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Book Review for 2034: A Novel of the Next World War

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Book Review of 2034: A Novel of the Next World War

While their military and policy experiences set them apart from Tom Clancy-esque writers, Ackerman and Stavridis are by no means the first practitioners to delve into military fiction. Following the success of his great power conflict novel  Ghost Fleet,  policy analyst Peter Singer  championed  this brand of useful fiction as a means of engaging readers in policy conversations: “People are more likely to read an engrossing story than a white paper and rarely recommend to others a good PowerPoint to read on vacation.” And yet, the challenge of this genre is attracting a policymaking audience specifically. In an  interview  about the book, Stavridis explained his intent “to strike a warning bell about the rise of China and the propensity in human history” for rising powers and established powers to go to war. But is this genre a valuable tool for policymakers or simply a compelling plot device?

The crisis in  2034  hinges on Beijing laying a “Chinese finger trap,” (45) intentionally drawing the U.S. into a confrontation for control over the South China Sea. A U.S. Navy carrier group on a freedom of navigation patrol captures the  Wen Rui , a Chinese vessel carrying advanced telecommunications technologies. Simultaneously, an F-35 pilot flying near Iranian airspace finds his plane hijacked via cyber intrusion and is taken prisoner. China approaches the U.S. with the offer of an exchange: return the  Wen Rui  and Iran will release the American airman on behalf of its Chinese ally. When negotiations break down, both states escalate toward war.

While U.S. forces concentrate on China, Russia sabotages subsurface internet cables as a show of force, obliterating U.S. internet connectivity and setting off the exchange of tactical nuclear weapons that destroy Zhanjiang, Galveston, and San Diego. China had not anticipated a nuclear escalation, but is drawn into retaliatory strikes to deter the U.S. from closing in on Taiwan. With superpower tensions moving towards mutual destruction, India intervenes as a third-party arbiter in a bid to restore peace, by force, if necessary. But their efforts come too late to prevent the U.S. from dropping a nuclear bomb on Shanghai, killing tens of millions, causing a global market freefall, and leaving India as the world’s sole viable power.

Ackerman and Stavridis both have extensive military and policy backgrounds. Ackerman served as a White House Fellow and performed five tours of duty in the Middle East with the U.S. Marines. Stavridis was educated at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and has held positions as Supreme Allied Commander of NATO and commander of U.S. Southern Command. The authors’ academic credentials shine through in valuable analysis of the works of Sun Tzu and Thucydides in Chinese stratagems and the lessons of overextended empires.  2034 , however,   is clearly an extrapolation of the great power trends Ackerman and Stavridis observed during deployments and command positions.

A central theme of  2034  is the overextension of American power projection and an outsized reliance on twentieth century grand strategy principles. An Indian mediator warns that “America’s hubris has finally gotten the better of its greatness. You’ve squandered your blood and treasure to what end?...For freedom of navigation in the South China Sea? For the sovereignty of Taiwan? Isn’t the world large enough for your government and Beijing’s?” (216)

Relatedly,  2034  demonstrates that the U.S. can no longer treat China as a middle power. The vivid characterization of U.S. patrols in South China Sea as “the legal equivalent of driving donuts through your neighbor’s prized front lawn” (2) illustrates just how provocatively Beijing views such activities. Similar sentiments emerged during early negotiation attempts when a Chinese defense attaché says, “For decades, your navy has sailed through our territorial waters, it has flown through our allies’ airspace, and today it has seized one of our vessels; but you maintain that you are the aggrieved party, and we are the ones who must appease you?” (39) In invoking language of sacrosanct territoriality and mutual defense commitments to allies, Ackerman and Stavridis invite readers to flip the script on geopolitical conflict – contemplating how an American audience would react to like incursions from a foreign power.

Other geopolitical trends set up in  2034  are less plausible: The premise of China deliberately provoking war with the U.S. to settle its territorial claim to the South China Sea seems far-fetched, and the insinuation that China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is an on-ramp to coerced military cooperation between Beijing and recipient states reads as a fundamental misunderstanding of China’s  economic diplomacy  which relies on BRI to cultivate foreign markets for Chinese products, avoid the middle-income trap by boosting domestic consumption, and secure long-term supply routes immune to U.S. disruption.

Among the most interesting elements of the  2034  plot is the role of technology in demarcating China’s rising and America’s declining power. Beijing is portrayed as an unrivaled cyber power: Just as negotiations break down, China shuts down all White House systems, piling a devastating cyber attack on top of a devastating kinetic one. Beijing also hacks the networks of the U.S. carrier group in the South China Sea, cutting off external communications and leaving commanders reliant on manual navigation and weapons deployment. Undergirding all these plot points is the assumption that the U.S. is incapable of defending against cyber incursions or responding in-kind: “If the Americans had really wanted to threaten the Chinese, they would’ve launched a massive cyberattack. The only problem was that they couldn’t.” (152)

How realistic is this picture of an insurmountable cyber capability-gap between the U.S. and China? While Beijing’s cyber operations are a top-of-mind concern for U.S. officials, China’s comparative advantage seems to be in its  influence operations  that manipulate public opinion and  cyber theft  of intellectual property. The idea that Chinese cyber warriors could seamlessly penetrate U.S. military networks seems far-fetched, as does the idea of an American lame duck in the face of concerted cyber-attacks. Exaggerated as this scenario may be, Ackerman and Stavridis do drive home the risks of American complacency in cyber deterrence and defense.  2034  serves as a cautionary tale on the dangers of great power escalation. But the question remains: Is the novel useful as a foreign policy tool? Scholar Lawrence Freedman engages this debate in his 2017 book,  The Future of War,  outlining three major weaknesses of the genre.  2034  overcomes two of these; an emotive desire to see the good guys win and a focus on knockout blows rather than usual situation of protracted conflict. The novel ends with global nuclear catastrophe at the hands of the U.S. that emerged from a situation of steadily escalating tensions. It is the last of Freedman’s traps, the tendency towards sweeping thriller plots over tightly-focused analysis, where  2034  demonstrates its weakness as a policy tool. Ackerman and Stavridis delve into a huge range of trends in great power politics and interesting technological evolutions.

2034  is a gripping narrative and a compelling introduction to the risks of great power competition and a cautionary tale for a U.S. audience that is overconfident about the American position vis-à-vis China.  But in order for a work of fiction to have a lasting impact on policy beliefs, it must sound the alarm on emerging threats through plausible and tightly focused conjecture. The breakdown of U.S.-China relations in Ackerman and Stravidis’ novel   rests on unlikely assumptions and the book’s technology-driven disaster, while interesting, stretches the bounds of credulity. For these reasons,  2034  is unlikely to be of real value to decisionmakers, remaining confined to the thriller shelf.

About the Author: 

Kathryn Urban is a current graduate student in the School of International Service’s Global Governance, Politics, and Security program. Her research interests include Arctic securitization and the strategic logic of drone warfare.

*THE VIEWS EXPRESSED HERE ARE STRICTLY THOSE OF THE AUTHOR AND DO NOT NECESSARILY REPRESENT THOSE OF THE CENTER OR ANY OTHER PERSON OR ENTITY AT AMERICAN UNIVERSITY.

clock This article was published more than  3 years ago

In ‘2034: A novel of the Next World War,’ it’s man against machine

In the late 1700s and early 1800s, a machine known as “The Turk” became a sensation by winning matches against expert chess players.

Audiences marveled at this feat of technological wizardry — that is, until one vanquished player took a closer look and discovered that there was a man hidden inside. The whole thing was a hoax.

That long-ago story pops into the head of Sandeep Chowdhury, a deputy U.S. national security adviser, as he’s pulled deeper into a terrifying match of technology and military gamesmanship in “ 2034: A Novel of the Next World War ,” by combat veteran Elliot Ackerman and Adm. James Stavridis, a former supreme allied commander of NATO.

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, while only vaguely understanding how the information stored in and shared by those devices can be exploited. We have grown numb to the latest data breach — was it a political campaign (Hillary Clinton’s) , or one of the country’s biggest credit-rating firms (Equifax) , or a hotel behemoth (Marriott) , or a casual-sex hookup site (Adult FriendFinder) , or government departments updating their networks with the SolarWinds system (U.S. Treasury and Commerce) ?

Oh yeah, it was all of them.

In “2034,” it’s as if Ackerman and Stavridis want to grab us by our lapels, give us a slap or two, and scream: Pay attention! George Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece, “Nineteen Eighty-four: A Novel” was published 35 years before 1984. Ackerman’s and Stavridis’s book takes place in the not-so-distant future when today’s high school military recruits will just be turning 30.

The action in “2034” begins near the aptly named Mischief Reef, where Sarah Hunt, a veteran U.S. navy captain nicknamed the “Lion Queen,” has steered her flotilla of three Arleigh Burke-class destroyers into the South China Sea — a thinly veiled mission to sneer at the Chinese claim to that stretch of water as part of their territorial seas. Hunt commands highly sophisticated war machines with computerized weapons systems. But she has a tendency to rely on her intuition, in much the same way as another of “2034’s” central figures, Maj. Chris Mitchell, a fighter pilot with a penchant for using manual controls and a nickname — “Wedge” — derived from “the world’s first and simplest tool.” He celebrates successful missions by smoking Marlboro Reds and loves the straightforward stick and button controls of old arcade games.

Their commander in chief is an unnamed woman, the first president elected in modern history without being affiliated with a political party. (Perhaps the future ain’t all bad.) Among her predecessors is a one-termer identified only by his last name: Pence. (Presumably — but who knows? — the former vice president, Mike Pence, not his wife, the teacher, towel-charm entrepreneur and watercolorist, Karen Pence.)

Hunt’s foray into the South China Sea and Mitchell’s simultaneous piloting of an F-35E Lightning into Iranian airspace set in motion a cascading series of events that — without giving away too much — lead to the world war referenced in the book’s title. The United States is eventually pulled into a conflict that involves forces from China, Russia, Iran and India. Yet, at a time when strident nationalism has become one of the defining characteristics of our age, Ackerman and Stavridis offer subtle commentary about the interconnectedness of the world. Chowdhury’s uncle is an admiral in India’s armed forces. Lin Bao, a Chinese defense official who plays a crucial role in the book, is half-American and half-Chinese, and studied at Harvard’s Kennedy School.

