Well, it gets worse from there. It escalates, if you can believe it. Lin Bao, a Chinese diplomat in DC, imagines that it will stop when the US gets its pilot back, and the Chinese their trawler. But, the limited omniscient narrator tells us,
The Americans wouldn't understand, or at least not until it was too late, that what Lin Bao's government wanted was simply the crisis itself, one that would allow them to strike in the South China Sea. What the Americans lacked... or lost somewhere along the way... was imagination. As it was said of the 9/11 attacks, it would also be said of the We'n Rui incident: it was not a failure of American intelligence, but rather a failure of American imagination.
That's why they call it 'limited omniscience'. Of course, the Admiral (or his ghost pal) lies when he refers to the 9/11 attacks as a failure of imagination: We knew something was coming and did nothing: That's established. Must be a bullshit pitch to the Z generation.
So, there it is, We'n Rui was a honeypot, it seems, a phishing expedition that America bit on, because a girl was in charge. An in-your-face Tonkin event to lure us in. A pearl harbor. And I have to laugh, because during a webinar last week, Admiral Stavridis referenced ex-NSA head James Clapper as the author of the 'failure of imagination' trope. f*ck, I'm thinking, even the way Clapper rubbed his head that time he lied to Congress was un-original and without imagination. I think chimpanzees invented that wheel, not Clapper Trapper. Clapper, now a security analyst for CNN, was said to be listening in on that webinar, so maybe the Admiral (or his ghost writer) was just flattering the old flatulant's ego.
The escalation game begins, and surprisingly doesn't seem to involve the US president (or any president) in any way. India enters the childish fray, and, in an effort to "de-escalate" the situation, unilaterally sinks the Chinese carrier Zheng He. US deputy national-security advisor Sandeep "Sandy" Chowdhury is informed of these actions by his uncle Arnan Patel, a rear admiral in the Indian Navy, when they meet at a country club in India during a visit by Sandy. Chowdhury quotes Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto: "I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve." Patel ain't going for it: "But this isn't Pearl Harbor. This is a very different situation...When empires overreach, that's when they crumble. This club, with its fusty Britishness, is a monument to overreach."
Chowdhury insists that all will be sorted out terribly when the US unleashes its tactical and strategic weapons on the Chinese. Again, his uncle ain't chomping: "Listen to yourself. Tactical and strategic nukes. Do you hear what you're saying? With those weapons, no one wins." Always with the Pearl Harbor references, these guys. Anyway, the Indians arrange for a release of Wedge (just in time, before word arrives of Ma's Yank-spanking in the South China Sea).
As a senior adviser to the US president, Chowdhury might have asked why he hadn't been brought in on the sinking of the Zheng He, but, totally unbelievably, he lets the Indian decision pass. Instead, the ghost and Admiral Stavridis take the opportunity to tease the reader with the godawful possibility that Injah possesses startling stealth technologies the West had no knowledge of (more failure of imagination? or a Carlyle wink?), allowing them to sneak up on the Chinese fleet in the South China Sea and show them what a spicy curry can do for a tough dumpling. BOOM! Smiling Buddha beating the snot out of Miss Qiu. Party time in the jello pit of Tao and Zen. At least that's what the Admiral seemed to be pushing. (Later dialogue between East and West will suggest that, metaphorically, Machiavelli and Sun Tzu in a WWE caged grudge match where each tries to subdue the other without landing a blow -- just out-knowing each other. Pass the opium pipe.)
Well, the long and short of it is, the Chinese up and nuke San Diego and Galveston. The Americans up the ante and target three Chinese cities, Sarah Hunt sending up nine old-fangled Hornets immune to being hacked, with only Wedge getting through to his target, Shanghai, population: 33 million. This ending has the feel of the finale to Fail Safe, when a lone pilot gets through and hits Moscow. As with Fail Safe, 2034 ends with New York being nuked. Counterintuitively, this results in the UN Headquarters being relocated to India after the signing of the New Delhi Peace Accords. Luckily, the world survives, and Admiral Stovridis and his ghost assure us that some of the survivors will gather new steam in the upcoming sequel, 2054. (A third book, 2074, completes the trilogy, and, the Admiral teasingly says it's about "when Climate Change comes home to roost.") I wonder what the Indians have planned for that.
Oy. I can't begin to tell you how dumb I think this book is. Let's start with a positive, though. The actual writing seems to be the work of Ackerman, who has good command of the language and writes taut sentences, even if he must relinquish the narrative plan to an uberordinate, the Admiral, who seems to have delivered notes to the ghostwriter to be churned into gold. But there are serious problems. In no particular order: It's 2034, and given the quickening approach of climate catastrophe (pick up any newspaper and note mentions of crazy fires somewhere), and yet, the premise of this co-written novel is that rattling sabers in the South China Sea will be just as important, if not more so, in 13 years, when we are burning up. The authors even have a juvenile take on what they are doing with their mission -- 'driving donuts into your neighbor's prized front lawn' to repay their presumed encroachment. That's really none of your business. America is no neighbor. And have you heard of 'the law'?
