Episode Details

Novelist Elliot Ackerman and retired Admiral James Stavridis — the former NATO Supreme Allied Commander — join the Chuck Toddcast to discuss their new novel 2084 and to deliver some deeply uncomfortable warnings about where war, technology, and great-power competition are actually headed. The duo, whose previous collaboration 2034 imagined a U.S.-China war, are quick to clarify that their work isn't predictive fiction — it's cautionary fiction, written from the conviction that major disasters almost always stem from a failure of imagination, and that the only way to prevent the worst-case scenarios is to seriously imagine them first. Ackerman and Stavridis argue that war has fundamentally changed, that superpowers are now uniquely vulnerable to asymmetric warfare, and that victors are made or unmade by their willingness to adapt to new technologies — pointing to the Ukraine war as a real-time revolution in drone combat and AI-driven battlefield decision-making. They raise the hardest moral question facing modern militaries: do you always need a human in the loop of the kill chain, and if not, who is morally responsible when something goes wrong? Different countries are answering that question in different ways, with profoundly different ethical and strategic consequences.

The conversation broadens into the deeper structural concerns animating 2084. Ackerman and Stavridis warn that one of the gravest threats to the international order is the rise of corporations whose power is beginning to rival that of nation-states — and they argue the defining feature of a nation-state has always been its monopoly on violence, meaning governments will eventually be forced to ensure corporations can't apply violence at scale (a fight that has already begun in subtle ways). They flag Trump's recent summit with Xi Jinping as a massive win for China, with Xi clearly presenting himself as the senior partner while Trump walked away with very little — and the meeting was particularly catastrophic for Taiwan, whose strategic standing has now been visibly weakened. The authors discuss whether democracy will remain the defining feature of America going forward, whether the country can overcome its current internal divisions, and how human patterns of warfare repeat themselves across centuries even as the technology evolves. They make the case that the 1983 film War Games was prescient and overdue for a reboot, that military action against Cuba would be nothing like Venezuela — politically much tougher given the engaged Cuban-American community in Florida, and economically far more expensive on the reconstruction side — and that Venezuela itself has the natural resources to one day become "the Dubai of the Caribbean" if its politics ever stabilize. Their bottom-line warning is the one most worth sitting with: the war between the United States and China is the one we all hope to avoid, and the only way to make sure it never happens is to take seriously the possibility that it could.

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Timeline:

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00:00 Elliot Ackerman & Admiral James Stavridis join the Chuck ToddCast

01:00 2084 is not predictive fiction, it’s cautionary fiction

02:00 Major disasters come from a failure of imagination

03:15 Planned the arc of multiple books in advance

04:30 You can’t be too dystopian or too pollyannish 

05:30 War has changed and superpowers are vulnerable to asymmetric war

06:15 Victors are made by adapting to new technologies

06:45 Ukraine war has revolutionized fighting with drones and AI

07:30 War is terrible and drones risk “g