“We have M&Ms in China too,” he says during a tense conversation with Chowdhury in the run-up to the war. “But they taste better here.”

He tosses the empty candy wrapper on the sidewalk outside the White House to punctuate the threat. When Chowdhury asks him to pick it up, he just walks away.

The disembodied weapons wielded in the war of “2034” initially are the main tools of the conflict — artificial intelligence, cyber-snooping, Internet-disrupting digital invaders, unmanned drones. But it is the men and women inside the machinery — the bureaucrats and politicians — who move the pieces around the board.

The Chinese scoff at their U.S. adversaries, and the policymakers they see as being responsible for a degradation of American might.

“The deregulation that had resulted in so much American innovation and economic strength was now an American weakness,” sniffs one Chinese defense official. “The Americans have proven incapable of organizing a centralized cyber defense.”

Hunt isn’t so sure that the viewpoint expressed by not only the Chinese, but by her fellow U.S. military commanders, gets it right.

After a major setback, she laments that “there’s still a whole swath of officers in our military who cling to a cult of technology. They cannot bring themselves to acknowledge that an overreliance on these systems has crippled us.”

She eventually concludes that “the way to defeat technology isn’t with more technology. It is with no technology.”

The fate of the world in “2034” the novel, and perhaps in ours, just might rest on the answer to that question.

Or maybe the question has already been answered, but we don’t know it yet.

A Novel of the Next World War

By Elliot Ackerman and James Stavridis

Penguin Press. 320 pp. $27

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Stories of War and Its Aftermath, From Ancient Greece to America in ‘2034’

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By Claire Jarvis

• March 9, 2021

2034 A Novel of the Next World War By Elliot Ackerman and Adm. James Stavridis 303 pp. Penguin Press. $27.

This fast-paced military thriller details the horrifying aftermath of a mistaken encounter between an American naval patrol and a potent Chinese weapon. The weapon’s power — to destroy all computers on board the American ships, rendering them utterly isolated — works as a kind of metonymy for the book’s argument about America’s waning global influence. The military’s isolation finds a twin in the novel’s political problem, in which American operators must reimagine their allies not as helpers to boost their might but as saviors.

For all their attempt to thread “2034” with diverse characters, the authors — Ackerman, a novelist and former Marine, and Stavridis, a former NATO commander — emphasize the organizers of war, not the cogs in the machine. Their major nod to enlisted men and women comes in the form of a pedigreed fighter pilot, Maj. Chris “Wedge” Mitchell, who feels torn from an earlier era, if not a different book . “2034” is a swan song for American exceptionalism, and the war it imagines coming in a few short years symbolizes the final failure of the American empire’s hopeful experiment. There are a few pointed references to the coronavirus outbreak, and the “one-term” Pence presidency, but after this winter’s political upheaval, we know that the greatest threats to American life currently live within our borders, and that our immediate challenge is coming to terms not only with our past but with our present.

One of the more intriguing characters is Sandeep Chowdhury, a National Security apparatchik whose interior monologues reflect his anxiety about a government that fails to see how its image of itself belies reality. But “2034” imagines that America’s star has fallen because its enemies have lapped it technologically; it is a weakened world power because of its complacency, not because of internal division and civil strife. “As he walked, he struggled to put words around his reservations as if he were writing a white paper to himself,” the authors write of Chowdhury in a passage that makes for ironic reading in light of current events. “His opening sentence came to him. It would be, The America that we believe ourselves to be is no longer the America that we are. ”

SLASH AND BURN By Claudia Hernández Translated by Julia Sanches 307 pp. And Other Stories. Paper, $17.95.

Narrowly focused on the women in a single family, Hernández traces the reverberations of El Salvador’s civil war on a young girl as she becomes a guerrilla and, eventually, an ex-combatant; and, finally, on her daughters — four of whom she raises herself and one who is adopted by a French family during the chaotic years of the war. The characters lack names, and their familial relationships make it hard, at first, to keep them straight as Hernández moves around in the novel’s time frame. But the effect, of showcasing war’s minute, daily power to alter life’s courses, is forceful.

The details of “Slash and Burn” are arranged gently, gathered in a loose assemblage of generational vignettes: the combatant’s first flush of love with the father of her first daughter, and that love’s dissipation as she returns to the guerrilla camp to find him involved with someone else; one of the combatant’s daughters, choosing a pink and purple camouflage backpack, to the consternation of her ex-combatant mother, for her courses at the university in San Salvador; digging up a wedding ring buried in a former home that soldiers burned.

The novel’s quiet, domestic focus serves Hernández’s purpose well. The intimacy of the narration is devastating in its precision, allowing us to trace the ramifications of war through generations of family life. Hernández’s choice to keep personal names from her reader is a powerful tactic, especially when we move among the families of characters touched by war. You turn back a page, two pages, asking yourself, Which daughter, which mother, which sister? The answer is all of them.

A THOUSAND SHIPS By Natalie Haynes 348 pp. Harper/HarperCollins. $27.99.

Haynes’s feminist novelization of the myths and histories around the “Odyssey” is savvy and well plotted. But her conceit — that the Trojan War’s women are underexamined heroines — is mildly perplexing. Expanding on stories referred to in passing in Homer’s epic, Virgil’s “Aeneid” and other ancient sources, including the Trojan Creusa’s blind reel through her city’s burning streets and the threat of godly rape that inaugurates Cassandra’s dreaded prophecies, Haynes’s novel shares bones with classic accounts of the women of Greek mythology and drama. We know the myths of Iphigenia and Andromache, so the plots Haynes imagines for them feel familiar, if the specifics seem more terrible. Unsurprisingly, much of the horror focuses on women’s sexual abuse and the deaths of their children; war’s effects on noncombatants tend toward a living perdition.

The novel is broken into short vignettes about particular figures; a story line following the Trojan women waiting to be divvied up by the Greeks after the fall of Troy; and arch commentary by Calliope, a poetic muse, and Penelope, Odysseus’ long-suffering wife, who serve as a chorus and offer the book’s most explicit political arguments. In long letters to Odysseus, Penelope worries over the mistakes Homer makes about her husband’s return voyage, passive-aggressively hinting that the poem makes him sound distracted and selfish.

Calliope’s complaints are more explicit: “This is the women’s war, just as much as it is the men’s,” she rails, frustrated at Homer’s failure to narrate the Greek and Trojan women’s woes. Haynes is most effective when she hews closely to her characters’ immediate experiences: Aphrodite’s skin smelling “faintly of salt,” the sticky sweat soaking through the conspirator Polymestor’s robe as he tries to deceive Priam’s widow, Hecabe. Haynes’s inventiveness in conjuring the lives of Greek and Trojan women through these evocative details keeps the novel humming toward its bathetically optimistic conclusion: tragic as it must be, hopeful as we want it to be.

Claire Jarvis is working on a book about British middlebrow fiction.

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Word of Mouth

Submitting a book for review, write the editor, you are here:, 2034: a novel of the next world war.

The monument to General Robert E. Lee at Gettysburg is on the edge of the battlefield, over by what is now (at least as of this week) called Confederate Avenue. The statutory Lee is on horseback, gazing towards Cemetery Ridge, where Pickett’s Virginians would make their famous charge. That is one way to view a battle, or a war, back behind the front lines. This is not exactly a safe place, you understand --- one errant Union cannonball could have unhorsed Lee --- but at least it’s away from the mud, the blood and the fixed bayonets.

This is not to say that Lee, or any other battlefield general, ought to have been front and center in the conflict. That is not often the job of the commanding general or admiral. It certainly can become part of the job, in desperate need, but their primary role is to plan and strategize and engage in top-tier decision-making. Lee’s troops understood this; there are more than a few stories of Confederate soldiers urging him to go to the rear during the heat of battle.

" 2034 accomplishes what it seeks out to do. It sets up a serious strategic problem, explores how both sides attempt to resolve the conflict, raises important issues about how the battle could be fought and what the results could be, and tells its story from a high-level perspective."

2034 is a war story, but most of it takes place at a cool remove. Its primary character is in the White House national security office, half a world away from where the actual fighting is going on. There are other characters who are out on the point of the spear --- a Marine aviator and a Navy destroyer captain --- but most of the action is high-level. Since co-author James Stavridis is a Navy admiral, that’s understandable enough.

You can’t fault the book too much on a strategic level. The war centers just where you think it might, in the South China Sea, where the Chinese Communist leadership has had it up to here with American patrols encroaching into what they consider to be their oceanic territory. The novel starts out gratifyingly, with the Chinese leadership luring an American patrol into a no-win situation that precipitates the conflict. At the same time, the Iranians, using Chinese technology, manage to take control of the avionics of a next-generation American fighter plane, bringing it in for a soft landing on their territory.

However, from that point on, the story of the conflict becomes subsumed into two parallel subtexts. One of these is as old as military technology itself --- the idea that armed conflict was somehow better, purer and more interesting when there wasn’t all this technology involved. Robert Heinlein warned against complex battlefield technology, opining that any soldier who spent all his time studying his readouts would wind up with their head bashed in by a primitive with a stone ax. This is buttressed by the more modern concern about American reliance on electronics made in China backfiring at critical times. My home state of Texas recently failed a real-life stress test to its power grid caused by nothing more malicious than cold weather. Could the Chinese stress our military communications and capability to the breaking point just by flipping a switch? It’s certainly a concern, and it’s one that causes havoc for the Navy of 2034 as they try to contain the Chinese threat.

It’s because of the concern about the fragility of the command-and-control technology that 2034 may be labeled a “technothriller,” but that’s misleading. The attraction of the technothriller is that readers walk away feeling as though they have learned something --- whether it’s about the operation of nuclear submarines, the innards of nuclear weapons or the dangers of carrier landings. Elliot Ackerman and Admiral James Stavridis don’t take the time to explain why the Chinese are able to black out naval communications or how it’s done. This leads to one of two conclusions: either the needed technology is far-future enough that it’s beyond our current imaginations, or the authors know how it could be done, but it’s too complicated to explain to their readership. Neither of these conclusions is particularly helpful.