Further, the precipitating event of the nuke exchanges-to-come is the arrest of the trawler's crew -- for what? They had a gizmo that is impossible to understand immediately and all Commodore Hunt has to justify forcibly boarding the ship is the lack of a flag and their resistance to being helped. What the reader wants to know is by what authority do the Americans presume they have the right to search and seize a vessel in international waters? What makes this problem more irritating is knowing that the novel's author is the former Dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. Sirrah, how would you teach this search and seizure to your young law students or burgeoning diplomats? Suddenly I'm thinking Fletcher -- Mutiny on the Bounty, the handsome Byronic Errol Flynn not taking any thit.
While we're on a roll, I couldn't for the life of me understand how you could not address climate change -- at all. No mention of how blowing up Shanghai might impact on the 2034 climate. I couldn't fathom how you could introduce a new political party into the equation, without detail of what they stand for, and what happened in 13 years from now to have that party's nominee, a woman, get elected president of the US of A. Stranger still, what the f*ck's her name? She's repeatedly referred to as the president. That's it. Was it Jill Stein, whom I voted for in 2016? Did Chelsea Manning get real political and lead the team to victory in '32? No, but, how could the CIC, the holder of the nuclear codes, in a time of war, not get thrown a bone of mention at least? The sh*t goes down among delegated power types -- admirals, vodka-drinking elite Soviet paratroopers who laugh with their Iranian captors when wind blows them off-course into the water and everyone is standing around all embarrassed bonhomie by the situation. You almost expect an Iranian to start whirling like a Dervish for entertainment, followed by a Soviet (he forgot) hitting on the Sufi soul surfer.
There are really only 10 characters in the story: Two Indians, two Chinese, an Iranian, and five Americans (none of whom is the president). They're cardboardish, speak mostly in 'genre' formulas and cliche's. In fact, that's another thing. There's really very little dialogue in the novel. It's like an old officer telling a tale about a campaign to another officer and subordinate soldiers don't really matter, like when you play Risk and it's just 'tough guy' versus 'tough guy' rolling the dice on the game board. Millions of people are evaporated in the war, but virtually no effort is put into caring. It's like the Admiral and his ghost prepped for the writing by re-reading Fail Safe, and took out all the deeper emotions, the terror of annihilation, the anguish of bad decisions...
Women. They started WW3, according to Stavridis' take on the near future. Commodore Hunt breaks mission protocol and bites on the Chinese trap. Somehow, she's then reassigned to command the carrier from which Wedge will fly in his manually-driven plane (getting lots of pilot "it" bliss), but, doh, neglects to ascertain there's a call-back-to-ship fail-safe mechanism in place to stop the ace from nuking Shanghai. Goodbye New York. In the next novel, what do they do for laughs -- put Hunt in charge of the Space Force? And the president says nothing. WTF? Nothing? What kind of third party is that -- the Atlas Shrugged Party?
When did the modern Indians get so feisty that they decide to bomb the world's wild Cowboy and Old Injun nations (if you believe those Bering Straits crossing stories) off the warpath by unilaterally arranging payback to each for breaching the global peace? Why wouldn't China and the US have turned on India and turned Mumbai into naan bread and dip? The treatment of Indians in the novel suggests an underlying bigotry and suspiciousness of motives, as if we needed to keep an eye out for the doings of these sneaky 'devils'. They're not quite as 'inscrutable' as the Chinese are said to be by certain right-wing nutjobs, but still, why take a chance? Also, maybe it was a backdoor pot shot at Kamala Harris -- who, wait for it, is of Indian heritage and once jailed a Jew.
There are references that are patently -- technological and historical. 10G networks (Is Carlyle hiding something?). Say what? In 13 years from now? Stealth-technology proliferation (isn't the Deep State invisible enough?) -- okay, but this is really bad news for a regime of nuke treaties managed with inspections and accountability. Stealth almost guarantees a first-strike advantage, lots of Cold War-like paranoia, and, consequently, policy pursuit by the Big Boys. Plus, let's not forget the UAPs are here now. Somewhere.
Iran: The character Brigadier General Qassem Farshad is written as a prote'ge' of Major General Qassem Soleimani, the commander of the Quds Force. The same one whom Trump droned and which easily could have been seen by a toothy UN observer as an act of war. Admiral Stavridis and his ghost describe Soleimani's death as 'a soldierly way to go'. The reader is told, "Soleimani... [was] one of the great protectors of the Islamic Republic... Soleimani's great adversary, the Americans, would grant him the most generous of gifts: a warrior's death." Well, hold on, he was taken out by a gimmick drone that used blades to cut through the roof of his car and dice him up with blades. Kinda like a flying IED. Intercept journalist James Risen flat-out called the event a murder -- "Donald Trump Murdered Qassim Suleimani" -- which flies in the face of a hero's end.
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