When Karl Marlantes was a student at Yale during the early days of the Vietnam War—in which he would enlist and receive the Navy Cross, rendering the experience later in his acclaimed novel Matterhorn—he first became aware of his own naivete after his dormmates laughed at his assertion that the American president would never lie. During our conversation about his latest work Cold Victory, I noted that the protagonist seems to share some of that youthful wide-eyedness. Marlantes nodded, saying, “She is a character that I very consciously made American-naïve because I think it’s one of the great things we suffer from.”

Set in Finland during the immediate aftermath of World War Two, Cold Victory follows two women attempting to navigate their roles as the wives of military attaches from the United States and Soviet Union. When their husbands agree to a friendly 500-kilometer ski race through the isolated Finnish wilderness, the women are plunged into danger and intrigue after the international press gets word of the competition and touts it as a grand geopolitical rivalry. Loosely based on real events involving Marlantes’ uncle, it’s a paranoid, thrilling narrative that is all too relevant today.

“When the Russians took Crimea in 2014,” explained Marlantes, “I was in the middle of Deep River, but I said to myself, it’s time for this novel. Because Finland and Ukraine are so similar. David and Goliath. Tough people.” His comparison has become even more accurate in the ensuing years with the outbreak of widescale war and the rising signs of authoritarianism at home and abroad—another theme in Cold Victory. “I wanted people to realize what is it like to live under a totalitarian system. We’re doing it to ourselves. It’s that naivete.”

In the book you write that, “Dictatorships need just a few ardent supporters. Democracies need everyone. That’s harder to do.” Lately we’ve seen the rise of authoritarianism around the globe. Why do you think that is?

I think it’s in us. When the primitive tribe was threatened—and I’m talking about back when we were apes: protohumans—everybody had to rally around the leader. As Martin Luther King said, every generation has to fight the battle again, because you’ll never defeat fascism.

It’s somehow in us. I think it’s a genetic thing that only consciousness and education can avoid. And warnings—we’re falling into it again. Our job is to try very hard to bring it to consciousness and always fight against it. And every generation will have to do it otherwise we lose it. The minute you relax you’ll have Donald Trump running the country.

You write “the basic need of every society on earth: to teach the children how to think.” How do we do that?

You let everybody see everything and then teach them how to discern truth from untruth. I think we’ve gotta teach kids how to understand Facebook and X because there’s a lot of nonsense on there. Half of our country thinks that everything they see is true—I read it in the paper sort of thing.

The one that I just groans me is, I’m not interested in politics. I don’t like to think about politics. I mean, will you fucking grow up and become a good citizen? Vote with some intelligence. How do we fix that? Again, I think it’s education. You do not live in this republic without voting and knowing why. The naivete…

One of your characters notes that “’politics,’ was invented to settle differences without violence…no matter how dirty politics gets, it’s never as dirty as war.” These days you hear a lot of talk about the failure of politics and the possibility of violent conflict.

The American Civil War happened because we couldn’t figure out how to compromise. And there are some things you can’t compromise on. That’s why we have wars. I’m not anti-war. I’m anti-stupid war, and you wish that we could solve everything with politics but some things we can’t. But yes, the way we can avoid fighting all the time is by fighting it out politically.

Where do you think we’re headed now?

I once had a very wise, older woman friend of mine say, Old gods die hard. And that’s where we are right now. We are in the middle of a pretty significant change in the way society wants to see itself, and the old gods are represented by MAGA Republicans. They really, I think, deep down want to see America one color and not a lot of immigrants and everybody Christian.

We go through this change periodically. That’s what the Civil War was. I don’t think that people should be owned like cows. What do you mean!? Black people are like cows. No, they’re not. There was an unmistakable shift. We ended up with a civil war instead of political turmoil. Another time this happened was with the unchecked capitalism versus checked capitalism fight which I wrote about in Deep River. It culminated in the thirties with the labor movement and Roosevelt and very nearly fell into fascism again. Same thing—they didn’t want to see the world change. But it did change, in all the cases. I don’t know if that’s called being an optimist, because those changes were extraordinarily painful. Just like gay marriage. People were like that’s impossible, that’s impossible, that’s impossible, and then all of a sudden, it’s okay. Because that God died. So I’m an optimist in the sense that we’re going to go through this horrible time—we’re in the middle of it—but we can save ourselves if we get serious about it and stop being so naive. And we’ll come out the other side.

I’m hoping that we keep democracy by voting the right way. But it’s a very closely run race, and they always have been. The North could have lost the Civil War. Capital could have crushed Labor instead of compromising. I won’t get involved in these in these dirty politics. Okay—now your hands are clean, but you’re a slave with clean hands.