It is always pointless --- and borderline ungrateful --- to wish that a book would be bigger than it is, to have a wider scope, to tell a different story. 2034 accomplishes what it seeks out to do. It sets up a serious strategic problem, explores how both sides attempt to resolve the conflict, raises important issues about how the battle could be fought and what the results could be, and tells its story from a high-level perspective. However, that perspective is as remote and bloodless as Lee on his horse at Gettysburg. The real action, the life-and-death struggle, is out there at the point of the spear. 2034 doesn’t find its way there.

Reviewed by Curtis Edmonds on March 19, 2021

2034: A Novel of the Next World War by Elliot Ackerman and Admiral James Stavridis

• Publication Date: March 8, 2022
• Genres: Fiction , Suspense , Thriller
• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Books
• ISBN-10: 1984881272
• ISBN-13: 9781984881274

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A Novel of the Next World War

By Elliot Ackerman On Tour and Admiral James Stavridis, USN On Tour

By elliot ackerman on tour and admiral james stavridis, usn on tour read by emily woo zeller , p.j. ochlan , vikas adam , dion graham and feodor chin, category: military fiction | suspense & thriller, category: military fiction | suspense & thriller | audiobooks.

Mar 08, 2022 | ISBN 9781984881274 | 5-5/16 x 8 --> | ISBN 9781984881274 --> Buy

Mar 09, 2021 | ISBN 9781984881267 | ISBN 9781984881267 --> Buy

Mar 09, 2021 | 650 Minutes | ISBN 9780593394748 --> Buy

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Mar 08, 2022 | ISBN 9781984881274

Mar 09, 2021 | ISBN 9781984881267

Mar 09, 2021 | ISBN 9780593394748

650 Minutes

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An instant New York Times Bestseller! “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.

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. * This audiobook edition includes an exclusive interview with co-author Admiral James Stavridis.

Listen to a sample from 2034

Also by elliot ackerman , admiral james stavridis, usn.

About Elliot Ackerman

Elliot Ackerman is the author of the novels Halcyon, Red Dress in Black and White, Waiting for Eden, Dark at… More about Elliot Ackerman

About Admiral James Stavridis, USN

Admiral James Stavridis, USN (Ret.) spent more than thirty years in the US Navy, rising to the rank of four-star admiral…. More about Admiral James Stavridis, USN

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“It is hard to write in great detail about what ensues in this novel without giving away the drama of its denouement. Suffice it to say that there is conflict and catastrophe on a large scale, and it unfolds, as major conflicts tend to, with surprising twists and turns . . . The strengths of the novel are anything but incidental to the background of one of its authors, Adm. Stavridis, a former destroyer and carrier strike group commander who retired from the Navy in 2013 as NATO Supreme Allied Commander in Europe. . . . Adm. Stavridis not only understands how naval fleets work; he has clearly given a great deal of thought to America’s biggest strategic risks, and at the top of the list is war with China, which, as this book seems designed to point out, could occur quite by accident and at almost any time . .. One of the messages of this book is that war is utterly unpredictable and that opportunist adversaries of the U.S. are likely to play important roles in any widening confrontation . . . 2034 is nonetheless full of warnings. Foremost is that war with China would be folly, with no foreseeable outcome and disaster for all. This is not a pessimistic book about America’s potential, but the picture of the world it paints before the central conflict will be a difficult one for many to accept, albeit one well supported by facts.” —Wall Street Journal “An unnerving and fascinating tale of a future . . . The book serves as a cautionary tale to our leaders and national security officials, while also speaking to a modern truth about arrogance and our lack of strategic foresight . . . The novel is an enjoyable and swiftly paced but important read.” — The Hill “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, while only vaguely understanding how the information stored in and shared by those devices can be exploited. . . . In 2034 , it’s as if Ackerman and Stavridis want to grab us by our lapels, give us a slap or two, and scream: Pay attention! George Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-four: A Novel was published 35 years before 1984. Ackerman’s and Stavridis’s book takes place in the not-so-distant future when today’s high school military recruits will just be turning 30.” — The Washington Post “Stavridis and Ackerman have combined their talents—the former’s detailed operational knowledge of military strategy and tactics and the latter’s narrative skills—to come up with a realistic, detailed and highly readable account of how the next world war might begin . . . 2034 is thought-provoking reading for military and diplomatic professionals dealing with China, and for the generalist concerned with China’s rise. The scenario outlined by Stavridis and Ackerman lends credence to recent calls for the US to strengthen its military capabilities in the Indo-Pacific. It’s also a riveting read.” — The Strategist (Australia)   “If you’re looking for a compelling beach read this summer, I recommend the novel 2034 .” —Thomas L. Friedman, The New York Times “Utterly engrossing . . .  [ 2034 ] is incredibly well-written, deeply thought-provoking, and it makes for uncomfortable and sober reading—in the best of ways . . . .. . . There is also an unexpected emotional rawness to the characters. This, in hindsight, should not come as a surprise. Elliot Ackerman is one of the finest writers to come out of this generation of military veterans and officers . . . The pairing of Mr. Ackerman and Adm. Stavridis is inspired. Both have military backgrounds as officers, both are accomplished writers in their own right, and both complement each other exceptionally well and have produced a fantastic work of fiction. . . .This is a book that sets the pulse as well as the mind racing but doesn’t let the reader off with a cheap or easy thrill. It is sobering and chilling.” —Joshua Huminski, Diplomatic Courier    “Consider this another vaccine against disaster. Fortunately, this dose won’t cause a temporary fever—and it happens to be a rippingly good read. Turns out that even cautionary tales can be exciting, when the future we’re most excited about is the one where they never come true.” — Wired “A frightening look at how a major-power showdown might race out of control. . . . This compelling thriller should be required reading for our national leaders and translated into Mandarin.” — Kirkus (starred) “Those seeking a realistic look at how a future world war might play out will be rewarded.” — Publishers Weekly “Chilling yet compulsively readable work of speculative fiction . . . Ackerman and Stavridis have created a brilliantly executed geopolitical tale that is impossible to put down and that serves as a dire, all-too-plausible warning that recent events could have catastrophic consequences.” —Booklist, starred review “War with China is the most dangerous scenario facing us and the world. Absent a strategic method to manage our differences, Jim Stavridis and Elliot Ackerman’s chilling novel presents a realistic series of miscalculations leading to the worst consequences. A sobering, cautionary tale for our time.” —Jim Mattis, General, U.S. Marines (Ret.) and 26th Secretary of Defense “A brilliant thriller! Masterfully plotted and elegantly written, 2034 is a literary tour-de-force. Let’s just hope none of it comes true.” —Brad Thor, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Near Dark “A real page-turner, 2034 is a novel about a conflict we hope never happens. Drawing on their deep operational and diplomatic backgrounds, Admiral Stavridis and Elliot Ackerman have conjured a nightmare we desperately need to avoid. The novel is a cautionary tale for our times, and a reminder how quickly events can spin out of control—even before 2034.” —Robert M. Gates, Secretary of Defense 2006-2011 “I could not stop reading 2034 . With sharply drawn, vibrant characters caught in an all too plausible future conflict, the novel left me fascinated, moved, thrilled and, ultimately, haunted.” —Phil Klay, author of Missionaries “ 2034 is an exciting, interesting, and informative novel about a hypothetical future war with China that is largely determined by actual decisions already made. It describes in detail how a single technological leap forward by an adversary, in this case China, could destroy our ability to communicate, resulting in a blind, hapless military. It also demonstrates how today’s military policies will leave a future United States without adequate resources to wage a high intensity conventional war and be forced to resort to a first strike nuclear response and its horrific consequences. Anyone who is concerned about where today’s military technology decisions are taking us should read this book.” —Karl Marlantes, author of Matterhorn and Deep River

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Part I: Peril in the South China Sea

Part II: Blackout in Washington, DC

Part III: One Left to Tell the Tale

Part IV: The Spratly Islands Ambush

Part V: Sailing Into Darkness

Part VI: Crossing the Red Line

WIRED Staff

What Did I Just Read? A Conversation With the Authors of 2034

2034: A Novel of the Next World War

“We've got a ship in duress sailing without a flag that hasn't sent out a distress signal. Something doesn't add up.”

“So much was happening—the Wén Rui , the F-35, Air Force One—and yet they had no news. Everything had been compromised.”

“When the planes didn't come in straight for the attack, a collective silence fell over the crew. Why didn't they finish the job?”

“In a thousand years America won’t be remembered as a country, but simply as a fleeting moment.”

“Somewhere in that black hole was the Chinese fleet. She would be expected to find and destroy it.”

“Eventually, the Americans would find them. But by then it would be too late.”

Earlier this year, as many of you know, WIRED dedicated our February issue of the magazine to an excerpt of 2034 . Then, for the past six weeks, we serialized the excerpt on this website. Today we are running the final WIRED chapter —and an interview with the authors. (The book in its entirety goes on sale next week.)

MARIA STRESHINSKY, WIRED: So, where did the idea for this book come from?

ADMIRAL JAMES STAVRIDIS: From another novel that I read many years ago, in the 1980s, called The Third World War , by Sir John Hackett. It is a superb novel that imagines a global war between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Over the past few years, the conversation about China and the United States heading toward a cold war began to gain real currency. You heard Henry Kissinger, for example, say that “we're not in a cold war, but we're in the foothills of a cold war.”

I started to think: How can we avoid a war with China? And I think part of the reason we avoided a war with the Soviet Union was that we could imagine how terrible it would be. And part of imagining that is books like The Third World War, which kind of walks you through it.

MS: You two are clearly drawing from a deep knowledge base. How much of this story is real—how much of this is based on your own experience?

