tanks, trenches, mud, blood, death, horrible hand to hand combat. But it's alongside Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers with advanced military capability. And those two things can coexist on a battlefield, and clearly they're going to for some period of time, at least in Ukraine, in my view.

So what does that tell us about how it's shifting? I think inexorably that dial is going to move away from trench warfare and the tanks and the big ticket kind of items. I think it will move toward unmanned, smaller swarms. AI will enable a great deal of this.

That has not happened yet, but clearly is coming special forces, elite forces to include not only sort of classic Navy SEALs, but also cyber warriors, AI warriors, unmanned vehicle warriors.All of those are going to become, elements in this sort of turn of the rheostat toward the higher tech and it'll include hypersonics space, which are, you know, satellites are drones, as well as undersea unmanned on the surface unmanned, which the Ukrainians have used quite effectively to sink a third of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, despite the fact that they have no Navy whatsoever.

So, when I put all that together, there are going to be lingering elements of grinded out kind of warfare, but I think that the rheostat is shifting. fairly swiftly toward the more advanced elements we talked about.

Final thought, yes, we need to not be nostalgic. Particularly perfect example of this is manned flight.

And you're right to mention Wedge from the novel 2034. All he wants to do is smoke Marlboro's and fly around in an open cockpit. Wedge! That's not going to happen. It's over. And in 20 years, we're not going to have people in cockpits anymore. I don't think. So, we need to break that cycle of nostalgia to recognize. There is a new form of warfare coming out here.

MARK HANNAH: So it sounds like technological superiority is a priority. And I want to ask you about priorities because, it does seem like America, the United States is managing a lot of crises at once. We haven't even talked about Gaza and Israel, Israel's war on Gaza and the support it's providing to Israel. But there are a lot of crises at once in different parts of the world.

So, while we have you, you know, what should America's priorities be?

ADMIRAL STAVRIDIS: I'll do it as a strategic, operational and tactical. So strategically, we ought to be thinking about China. We ought to be projecting ourselves ahead. That's why we picked the year 2034 as a potential warning period where China could feel it could take on the United States. So I think that strategic piece ought to be our top priority. And here I'll add in AI. That's why in 2054, the middle novel in the trilogy, we talk about AI so pervasively. So, China, I think, is really at the top.

Operationally, it's Russia-Ukraine. Ultimately, Vladimir Putin is not going to win a war with the West. His, his defense budget is 10% of today's NATO budget. He is not going to beat NATO. The, the GDP of NATO is 52% of the world's gross domestic product. Putin's like 3%, 4%. There is no way Putin is going to win that war. We just need to make sure he doesn't bluff us out of Ukraine in particular, in my view, but that's going to be an operational priority. And I put it just below China.

The Middle East, I think, is a basket of discrete tactical challenges. They're all important. Gaza is in a humanitarian crisis. You know, newsflash, Israel is going to win the war. They're going to defeat Hamas, they'll kill a majority of Hamas fighters, but unfortunately they're going to create a new generation of terrorists and that seemingly endless cycle of this I fear will go on in the Middle East.

What we should be doing is thinking how can we bring Israel and the Arab world together because that creates the best kind of containment barrier. balance to Iran, which is the real superpower of the region.

There are plenty of crises to go around. The big three are the three that I just mentioned, Mark.

MARK HANNAH: Final question, and thank you very much for your time with us, Admiral Stavridis. We have a lot of younger people listening, college students, graduate students, who don't study international politics or international relations. But based on your experience with the military, you know, what advice do you have for the people who, who want to serve their country, either in uniform or not, or, or get more involved in these debates? You mentioned earlier that, you know, some people who criticize the, you know, America's sort of adventuring military experiments and, you know, that we, that we haven't won a war in in Vietnam or these post 9/11 wars or were inconclusive or, at, but there, there seems to be a generational divide because we did win the World, the World Wars. We did win the Cold War, But these younger people might not have lived through that or experienced the sense of victory there. So what advice would you have to them about, you know, the purpose of American power as well as what they can do in their own careers to contribute to that purpose?

ADMIRAL STAVRIDIS: Yep. First, I would say, learn more, read more, study more, read history, read biography. read current events.

I'd say to anybody in their 20s who has a college degree, your education began the day you left your university. And what I mean by that is, that's when you own the syllabus. You decide what you want to read. You get to pick out, both the fiction and non-fiction that you're reading.

And in the end, you are what you read.

In terms of America's role in the world, you know, we don't have to be, we don't want to be America's policemen. We have a deep strain of isolationism in America. But I think it's, it's a stream that will not serve us well In today's very complicated, interconnected world.

So this gets us back to alliances, Mark. If we don't want to be the dictator of the global system, and even we don't have the capacity to do that, the only viable way to shape that international system in ways that enable our economy to work and allow us to engage in the world in sensible ways is through alliances.

And then final thought, and a good way to end the podcast, wherever you are, whoever you are, find time to serve. You know, people say to me all the time, and they mean it. And it's very kind. They say, Admiral, thank you for your service. And they need my military service. There are so many ways to serve this country to serve the world. And they range from military to diplomacy, to intelligence, to police, to firefighters, to nurses and doctors in underserved clinics to teachers.

There are a lot of ways to serve the country or individuals.

Doesn't have to be a career. But a few years really serving others and in my view particularly engaging in, in activity that gets you out and into the world. Be that banging around on a destroyer or going to Sub-Saharan Africa in the Peace Corps or volunteering as a nurse in a clinic for a year in Central America.

There are a lot of ways to serve the country. And at the end of your life, you'll look back on those experiences. I would bet as the absolute best ones in your professional life.

MARK HANNAH: Thank you very much Admiral Stavridis for spending time with us and the None of the Above podcast. It's been a real honor to have you on.

ADMIRAL STAVRIDIS: Thanks so much.

MARK HANNAH: Special thanks to Admiral Stavridis for joining us. Thank you also to our None Of The Above team: Olivia Chilkoti and Lucas Robinson.

If you enjoyed what you heard, we’d appreciate you subscribing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or anywhere else you find podcasts. Please rate and review us. Give us a follow on X @podcast NOTA. If there’s a topic you want us to cover, send us an email at info@noneoftheabovepodcast.org. Thanks for joining us. Stay safe out there, and see you next time.

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