Katelyn Fossett is associate editor at Politico Magazine.

After retiring from NATO as its second highest military official in 2014, Gen. Sir Richard Shirreff penned the ultimate war game: A 500-page fictionalized account of a war between Russia and NATO, titled, simply, War With Russia. The book, in the style of anti-appeasement tracts before World War II, is a plot-propelled warning about the dangers of Western acquiescence complete with romances, a Russian president with a “pale, bloodless face” (known only as Vladimir Vladimirovich) and a group of bumbling, self-interested NATO ambassadors that can’t ever seem to agree on a course of action soon enough.

While the story may seem farfetched, key plot points look awfully similar to some real life geopolitical mischief we’ve observed in the past couple of years, like Russia’s sowing of misinformation to rile up public sentiment and justify military action. The basic plot of the book begins with a Russian invasion of Ukraine, followed by invasions of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. At each aggression, NATO members debate over how to respond, and every response is not enough to stop escalating Russian aggression, until, eventually war breaks out.


Since Shirreff published the book in May, several geopolitical earthquakes have upended our understanding of what the future might look like. Some of those events have taken our world closer to his fictionalized one—like Brexit, which he predicted in the book, and an increasingly aggressive Russia. And some of those events have surpassed his wildest scenarios, like Russia’s hack on the Democratic National Convention, an attempt to manipulate the U.S. election that even Shirreff concedes goes further than what he could have imagined a year ago. He also didn't imagine a President Trump, who is far less supportive of NATO and far friendlier with the Russian president than the no-nonsense, relatively hawkish woman who is elected in the United States in the book's fictional 2016 election.

Given how much the world has changed, we thought it was worth sitting down with Shirreff to ask how this fictional universe that he has spent so long creating has changed in just a matter of months. If the scenario he predicted was bad before, he's feeling less optimistic now with a Trump presidency, an apparently emboldened Russia and a NATO he says might not survive for even five more years.

(This conversation has been condensed and edited.)

***

Katelyn Fossett: In the beginning of the book, a new U.S. president reverses the previous president’s “hands-off” approach to Russia; she arms Ukraine and is committed to standing tough against Russia. This doesn’t really sound like Trump.

Richard Shirreff: No. This is absolutely the antithesis of Trump. [In the book] we have an American president who is absolutely unequivocally prepared to lead NATO and to lead the free world.

What we’ve seen with Trump—and rightly, actually, in Trump’s case, rightly for America’s case, he called out European members of NATO for not stepping up to the mark in terms of defense spending and being dependent on America. But Trump is not alone in saying that; secretaries of defense and secretaries of State have said that over the last decade or so.

The really scary thing about Trump is what he said about not necessarily coming to their aid if a NATO member is attacked. In a stroke, that undermines the credibility of NATO’s collective defense under the founding principle of NATO, Article 5, which says that an attack on one is an attack on all. That is scary because the defense of Europe since 1949 and the establishment of NATO has depended on the total certainty that whatever American president is in the White House, America will always come to their aid if a NATO member is attacked.

And his recent appointment of Tillerson—here is a man who’s got an order of friendship from Vladimir Putin. So, you know, this isn't a man who is necessarily going to stand up to Russia.

The whole principle of collective defense and deterrence is to raise the bar of risk sufficiently high to any decision-maker in the Kremlin so that biting off a chunk of the Baltic States is not worthwhile.

But after Trump’s inauguration in January, Putin might think it’s worthwhile because he knows that America may not come to the aid of Baltic States if attacked. So he may just get away with it, and that’s why this is so dangerous.

Fossett: So, looking five years down the road, what do you think is the future of NATO? Does it survive a Trump presidency?

Shirreff: Well, if on the 21st of January, the new president makes a strong pitch for America as NATO’s leader, an absolutely resolute declaration of the lasting importance of Article 5 and of America’s commitment under his presidency to collective defense and to defend any NATO member of attack, then NATO will survive a Trump presidency. It might even prosper under a Trump presidency. But if he doesn’t, and if he continues to undermine the credibility of collective defense, as he has started to do as a candidate, then NATO won't survive five years.

Fossett: How do you think that starts, the end of NATO? Is it a show of aggression and NATO fails to come to the defense of a Baltic country, and then it happens again, and it just becomes clear through Putin’s actions or somebody else’s actions that NATO is just not taken seriously?

Shirreff: Well, NATO is an alliance based on principles of democracy and individual liberty and rule of law, but it’s also an alliance based on trust; what keeps it together is trust. It’s not an alliance based on a transactional arrangement between member states. I mean, a statement of attack on one is an attack on all, it's a very idealistic statement.

If you have a leader of NATO taking a transactional approach saying, “Well, let me come to your aid if you’re prepared to pay for American troops in your country or whatever,” that trust goes, and so the centrifugal forces that pull nations apart will predominate over the forces that bind them together. So I think that’s the concern, and it may not need an attack on the Baltic states for NATO to lose credibility and to unwind.

Fossett: America’s willingness to step up militarily is a crucial decision point throughout the book. If you were to write that today, now that Trump is president and with Rex Tillerson possibly as our next secretary of State, how do you think those things would change?

Shirreff: Well, it would make it easier, much, much easier for Vladimir Vladimirovich to launch the attack. As you know, he’s got to be increasingly sure that he’s not going to be haunted by anything, that America won’t step in, and he knows that NATO will not do anything unless America is prepared to take the lead.

The second thing is that America’s failing to underwrite collective defense and the defense of Europe in Article 5 will most certainly cause the collapse of NATO because NATO needs to believe America’s credibility.