JS: The character who's the closest to me, career-wise, is Sarah Hunt. Well, there are a lot of differences—you know, like Sarah is much taller than I am and she has really great hair. [ Laughter .] But our paths are very similar. She's a commodore and I've been a commodore, in command of a group of destroyers operating in the South China Sea. I've lived that opening scene, up to and including rescuing Chinese fishermen. I've been through these kinds of episodes—they just turned out better for me than that one does for Sarah.

I was also lucky enough to be a carrier strike group commander, just like Sarah. So I know that terrain well. And she has all the appropriate insecurities that people in command should have.

I think Elliot would tell you as a platoon commander, as a company commander, leading 30 grunts in a firefight, you never know what's around the corner. And Sarah never knows what's around the corner.

ELLIOT ACKERMAN: The doubts that she has—those are doubts that I very much identified with. The second you see your friends getting hurt, you start asking yourself hard questions that there's no answer to.

MS: I'm still processing the news that the South China Sea incident is based on real experiences you've had.

JS: Very real.

MS: What else in the book was inspired by specific experiences?

JS: The launching of strikes in combat is very real. I lived it. Also, I worked on the National Security Council staff in the 1990s. I know what the Situation Room is like, I know what it's like to come from the Old Executive Office Building into the West Wing and to be part of a code red.

Andy Greenberg

The Russian character, Kolchak, is based on my experiences with Russians as the supreme allied commander of NATO. And I love the ambivalence of the Chinese attaché, Lin Bao, how he has a foot in both worlds. One of my classmates from Fletcher is Chinese and was educated in the United States; he has a foot in both worlds. I think Lin Bao is a very attractive, complicated character.

And, well, I think it's fair to say that Elliot knows Wedge.

EA: Yeah, I think that's fair. In the book, Wedge, the pilot, winds up as the commanding officer of Marine Fighter Attack Squadron 323, the Death Rattlers. One of my oldest friends is at this moment deployed to the Persian Gulf as the commanding officer of the Death Rattlers, so using that squadron was an homage to him.

But with novels—the ones that I enjoy reading, and the ones I try to write—often you're showing the topography of people's interior lives. And past a certain point, the characters I write are all me, or some version of me.

For instance, with Wedge, there's an opening refrain in the book where he talks about wanting to be close to it , and the it is flying on instinct, by the seat of your pants—something that his great-great-grandfather had done in the Second World War. He feels he's never had the opportunity to do that when the book opens up, and so much of his emotional journey is trying to be close to this it . I was never a pilot, but it, the quest for something real, is definitely an emotional journey that I feel familiar with. There are other characters too, like Chowdhury, who is in the National Security Council. He has a complex personal life and is divorced. I'm divorced.

And I've lived in DC, and have worked in the government and felt the crush of anonymity that comes with some of these bleak government jobs. Chowdhury talks about that; that's part of his character. I know how oppressive the bureaucracy can feel, but also how, even while you're dealing with that feeling, you know you're sitting at the fulcrum of major decisions.

So, oftentimes you're excavating things from your own experience, your subconscious, and putting them into these characters.

MS: With all these characters, as I read this book, I had a strong feeling ... well, I kept asking: Why don't they just stop? Just: Don't hit the button, don't drop the bomb. This book is an intense cautionary tale, but the people who have control don't stop. Is that just me, not having much of a sense of what it is like to be in the military, with the imperatives that come with orders and chains of command?

JS: I would say this isn't a military thing. I think this is a sociological, human thing. Just look at the last hundred years or so—years when we are supposedly evolved as a species, when we trade with each other routinely and we elevate the rights of women and minorities, all the marvelous things of the last 100 years. Yet we stumbled into two massive world wars, one from 1914 to 1918 and one from 1939 to 1945. Collectively, we killed 80 million people in the 20th century.

We see bad leadership, certainly, around the First and the Second World Wars. Those people could have stopped, but again and again they didn't. And we see that events take on a momentum of their own. This happened in particular with the First World War—the sleepwalkers, as they're sometimes called, these nations that were intertwined by blood and marriage and trade and similar political systems, yet they blunder into this devastating conflict. And you can draw a plumb line from that war to the Second World War.

EA: The question you ask is one of the central themes of the book: Why do we as humans do this over and over and over again? Another theme is that it's rarely good to start a war: You want to be the one who finishes a war. So much of our American century is predicated on the first two world wars: Those are wars that we did not start, but, you know, we damn sure finished them, and they set us up with great prosperity. If a war is started between the US and China, how does that war end? And is it even possible for it to end to the benefit of either party? Thematically, that goes throughout the book.

JS: It's important to say that this is not a predictive book. It's a cautionary tale designed to help us stay out of events like this. And it's about trends, where things are going.

MS: What are the trends that keep you up at night?

JS: The number one thing is the thought of a massive cyberattack against the United States—that our opponents will refine cyber stealth and artificial intelligence in a kind of a witch's brew and then use it against us.

“We didn't start with 2034. We were actually further in the future. And the more we wrote, the more we started bringing the date closer and closer and realizing, no, no, no, no, no. This stuff is happening.”

Number two, we have to worry about this sense you get of the US and China sleepwalking potentially into a real war. If it happens, I would argue it'll happen in the South China Sea because our forces are in confluence. It is the land of unintended consequences, the South China Sea.

I'd also note the spoiler role that a nation like Iran or Russia can play. It is interesting that both Iran and Russia are inheritors of huge empires. But their day has passed. And they can create a great deal of mischief on the international scene. Elliot?

EA: I would say I slept a lot better before I started working on this project.

MS: I slept better before I ever read this book.

This excerpt appears in the February 2021 issue. Subscribe to WIRED .

EA: One thing that was fascinating while working on the book was that real-world events would overtake our drafts. A big one was the death of Qassem Soleimani, the commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard's Quds Force, assassinated in a drone strike in January 2020. In an earlier draft of this book he's mentioned a number of times, but in that draft he's alive in the year 2034. So we had to rework that. Then there's the coronavirus. It obviously needed to be mentioned in a few places.

Looking back, the world that we began writing this book into is now a very different world. So who knows what the world will look like in 2034?

MS: You know, when you start this book, it feels like a work of fiction set way in the future. But somehow by the time you end, it feels like it's gotten much closer.

JS: Yeah. When we started writing, you had a Trump administration that was in a trade negotiation with China, and you felt like, OK, we're gonna work through this. And boy has that cratered. In every dimension since we started writing the book, the relationship with China has worsened. And there's no reason to think that it's suddenly going to reverse itself with the Biden team. So your point is well taken. It does feel closer to us, and we are closer to 2034.

EA: You know we didn't start with that date, with 2034. We were actually further in the future. And the more we wrote, the more we started bringing the date closer and closer and realizing, no, no, no, no, no. This stuff is happening.

MS: Do the events that happened here, between the election in November and January 6th at the US Capitol, make you think differently about your cautionary tale?

EA: Toward the end of the book, Chowdhury is thinking of a speech by Lincoln, in which he said: " All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest, with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years. . . . If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die by suicide .” The events between the election and the riot at the Capitol certainly took us much closer to that “suicide.” I very much hope we can find a way to avoid it.

MS: In the real world, are there voices that help you sleep better?

JS: Certainly on January 21 there were. I think what you are going to see is a Biden team that comes in with a deep knowledge of the issues: the challenges of dealing with China, cybersecurity, our trade and tariff disagreements, arguments over 5G networks, the South China Sea, and the construction of artificial islands.

I look for this team to create a strategy to deal with China. What we've had for the last four years is episodic tactical engagement—from dinners at Mar-a-Lago to a kind of quasi-trade agreement that never really got lift behind it to freedom-of-navigation patrols steaming through the South China Sea. None of it connected in a strategic sense that brings ends, ways, and means together. The Biden team, because it's their MO, will construct a strategy and they'll consult with the experts. You'll see a more coherent approach.

But it's not going to be a return to the idea that we can simply trade our way into a China that wants to be part of the global system. Those days are gone. China has a plan, has a strategy. One belt, one road, it's called. The Biden team is well aware of that. And we'll think concurrently, on the strategic side: How do we avoid a war but ensure that we aren't simply turning over the keys of the international car to China? That would be a mistake for the United States. India will be key to that, I believe.

MS: We haven't talked much about India, which goes on to play a huge part in the novel after the WIRED excerpts. We know this story is fiction, but what led you to imagine such a strong future for India? India is certainly grappling with its own anti- democratic turmoil .

EA: As a novelist, I’m often looking for patterns of human behavior; for instance, in what non-obvious ways are outwardly different people or societies in fact quite similar. In  2034 , we see India rising as a global power, one that begins to claim the mantle of both individual and broader societal mobility, national traits we traditionally associate with the United States. This is, for instance, a theme in the scene with Chowdhury and his uncle at his uncle’s club, which was founded by the colonial British. One of the great lessons of the book is that you never want to be the country to start a war, but you do want to be the country that finishes one. That is, broadly speaking, the lesson of American dominance in the 20th century. We didn’t start the First and Second World Wars, but we sure did finish them and the result has been nearly a century of global dominance. Will we be wise enough to avoid starting the next war? And if not, who might finish it?  MS: Are either of you thinking of working with this administration?

EA: Not unless they need someone to write them a compelling novel. [ Laughter .]

JS: I'm very content with my role as a writer and commentator. And I'm excited about this project with WIRED. You know, I'm a huge Hemingway fan—I have eight first editions. And the first edition of The Old Man and the Sea was published in its entirety in Life magazine.

MS: One of the few things WIRED has done that comes close to this was an issue takeover, years ago, with a story about the Microsoft antitrust trials.

EA: I hope we're more entertaining than the antitrust trials.

JS: Yeah. If we land on the scale between the antitrust trials and the story of Santiago the fisherman in Hemingway's novel, we're great.

The authors' novel , from which this story is excerpted, comes out March 9 .

Elliot Ackerman

• Shah of Shahs by Ryszard Kapuscinski
• Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein
• The Retreat of Western Liberalism by Edward Luce
• The Captive Mind by Czesław Miłosz
• The Guns of August by Barbara W. Tuchman
• Red Sorghum by Mo Yan
• Missionaries by Phil Klay

Admiral Stavridis

• China in Ten Words by Yu Hua
• On China by Henry Kissinger
• Waiting by Ha Jin
• Life and Death in Shanghai by Nien Cheng
• Destined for War by Graham Allison
• The Leavers by Lisa Ko
• The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu

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This excerpt appears in the February 2021 issue. Subscribe now .

Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at [email protected] .

Dell Cameron

Matt Burgess

Medea Giordano

Elliot Ackerman

2034: A Novel of the Next World War

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 out maneuvering America’s most tenacious adversaries. Written with a powerful blend of geopolitical sophistication and literary, 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.

Praise & Reviews

“An unnerving and fascinating tale of a future…The book serves as a cautionary tale to our leaders and national security officials, while also speaking to a modern truth about arrogance and our lack of strategic foresight…The novel is an enjoyable and swiftly paced but important read.” — The Hill

“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, while only vaguely understanding how the information stored in and shared by those devices can be exploited….In 2034 , it’s as if Ackerman and Stavridis want to grab us by our lapels, give us a slap or two, and scream: Pay attention! George Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-four: A Novel was published 35 years before 1984. Ackerman’s and Stavridis’s book takes place in the not-so-distant future when today’s high school military recruits will just be turning 30.” —T he Washington Post

“Utterly engrossing… 2034 is incredibly well-written, deeply thought-provoking, and it makes for uncomfortable and sober reading—in the best of ways . . . .. . . There is also an unexpected emotional rawness to the characters. This, in hindsight, should not come as a surprise. Elliot Ackerman is one of the finest writers to come out of this generation of military veterans and officers . . . The pairing of Mr. Ackerman and Adm. Stavridis is inspired. Both have military backgrounds as officers, both are accomplished writers in their own right, and both complement each other exceptionally well and have produced a fantastic work of fiction. . . .This is a book that sets the pulse as well as the mind racing but doesn’t let the reader off with a cheap or easy thrill. It is sobering and chilling.” —Joshua Huminski, Diplomatic Courier

“Consider this another vaccine against disaster. Fortunately, this dose won’t cause a temporary fever—and it happens to be a rippingly good read. Turns out that even cautionary tales can be exciting, when the future we’re most excited about is the one where they never come true.” — Wired

“A frightening look at how a major-power showdown might race out of control. . . . This compelling thriller should be required reading for our national leaders and translated into Mandarin.” — Kirkus (starred)

“Those seeking a realistic look at how a future world war might play out will be rewarded.” — Publishers Weekly

“Chilling yet compulsively readable work of speculative fiction . . . Ackerman and Stavridis have created a brilliantly executed geopolitical tale that is impossible to put down and that serves as a dire, all-too-plausible warning that recent events could have catastrophic consequences.”— Booklist , starred review

“War with China is the most dangerous scenario facing us and the world. Absent a strategic method to manage our differences, Jim Stavridis and Elliot Ackerman’s chilling novel presents a realistic series of miscalculations leading to the worst consequences. A sobering, cautionary tale for our time.” —Jim Mattis, General, U.S. Marines (Ret.) and 26th Secretary of Defense

“A brilliant thriller! Masterfully plotted and elegantly written, 2034 is a literary tour-de-force. Let’s just hope none of it comes true.” —Brad Thor, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Near Dark

“A real page-turner, 2034 is a novel about a conflict we hope never happens. Drawing on their deep operational and diplomatic backgrounds, Admiral Stavridis and Elliot Ackerman have conjured a nightmare we desperately need to avoid. The novel is a cautionary tale for our times, and a reminder how quickly events can spin out of control—even before 2034.” —Robert M. Gates, Secretary of Defense 2006-2011

“I could not stop reading 2034 . With sharply drawn, vibrant characters caught in an all too plausible future conflict, the novel left me fascinated, moved, thrilled and, ultimately, haunted.” —Phil Klay, author of Missionaries

“ 2034 is an exciting, interesting, and informative novel about a hypothetical future war with China that is largely determined by actual decisions already made. It describes in detail how a single technological leap forward by an adversary, in this case China, could destroy our ability to communicate, resulting in a blind, hapless military. It also demonstrates how today’s military policies will leave a future United States without adequate resources to wage a high intensity conventional war and be forced to resort to a first strike nuclear response and its horrific consequences. Anyone who is concerned about where today’s military technology decisions are taking us should read this book.” —Karl Marlantes, author of Matterhorn and Deep River

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2034: A Novel of the Next World War Hardcover – March 9, 2021

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• Reading age 12 years and up
• Print length 320 pages
• Language English
• Dimensions 6.2 x 1.05 x 9.3 inches
• Publisher Penguin Press
• Publication date March 9, 2021
• ISBN-10 1984881256
• ISBN-13 978-1984881250
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Press; First Edition first Printing (March 9, 2021)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 320 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1984881256
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1984881250
• Reading age ‏ : ‎ 12 years and up
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.14 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.2 x 1.05 x 9.3 inches
• #199 in Political Fiction (Books)
• #583 in Military Thrillers (Books)
• #909 in War Fiction (Books)

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BOOK REVIEW: 2034: A Novel of the Next World War

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About the authors

Admiral james stavridis usn.

Admiral James Stavridis, US Navy (Retired)

Vice Chair, Global Affairs, The Carlyle Group

Chair of the Board of Trustees, the Rockefeller Foundation

A South Florida native, Jim Stavridis attended the US Naval Academy at Annapolis, and spent over thirty five years in the Navy, rising to the rank of 4-star Admiral. Among his many commands were four years as the 16th Supreme Allied Commander at NATO, where he oversaw operations in Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, the Balkans, and piracy off the coast of Africa. He also commanded US Southern Command in Miami, charged with military operations through Latin America for nearly three years. He was the longest serving Combatant Commander in recent US history.

In the course of his career in the Navy, he served as senior military assistant to the Secretary of the Navy and the Secretary of Defense. He led the Navy’s premier operational think tank for innovation, Deep Blue, immediately after the 9/11 attacks.

He won the Battenberg Cup for commanding the top ship in the Atlantic Fleet, the Destroyer USS BARRY, and the Navy League John Paul Jones Award for Inspirational leadership as a Commodore. He holds more than 50 US and international medals and decorations, including 28 from foreign nations. He also commanded a Destroyer Squadron and a Carrier Strike Group, both in combat in the Middle East.

He earned a PhD from The Fletcher School at Tufts, winning the Gullion prize as outstanding student in his class in 1983, as well as academic honors from the National and Naval War Colleges as a distinguished student. He speaks Spanish and French.

Jim has published nine books on leadership, character, the world's oceans, command at sea, Latin America, ship handling, and innovation, as well as hundreds of articles in leading journals. His latest book is "2034: A Novel About the Next World War," which depicts a war with China. It hit #6 on the NYT bestseller list when it was released in early 2021.

An active user of social networks, he has over one hundred thousand followers on Twitter, friends on Facebook, and connections on Linked In. His TED talk on 21st century security in 2012 has had nearly a million views across all platforms. He tweeted the end of combat operations in the Libyan NATO intervention. His memoir of the NATO years, “The Accidental Admiral,” was released in October 2014, and he had two books out in 2017: "The Leader's Bookshelf," about fifty books that can make you a better leader; and "Sea Power: The History and Geopolitics of the World's Oceans." His latest non-fiction book is "Sailing True North: Ten Admirals and the Voyage of Character" in 2019. In all, his books have sold hundreds of thousands of copies and are in print or under contract for publication in 20 countries.

Admiral Stavridis is also the Chair Emeritus of the Board of the US Naval Institute, the professional association of the Nation’s sea services: Navy, Marine Corps, Coast Guard, and Merchant Marine. He is also Dean Emeritus of The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, a position he held from 2013-2018.He is a contributing editor for TIME Magazine and Chief International Security Analyst for NBC News.

He is happily married to Laura, and they have two daughters – one working at Google and the other a Nurse Practioner. Both are married to physicians and have small children. Jim enjoys competitive squash and tennis (he played on the varsity team at Annapolis), and cycling rather slowly.

Elliot Ackerman

ELLIOT ACKERMAN is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels Halcyon, 2034, Red Dress In Black and White, Waiting for Eden, Dark at the Crossing, and Green on Blue, as well as the memoir The Fifth Act: America's End in Afghanistan, and Places and Names: On War, Revolution and Returning. His books have been nominated for the National Book Award, the Andrew Carnegie Medal in both fiction and nonfiction, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize among others. He is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and Marine veteran who served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he received the Silver Star, the Bronze Star for Valor, and the Purple Heart. He divides his time between New York City and Washington, D.C.

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Stoned Cherry

Fiction by frank yacenda, review: 2034: a novel of the next world war, august 6, 2021 frank yacenda comments 0 comment.

An old Foreign Service buddy of mine recently turned me on to the book 2034: A Novel of the Next World War . Co-authored by writer Elliott Ackerman and retired Admiral James Stavridis, my friend tells me the novel is all the buzz inside the Beltway these days. In no small measure, this is because in every war game simulation run in recent years , the ChiComs wind up handing the U.S. its ass on a platter. A sobering thought, it was enough to make me want to read this book.

It’s no coincidence that I’m posting this review on August 6, on the 76 th anniversary of the day the U.S. dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. While it takes more than a book to remind us, the specter of nuclear war has not receded into the realm of the totally implausible despite all the changes that have occurred in the world in those intervening years since the Enola Gay (which I’ve actually seen and stood next to) released its payload over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. If anything, an increasingly multi-polar world may be making the world ever more dangerous.

First, from a literary point of view, the book is well written. At times the action is gripping, and it becomes difficult to put the book down (a tendency I confess to have resisted and wound up reading the book in several tranches). There is a fair amount of personal back story of various characters, which got me a bit impatient, though such things usually do when my focus is on the action.

