“2034,” a Cautionary Tale of Conflict with China
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.3 • 3.9K Ratings
🗓️ 22 March 2021
⏱️ 17 minutes
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Summary
American naval vessels routinely patrol the South China Sea. It is a shared maritime space, but China claims much of the area as its own. That much is true. What if one of the ships was torpedoed? The retired admiral James Stavridis teamed up with Elliot Ackerman, a journalist and former Marine, to write about how, in the shadow of an increasingly tense relationship between the U.S. and China, such an incident could spiral into catastrophe. The result is “2034: A Novel of the Next World War.” The book is a thriller, and also a cautionary tale; Stavridis cites Nevil Shute’s post-apocalyptic novel “On the Beach” as an inspiration. The writers tell Evan Osnos that they intend to deliver in fiction an ingredient that’s missing in military planning: “We have plenty of intelligence, we have plenty of hardware,” Ackerman notes, but “what we often lack is imagination.”
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| 0:48.1 | I'm Dorothy Wickenden. On today's Politics and More podcast, the New Yorkers Evan Osnos talks with Elliot Ackerman |
| 0:55.8 | and retired Admiral James DeVritus, the authors of the new novel, 2034. The book imagines |
| 1:03.1 | a global conflict that begins with a dispute in the South China Sea. |
| 1:19.2 | Evan Osnows is a staff writer based in Washington, and he recently covered the endless presidential campaign. |
| 1:24.6 | And for many years, Evan was based in China. He was the New Yorker's correspondent in Beijing, |
| 1:28.6 | and he still writes for us about China and Xi Jinping's regime. |
| 1:34.0 | That made Evan particularly interested in a new book called 2034. |
| 1:39.3 | It's a work of fiction, a thriller in which an incident between the American and Chinese navies balloons into a catastrophe. Here's Evan. |
| 1:48.0 | The U.S. and China are the world's two superpowers, and their relationship has deteriorated quite sharply over the course of the last few years |
| 1:54.0 | across a whole range of issues around technology and trade and defense and espionage. |
| 2:01.9 | And whether or not you think one side is right or wrong, |
| 2:05.7 | the reality is that the stakes are very, very high. |
| 2:11.5 | One of the big places where that tension is playing out day to day |
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