And I think a third thing is, if you read to the end of the book, you know, it ends not quite happily ever after, but it does end on a high. And however fantastical that might appear, it won't end on a high if America fails to step up under Trump. It will be a disaster. It will be a catastrophe.

Now, I’m not saying we’re going to be seeing Russian soldiers marching into Paris. No, far from it. But, once again, what we will see is—well, in the words of Putin, what we’ll see is a new Yalta descend on Europe. It will be a 21st century Yalta. It won't be enslavement under Communism, but it will be effectively seeing both former republics of the Soviet Union, the three Baltic States in particular, fall increasingly under Russian influence, and as I said, a collapse of NATO and a reversion, I think, to nationalism. It’s still under the surface of Europe and then will come out of the woodwork. So I think we will be in for a very, very uncertain mood for the century.

Fossett: So, in the U.S. right now, everyone is talking about the alleged Russian hack of the DNC. Can you talk about the role that cyber operations play in the book and whether they would factor in more heavily if you wrote it today?

Shirreff: Yeah. Well, it has changed my expectations. You know, this is the scary thing: When I started writing this book at the beginning of last year, at the beginning of 2015, I painted a picture that for many people would have seemed pretty fantastical. But I fear now that that picture appears all too vulnerable, given what has happened since then.

I think one assumed that cyber would play its part in hybrid asymmetric warfare, exactly the sort of thing we saw in Crimea. How do you undermine the integrity of a state from within, so it collapses without necessarily you having to invade formally?

But I would have expected one of the Baltic States to be the target. I would never have expected that Russian intelligence services, no doubt authorized by Putin, would have deployed cyber operations to manipulate the American presidential election. That is bare-faced, in your face. That is an extraordinary step to take by one state or another in so-called peacetime.

But we have to remember that the Russians do not believe they are in peacetime. The Russians believe they’re at war. The Kremlin totally has believed it has been at war since 2014, and that’s not me saying that. It’s the words of Dmitri Trenin, who runs the Carnegie Moscow Center, which is a very respected think tank. There is a man with close links to the Russian regime—and that’s what he believes.

Another thing is: What should we be doing about it? Number one, we should be taking it seriously, unlike Mr. Trump who denies it, as we heard the other day, [claiming] that it could be some kid somewhere, it could be the Chinese. Well, you know, I think I believe the CIA on that one. But also, we should contest the cyberspace. We should contest the information space. We should not let Russia get away with asymmetric warfare willy-nilly deployed against us, deployed against our democratic institutions.

We should be putting the boots in for the cyber enterprise, and I think it shows extraordinary weakness that we’re not, that America has not on the face of it deployed any form of defensive cyber against Russia to send a warning shot. And the United Kingdom could be doing the same as well because we’ve both got more than enough capabilities to take down the Russian banking system for 24 hours, just as a warning shot, just to make it clear: Don’t mess with us. If you do mess with us, you're going to get a bloody nose.

Fossett: Disinformation campaigns factor really heavily into the book. There’s a school takeover in Donetsk, which Russia stages and uses as a pretext for military intervention, for instance. How have the past couple of years changed how you understand these kinds of vintage Russian disinformation campaigns, in the era of social media and unverifiable news, and what do they expose about our vulnerabilities?

Shirreff: Well, as you said, these are classic techniques of Maskirovka [Russian and Soviet military deception], but 21st century media capabilities allow for much more effective application of these sorts of techniques.

I guess in the last couple of years, it’s just highlighted the extent to which the Russians are really ahead of the game in the sophistication of their approach, the sophistication of their techniques.

What does it say about the West and NATO? Well, it’s difficult, but we’ve got to find ways of stopping the chaos, as it were. You’ll never control it, but you’ve got to find ways of turning it to our advantage in a way that Russia has proved itself able to turn it to its advantage.

Fossett: The calculus of avoiding nuclear war is throughout the book, too. Has a Trump presidency changed how you think of a possibility of nuclear war? There have been reports he’s asked advisers why we don’t use them.

Shirreff: Well, yeah, it does because, again, if you’ve got a president in the White House who says, “Why the hell don’t we—why don’t we just use them?” ... And I am tempted to say the Chinese had it right when they described these interventions of Taiwan as the actions of a child. I mean, it’s an infantile approach to the complexity of deterrent theory, and so the lack of any formal understanding of deterrence and why the way to prevent wars is to build capabilities and then—there’s got to be a degree of credibility about potential use of them. But it’s also got to be that such Armageddon-creating capabilities require the toughest possible control and seriousness about the nature of circumstances in which they might one day be used.

I think by the loose talk about why don’t we use nuclear weapons, it breeds lack of credibility. It sends a message about a failure to understand, which again, thinking about the mind of your opponent or your potential aggressor, creates a situation where he might just think he can get away with it.

It’s also the unpredictability, I think. I think deterrence depends on “If you do this, we’re going to do this.” That’s predictable, OK? [If I'm clear on the consequences,] I’m not going to do it.

Fossett: Why do you think fiction was the best vehicle for this warning?

Shirreff: There was a book called “The Third World War” by General John Hackett. It was written and published in about 1977, ’78, and it made a big impression on me about the time I left the university and I went into the Army.

I was thinking it was time for another similar predictive history, as it were, and then what changed things was the invasion of Crimea and the dynamic that Putin had started there. And I felt that this was really, really dangerous, and so now was the time put pen to paper and start to write a book about a new, as it were, Third World War.