The general premise of the book is that China coordinates with the Iranians and the Russians to goad the U.S. into a conflict in which the U.S. is from the outset at a technological disadvantage. A series of miscalculations and missteps set the world’s two leading powers into a pattern that winds up in a tit-for-tat nuclear exchange, one that, just barely, falls short of being an all-out nuclear blow out. In the end, the world balance of power has shifted, and somehow India winds up emerging as the world’s king maker. There are elements of nuclear porn, for those who seek such things, but the book doesn’t wind up being Apocryphal. If anything, I found the ending rather unsatisfactory, but we’ll get to that.

One of the premises of the book is that the Chinese have developed a technology that renders entire fleets of their ships invisible to detection. Clearly this gives them a huge strategic advantage, but I had to wonder how plausible this is. We have satellites circling the globe with visual surveillance capability, and it just didn’t make sense to me that actual ships on the waters could be hidden from that kind of visual identification.

As it turns out, I recently came across an article where this very issue is raised. Apparently GPS technology already is being intercepted and manipulated by unknown actors to show ships and fleets in locations where they are not. Obviously, this can lead to serious consequences if, for instance, a nation thinks it is about to be attacked by a phantom fleet, which it believes to be real, and retaliates. But, much as I suspected in reading the scenario painted in 2034 , visual satellite imagery is used to confirm the actual location of the ships detected and to compare that location with the phantom location to demonstrate the reality. So until someone shows me some technology that completely obscures a vessel’s visual presence (as well as the role played by human intelligence), I have to conclude that this is a stretch too far.

There were other things in the book that didn’t compute to me. Early in the book an entire U.S. naval fleet is destroyed by the Chinese, and yet our retaliation is restrained and the course of events is stretched over several months. If China (or anyone) wipes out an entire fleet of our ships, would we slow-walk our response, as happens in the book? I seriously doubt it. In fact, the whole war seems like it is in slow motion. I understand we’re on entirely new ground here and we have never engaged in a full-scale war with a nuclear power before. We may or may not make a first nuclear strike, but would a nuclear China be as restrained if faced with a massive conventional response? I can’t answer that question, with what I know, but the pace of events just didn’t seem realistic, though it did help fill pages.

Another thing I didn’t understand was a key part where the Russians take out underwater Internet cables passing under the Arctic Sea, completely disrupting domestic U.S. communication. I had to wonder why Internet cables running under the Arctic Sea would be connecting domestic U.S. Internet nodes, and why destroying them would disrupt our internal Internet connectivity. I also looked up current undersea cables and there don’t appear to be any running under the Arctic Sea. But even if there were, I can see where they might disrupt connections to Europe or maybe Asia, but not between the East and West coasts of the U.S. This seemed to be an unanswered question even though it was a critical event in the book.

The cable thing also raised the question why one side or the other wouldn’t have used an Electro-Magnetic Pulse (EMP) attack on the other, which would have had far more widespread effects without the need to resort to nuclear ground attacks and frying whole cities.

I understand a certain degree of literary liberty, but when logic seems not to apply to major elements of the plot, without any explanation, I find it troubling as a reader and it makes me question how much I can suspend disbelief. Perhaps we’ve gotten to the point where we believe that all things are possible with technology, but until pigs fly without benefit of technology, I’m going to retain a level of skepticism.

There are some interesting themes that run through the book. One of them seemed to be, low tech meets high tech and low tech wins (usually, anyway). This has long been a kind of life principle of mine. Are we too dependent (and would be even more so in 13 years which, by the way, doesn’t seem that far off) on technology? Probably. Especially if proper safeguards and backstops aren’t built into it. But meanwhile we are engaged in a technological competition with the Chinese. To believe 2034 , they may well be winning that competition. And there is reason to believe they are, aside from the book.

One lesson, early on and which sets the whole story in motion, is how not following proper procedure and going off on deviations can be a very bad idea. A U.S. naval commodore, heading a patrol in the South China Sea, decides to deviate from SOPs to go check out a Chinese merchant vessel that appears to be in trouble. In doing so, she walks right into a trap that had been set by the Chinese. It might not be as heroic or dramatic, but sometimes it’s better to stay with the program and not follow one’s gut feelings or curiosities.

I have long believed that if we get into a nuclear war it would most likely be by accident or miscalculation. We have come pretty close a couple of few times. In the book, a series of mishaps and miscalculations allows a U.S. Navy pilot to get through to nuke Shanghai despite attempts by his commander to call off the attack. And things just continue to snowball.

Parts of the book turned out to be nothingburgers. There is a whole section devoted to a battle for the Strait of Hormuz between the Iranians and the Russians which seemed superfluous and much to-do about not much. I was expecting more involvement by Russia leading to the U.S. being forced to fight a two-front war, and that just never developed.

While, as I said, much of the book is gripping, I found the ending unsatisfactory. It is made to seem that the U.S. had been reduced to some sort of second- or third-rate power, while India, of all countries, had risen to be the major world power. Both the reality and the logic of that eluded me. In the course of the book the Chinese nuke Galveston and San Diego, but in the end the country seems demoralized and a shadow of its former self. Somehow I don’t see how loss of those two cities would have such a major impact on the country as it does in the book. There are even people living in refugee camps, which also seemed superfluous and unlikely.

We’ve faced crises before, whether it was grouping and striking back after Pearl Harbor, or following 9-11. And a major hurricane, like Katrina, certainly devastated a big part of the country, and we dealt with it, if imperfectly. Maybe if New York and Los Angeles were taken out it might be more likely. But with Galveston and San Diego being the targets, I don’t see it. Of course, at the rate and in the direction the country currently is headed, we might be so wimped out and divided and chaotic by then, that we just slip into being a third-rate power.

We also never do find out how things are in China after the war (except they don’t mind putting a bullet in the back of the head of someone who is perceived to have screwed up), and we are left wondering the final disposition of Taiwan, which China has invaded in the course of the war.

My friend who turned me on to the book disagrees with me on the ending. He thinks it would be quite realistic to believe that the country could be so demoralized if even relatively minor cities were nuked that it might actually break up, and the country would face an existential crisis the likes of which we only experienced during the Civil War. In his view, states with extreme politics, like California and Oregon, might opt out of the Union and attempt to become independent entities. There also would be lots of openings, he says, for malicious external actors to support some people’s worst inclinations. I’m not prepared to say his analysis is wrong, again, especially with the current negative trends we’re seeing in the country. I do think it would not be unrealistic to think both the country and the world would be profoundly altered by a war between the superpowers, especially one with nuclear exchanges.

As I proceeded through the book, I was reminded of an argument I had with a friend 40-some years ago. I argued at the time that logic would militate against a nuclear confrontation, and the other party argued that it would in fact be logic that would lead to such a conflict. Reading this book and seeing the progression of events, I actually could see the validity of that argument and how that very logical progression of events led to the conflagration that ensues.

The Washington scenes frequently reminded me of the things I didn’t like about being in the Foreign Service and the reasons that caused me eventually to leave it: The boneheads running the show, the clash of egos, the internal politics, the too many chefs in the kitchen, the hubris, the suits and ties running the ship of state aground. There were little giveaways to when the book was written and the authors’ perspectives, such as a reference to the one-term presidency of Mike Pence, but those didn’t much matter in the overall scheme of things.

Of course I felt bad about all the millions of incinerated people, on both sides. I even felt bad for the ex-wife of one of the main characters who got nuked in Galveston (and I felt bad for the neat little B&B there at which I once stayed). But, think what you will, I felt worst about this squirrel that the main Iranian character squeezes to death in his hand, and for its mate as she watches him do it. That just seemed gratuitously cruel and it bothered me all through the rest of the book.

Perhaps the main value of 2034 is that it draws our attention to the biggest external threat facing the country and the world. China has made no secret of its designs for domination both regionally and on the larger world stage. Its impact has been felt in the past year and a half through a devastating virus that it allowed to be released across the globe and, to date, has faced virtually no consequences for what, at best, was its negligence. Neither has it faced consequences for its repressive internal policies, the genocide it is conducting against the Uighurs, its crushing of Hong Kong’s democracy, or its open threats against Taiwan and even Japan. While our focus and national resolve drift, China’s has intensified.

There are a range of issues the book brings attention to, from the role of technology, to war strategy, to civil preparedness, to hardening our communications, to effective diplomacy. And they are all worthy of attention. But what it fails to address, what fall outside its purview, are the internal divisions that tear at our national fabric, the diversion of both our civilian and military leadership from the big issues of national security to some sort of “woke” agenda that only further weakens us, and our growing loss of educational acuity as China surges ahead. It is the internal threat that, in the end, may pose the greater danger than the external one. The import of that threat is not lost on China nor our other adversaries.

Bottom line: Read 2034 , pay more attention to what China is up to, and what is — or isn’t — going on in Washington, too.

>>Click this link to buy the book on Amazon<<

2034: A Novel of the Next World War is by Elliot Ackerman and Admiral 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 Admiral James Stavridis.

Elliot Ackerman is the author of the novels “Red Dress in Black and White,” “Waiting for Eden,” “Dark at the Crossing,” and “Green on Blue,” as well as the memoir “Places and Names: On War, Revolution, and Returning.” His books have been nominated for the National Book Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. He is both a former White House Fellow and Marine, and served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he received the Silver Star, the Bronze Star for Valor, and the Purple Heart.

Retired Adm. Jim Stavridis spent more than 30 years in the U.S. Navy, rising to the rank of four-star admiral. He was Supreme Allied Commander at NATO and previously commanded U.S. Southern Command, overseeing military operations through Latin America. At sea, he commanded a Navy destroyer, a destroyer squadron, and an aircraft carrier battle group in combat. He holds a Ph.D from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, where he recently served five years as dean. He has published eight previous books and hundreds of articles. Admiral Stavridis is chief international security and diplomacy analyst for NBC News, and a columnist at both Time magazine and Bloomberg Opinion. Based in Washington, D.C., he is an operating executive of the Carlyle Group, an international private equity firm, and chair of the board of counselors of McLarty Associates, an international consulting firm.

This piece also is posted on my non-fiction blog, FJY.US , and on Substack in my community there, Issues That Matter . Follow me here, and there.

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER!

Early reviews, recent reviews.

“2034: A Novel of the Next World War”

Reviewed by James P. Farwell

For the National Defense University Press

“This a fine book, as fiction and as a clear lesson offered without preaching. Highly recommended.”

September 30, 2022.

“The War We Dread”

“Ackerman and Stavridis remind Americans…that victory is not preordained”

A Review of 2034 in “War on the Rocks”

March 1, 2022.

Global Atlanta Review of “2034”

Once I started the book, I couldn’t put it down.

Review by Monique B. Seefried, Ph.D., commissioner of the U.S. World War I Centennial Commission December 30, 2021

David Rubenstein Interviews Admiral Stavridis and Elliot Ackerman about “2034”

Library of Congress – National Book Festival

September 19, 2021.

Kentucky Authors Forum Podcast

With Thom Shanker of the New York Times

September 10, 2021.

THE NEXT WORLD WAR AND AMERICA’S GEOPOLITICAL FUTURE: FACT AND FICTION – ELLIOT ACKERMAN and ADMIRAL JAMES STAVRIDIS from Sun Valley Writers’ Conference

July 20, 2021.

Admiral  Jim Stavridis on the summer’s must-read book: “2034: A Novel of the Next World War”

An interview on the duke university website: lawfire, july 8, 2021.

Admiral Stavridis and Elliot Ackerman Discuss 2034 with China analyst Emily de La Bruyere

The Octavian Report

Nuclear Threat Initiative Seminar on 2034

NTI Co-Chair and CEO Ernest J. Moniz discusses 2034 with Admiral Stavridis

Discussion of 2034 in “American Purpose” by Francis Fukuyama

June 7, 2021

The novel is a quick and gripping read, filled with the details of naval operations that give it a lot of color and plausibility.

U.S. Admiral warns against U.S.-China war in

Best-seller.

June 2, 2021

Admiral Stavridis’ Q&A with The Asahi Shimbun newspaper of Japan

Review of “2034” from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute

May 28, 2021

“This isn’t your average airport bookstore blockbuster…. 2034 is  thought-provoking reading for military and diplomatic professionals dealing with China, and for the generalist concerned with China’s rise….It’s also a riveting read.”

Culturati Magazine Interview with Admiral Stavridis on 2034

May 14, 2021.

“ Like  1984  before it, I’m not going to be able to get  2034 out of my mind, likely ever. “

MODERN WAR INSTITUTE AT WEST POINT Irregular War in the Next World War May 24, 2021

NEWT’S WORLD’S PODCAST May 21, 2021

GZERO WORLD PODCAST

May 15, 2021.

“2034” cited by George Will in his syndicated column

“A retired four-star admiral and former supreme allied commander at NATO, Stavridis says he chose to make his just-released warning as fiction — “2034: A Novel of the Next World War,” co-written with Elliot Ackerman — because today, as usual, the challenge for policymakers is to imagine how events can surprise and cascade.”

“The Chatter on Books” Podcast Discussing 2034

May 10, 2021.

2034 is all three – a work of fiction, a position paper and a warning about the next world war.

A review of 2034 in the tribune of india, may 9, 2021.

War With China Over Taiwan Is Not A Fictional Worry

Q&a with noema editor-in-chief nathan gardels and admiral stavridis, may 5, 2021.

The U.S. -China Confrontation

“we need to avoid stumbling into a major war”, admiral stavridis’ interview with spiegel international , may 6, 2021.

 May 6, 2021

Episode summary.

Admiral James Stavridis (ret.) and Elliot Ackerman join the program to discuss their new book, War in 2034: A Novel of the Next War, about a future war between the United States and China. The conversation is far-ranging and covers not only their book but other great reads, their writing process, U.S.-Latin America relations, and the nature of war and decision making.

 April 30, 2021

“ If you’re looking for a compelling beach read this summer, I recommend the novel “2034…”

“…what made the book unnerving, though, was that when i’d put it down and pick up the day’s newspaper i’d read much of what it was predicting for 13 years from now.”, new york times opinion column by thomas l. friedman,   april 27, 2021.

Discussing U.S. China Relations in the context of “2034” at an event sponsored by the University of Wisconsin Alumni Association April 27, 2021 —

Admiral Stavridis and Ellliot Ackerman interviewed on the Writer’s Bone podcast —

Pritzker Military Museum & Library

Discussion with admiral stavridis and elliot ackerman about 2034.

American Enterprise Institutute’s “What the Hell is Going On?” podcast. Hosted by Daneille Pletka and Marc Thiessen. Posted April 21, 2021

WTH Transcript

George Mason University National Security Institute Discussion – Posted April 19, 2021

America and China: Imagining the worst.

“ a little well-crafted speculation can shake off complaceny and allow people to foucs on the true challenge.”.

A review of “2034” in the “The Interpreter”  April 19, 2021

“ 2034″…is full of warning. Foremost is that war with China would be folly, with no foreseeable outcome and disaster for all”

A review of “2034” in the Wall Street Journal April 16, 2021

(Note: subscription required to read full review)

Admiral Stavridis on the Hugh Hewitt Show, Salem Radio Network, April 13, 2021

TRANSCRIPT – HERE

Former Congressman Mike Rogers of The Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress interviews Admiral Stavridis and Elliot Ackerman about”2034″ posted April 11, 2021

General David Petraeus interviews Admiral Stavridis about”2034″ and U.S.-China relations April 8, 2021

Admiral Stavridis interviewed by Randy Miller on National Defense Radio about “2034” April 6, 2021

Dave Ross, KIRO Radio Seattle interviews Admiral Stavridis about “2034” April 2, 2021

Prior to the upcoming San Antonio Book Festival, KSAT-TV San Antonio, TX talks with Admiral Stavridis about “2034” April 1, 2021

The National Security Institute Podcast “Faultlines” discusses with Admiral Stavridis – Should we expect a war with China? Interviewed by Lester Munson March 31, 2021

Discussing U.S. China relations and “2034,” Admiral Stavridis on Bloomberg Television March 30, 2021

Discussing the rise of U.S.-Chinese tensions and whether “2034” is set too far into the future. Admiral Stavridis discussion with Hugh Hewitt on the Salem Radio Network . March 30, 2021

The Carnegie Council on Ethics in International Affairs discussion about 2034 with Admiral Stavridis and Elliot Ackerman. Hosted by Nickolas Gvosdev and Tatiana Serafin. March 25, 2021    Transcript here.

Former Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Justin Muzinich discusses “2034” and US-China relations with Admiral Stavridis at a virtual event conducted by RJ Julia Bookstores – March 24, 2021

Admiral Stavridis interviewed on “The Realignment” Podcast – interviewed by Saagar Enjeti and Marshall Kosloff, posted March 25, 2021

Admiral Stavridis discussing “2034: A Novel of the Next World War” with Hugh Hewitt on the  Salem Radio Network, March 23, 2021

Admiral Stavridis interviewed by Paul Allen and Bryan Curtis on Bloomberg Daybreak Asia discussing “2034: A Novel of the Next World War”. March 22, 2021

Admiral Stavridis interviewed on Newsy discussing “2034: A Novel of the Next World War” March 22, 2021

Admiral Stavridis interviewed by Suzanne Kelly and Brad Christian on The Cipher Brief’s “State Secrets” podcast discussing “2034: A Novel of the Next World War”. March 22, 2021

Admiral Stavridis joined by International Churchill Society Executive Director Justin Reash to discuss “2034” and his experiences as a U.S. Navy and NATO leader. March 21, 2021

The authors of “2034: A Novel of the Next World War” interviewed by Hugh Hewitt. Posted on March 19, 2021

Admiral Stavridis and Elliot Ackerman discuss 2034 at a virtual event hosted by the World Affairs Council of Orange County California. March 19, 2021

Atlantic Council Book Event Moderated by Michele Flournoy with Admiral Stavridis and Elliot Ackerman, March 18, 2021

“Years of military service helped inform ‘2034: A Novel of the Next World War'” 

Interview of Admiral Stavridis and Elliot Ackerman by Mary Louise Kelly on NPR’s “All Things Considered” March 18, 2021

“Elliot Ackerman and Adm. James Stavridis have powerful crystal balls, the result of their extensive lived experiences in the U.S. military, academia, politics, and publishing. Who better to construct a cautionary tale of cyberwar, miscalculation, and terror?” 

Article in the Christian Science Monitor titled: “How to avoid world war? Use your imagination” by Jacqueline Adams, March 18, 2021

Admiral Stavridis Interviewed by Lizzi Chen for Wall St TV, an independent Chinese-language media outlet based in New York, March 16, 2021

Admiral Stavridis Interviewed by Vago Muradian on the Defense & Aerospace Podcast, March 16, 2021

Admiral Stavridis and Elliot Ackerman on the Stand Up! with Pete Dominick podcast – March 17, 2021 (Interview starts at the 25:00 mark)

Admiral Stavridis and Ellliot Ackerman Interviewed by Mark Cecil on “The Thoughtful Bro” for “A Mighty Blaze” – March 16, 2021

Admiral Stavridis and Ellliot Ackerman Interviewed about 2034 on AM 560 The Answer in Chicago March 16, 2021

Admiral Stavridis Interviewed about 2034 and real world geopolitics by Frank Buckley – KTLA-TV March 15, 2021

Alex Vindman interviews Admiral Stavridis and Elliot Ackerman for the Lawfare Blog Podcast March 15, 2021

Admiral Stavridis discussing “2034” on the “What Happens Next” Podcast – March 14, 2021

“The enthralling geopolitical thriller “2034: A Novel of the Next World War” tells a fictional and futuristic, yet eerily plausible, story of how the U.S. could find itself in a third world war.”

A review of 2034 by Douglas Schoen in “The Hill” March 14, 2021

Admiral Stavridis interviewed on The Cat’s Roundtable WABC Radio, March 14, 2021

Admiral Stavridis and Elliot Ackerman interviewed by Evan Osnos on the New Yorker Radio Hour – March 12, 2021

“Each 2034 peek into personality, whether pique or pursuit, helps distinguish the thriller from countless others. The personal reflections convey a human apprehension about a frightening future and provide a reader with relief amid chaos.” Review in “Coffee or Die” – March 12, 2021

Admiral Stavridis Interviewed on the Trevor Carey Show FM 96.7 Fresno – March 12, 2021

Admiral Stavridis and Elliot Ackerman interviewed on the Ross Kaminsky Show, KHOW radio Denver – March 12, 2021

A virtual Politics and Prose Bookstore discussion with “2034” authors Admiral Stavridis and Elliot Ackerman moderated by Martha Raddatz – March 11, 2021

Interview on the Brian Kilmeade Show, Fox News Radio about 2034 and the current state of U.S. China relations- March 11, 2021

“Admiral Stavridis is one of those rare breeds of hybrid military, academic, and private sector leaders. I was struck by his use of the novel as a device for inspiring ‘outside the box’ thinking during this volatile period in U.S.-China relations.” 

Yale Daily News article about Admiral Stavridis’s discussion about “2034” with the Jackson Institute of Global Affairs – March 11, 2021

Admiral Stavridis and Elliot Ackerman interview on the Adam Carolla Show podcast – March 11, 2021

“2034” Co-authors break down warfare scenes from film & TV

Admiral stavridis and elliot ackerman breakdown scenes from tv and film that feature themes found in their novel “2034”, why a novel.

China poses ‘real’ threat of war

Admiral stavridis  interviewed by brian kilmeade on fox and friends– march 10, 2021.

We need to act now

Admiral stavridis and elliot ackerman interviewed by greg kelly on newsmax tv -march 9, 2021.

Defense One Radio: Episode 88

Defense one podcast interview with admiral stavridis and elliot ackerman – march 10, 2021.

How the U.S. and China could go to war.

Washington post column by ishaan tharoor – march 9, 2021.

‘Imagining is a detererrent.’ Why two military vets wrote a novel imagining a deadly world war

The jewish insider – march 9, 2021.

This fast-paced military thriller details the horrifying aftermath of a mistaken encounter between an American naval patrol and a potent Chinese weapon.

The new york times review – march 9, 2021.

Could This Cause World War III?

Admiral stavridis and elliot ackerman interview in tufts now  – march 9, 2021.

This book earns a prestigious four out of four trench coats for its clear warning.

The cipher brief – march 9, 2021, newsmax.com rising bestsellers – week of march 8, 2021, newsmax.com  – march 8, 2021.

In “2034,” it’s as if Ackerman and Stavridis want to grab us by our lapels, give us a slap or two, and scream: Pay attention!

Washington post review  – march 8, 2021.

Is war with China just a matter of time?

Washington examiner article by jamie mcintyre – march 4, 2021.

An admiral and a novelist want you to imagine a nuclear war with China

Opinion from trudy rubin – the philadelphia inquirer – march 4, 2021.

How and admiral and a war vet-turned-novelist teamed up on a smart technothriller

Los Angeles Times – March 4, 2021

What Did I Just Read? A Wired.com interview with 2034 Co-Authors Admiral Stavridis and Elliot Ackerman

Penguin Press Interview with Co-Authors Admiral Stavridis and Elliot Ackerman

Penguin Press

“This compelling thriller should be required reading for our national leaders and translated into Mandarin”

Kirkus Reviews

“ A brilliant thriller! Masterfully plotted and elegantly written, 2034 is a literary tour-de-force. Let’s just hope none of it comes true.”

Brad Thor #1 New York Times bestselling author of Near Dark

“Chilling yet compulsively readable work of speculative fiction . . . Ackerman and Stavridis have created a brilliantly executed geopolitical tale that is impossible to put down and that serves as a dire, all-too-plausible warning that recent events could have catastrophic consequences.”

“Those seeing a realistic look at how a future world war might play out will be rewarded.”

Publisher’s Weekly

“Consider this another vaccine against disaster. Fortunately, this dose won’t cause a temporary fever — and it happens to be a rippingly good read. Turns out that even cautionary tales can be exciting, when the future we’re most excited about is the one where they never come true.”

“Personally, I love a good military science fiction story with plenty of political intrigue….(2034) hooked me with compelling characters whose lives I was immediately invested in as well as an exciting plot line…”

Mind Matters News

“(2034) is incredibly well-written, deeply thought provoking, and it makes for uncomfortable, and sober reading in the best of ways”

Diplomatic Courier

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by Elliot Ackerman & James Stavridis ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2024

A game effort at a tough theme.

The Singularity may become the new ultimate weapon in the aftermath of a nuclear debacle.

If the page-and-a-half prologue doesn’t stop the reader cold, nothing will. It begins: “If a beam of light / energy / open + / close— / reopen == / repeat / stop...” Stop, indeed. This will prompt only the geekiest among us to move on to Chapter 1. But do turn the page. In 2054, the U.S. is in turmoil. Two decades earlier, China nuked San Diego and Galveston while the U.S. inflicted the same on Shanghai and Shenzhen. In the aftermath, the two countries no longer dominate the world, and traditional U.S. political parties are no more. The current action begins when the physically fit President Ángel Castro collapses while giving a speech, prompting “malicious rumors that the president had suffered some sort of health crisis.” He had, and he dies. Of course, there are profound suspicions over his sudden demise. Was the president’s aorta inflamed by a sequence of computer code, à la the prologue? Is he a victim of “remote gene editing” by an unknown entity? Hence the inklings of the 21st century’s new existential threat, a race to achieve the Singularity, where—to oversimplify—technology and humanity become one. The cast includes some holdovers from the authors’ last book, 2034 , including Dr. Sandy Chowdhury and Julia Hunt, a woman born in China with allegiance to the U.S. But key is the elusive (and nonfictional) Dr. Ray Kurzweil, thought to be living in Brazil. Meanwhile, American society threatens to explode into civil war between Dreamers and Truthers. But if the ultimate threat to humanity is the Singularity, it doesn’t come through convincingly on these pages. In 2034 , the stakes were brutally clear, with millions of lives on the line. Two decades hence, they’re mushier—serious to be sure, but tougher to wrap up into a thriller. With apologies to T. S. Eliot: This is the way the book ends / Not with a bang but a whimper.

Pub Date: March 12, 2024

ISBN: 9780593489864

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Penguin Press

Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024

THRILLER | POLITICAL, MILITARY & TERRORISM | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE

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by Elliot Ackerman & James Stavridis

CITY IN RUINS

by Don Winslow ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 2, 2024

If you love good crime writing but aren’t familiar with Winslow’s work, read this trilogy in order.

The dramatic conclusion to the trilogy about two New England crime families begun in City on Fire (2022) and City of Dreams (2023).

Near the end of his journey, multimillionaire Danny Ryan watches a casino implode in a mushroom cloud of dust and muses about his life’s implosions: “The cancer that killed his wife, the depression that destroyed his love, the moral rot that took his soul.” Danny is from Providence, Rhode Island, and desperately tried to leave his criminal life behind him. But using a ton of ill-gotten gains, he invests heavily in Las Vegas properties. Congress is conducting an investigation into gambling that could destroy his casino business and even land him in jail. An FBI agent plans to take Danny down for major sins he’d like to repent for. Meanwhile, can he make peace with his enemies? Nope, doesn’t look like it. Even if the parties involved want to put the past behind them, the trouble is that they don’t trust each other. Is Vern Winegard setting Dan up? Is Dan setting Vern up? “Trust? Trust is children waiting for Santa Claus.” So what could have been a “Kumbaya,” nobody-wants-to-read-this story turns into a grisly bloodletting filled with language that would set Sister Mary Margaret’s wimple on fire—figuratively speaking, as she’s not in the book. But the Catholic reference is appropriate: Two of the many colorful characters of ill repute are known as the Altar Boys, serving “Last Communion” to their victims. On the law-abiding side and out of the line of fire is an ex-nun-turned-prosecutor nicknamed Attila the Nun, who’s determined to bring justice for a gory matricide. (Rhode Island really had such a person, by the way.) Finally, the prose is just fun: A friend warns Dan about Allie Licata: “In a world of sick fucks, even the sick fucks think Licata’s a sick fuck.” A couple of things to note: This not only ends the trilogy, but it also closes out the author’s career, as he has said he’ll write no more novels.

Pub Date: April 2, 2024

ISBN: 9780063079472

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024

MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | THRILLER | POLICE PROCEDURALS | CRIME & LEGAL THRILLER | GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE

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by Don Winslow

THE TRUTH ABOUT THE DEVLINS

by Lisa Scottoline ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 26, 2024

As an adjunct member says, “You’re not a family, you’re a force.” Exactly, though not in the way you’d expect.

The ne’er-do-well son of a successful Irish American family gets dragged into criminal complications that suggest the rest of the Devlins aren’t exactly the upstanding citizens they appear.

The first 35 years in the life of Thomas “TJ” Devlin have been one disappointment after another to his parents, lawyers who founded a prosperous insurance and reinsurance firm, and his more successful siblings, John and Gabby. A longtime alcoholic who’s been unemployable ever since he did time for an incident involving his ex-girlfriend Carrie’s then 2-year-old daughter, TJ is nominally an investigator for Devlin & Devlin, but everyone knows the post is a sinecure. Things change dramatically when golden-boy John tells TJ that he just killed Neil Lemaire, an accountant for D&D client Runstan Electronics. Their speedy return to the murder scene reveals no corpse, so the brothers breathe easier—until Lemaire turns up shot to death in his car. John’s way of avoiding anything that might jeopardize his status as heir apparent to D&D is to throw TJ under the bus, blaming him for everything John himself has done and adding that you can’t trust anything his brother has said since he’s fallen off the wagon. TJ, who’s maintained his sobriety a day at a time for nearly two years, feels outraged, but neither the police investigating the murder nor his nearest and dearest care about his feelings. Forget the forgettable mystery, whose solution will leave you shrugging instead of gasping, and focus on the circular firing squad of the Devlins, and you’ll have a much better time than TJ.

Pub Date: March 26, 2024

ISBN: 9780525539704

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Putnam

SUSPENSE | THRILLER | SUSPENSE | CRIME & LEGAL THRILLER | PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE

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by Lisa Scottoline

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