In the centuries-long war between humans and cockroaches, the most bitter blow was dealt roughly 40 years ago. Tired of chasing after the pests with noxious sprays and bombs, researchers started to infuse their poisons with delicious flavors that could compel roaches to approach of their own accord, and then feast upon their own demise. The secret was sugar: Cockroaches, like us, simply couldn’t resist their sweet tooth.

The advent of these baits “revolutionized pest control,” says Coby Schal, an entomologist at North Carolina State University. Manufacturers were sure that they had, after centuries of strife, gained a decisive upper hand. And victory was sweet.

But not even a decade passed before the battlefield shifted once again. In the late 1980s, the manufacturers of Combat, a popular roach bait, received a perplexed call from a pest-control operator in Florida. He’d been planting Combat all over homes for years, but suddenly, it was failing to seduce German cockroaches to their deaths. One of the company’s researchers, Jules Silverman, plucked several roaches from a Gainesville apartment—and was flabbergasted to find that the insects were no longer tempted by Combat’s corn syrup and instead scuttled away in disgust.

Silverman had stumbled upon an evolutionary accident. Lured irresistibly to sugar-laced poisons for years, most of the roaches in the apartment had died. But a few insects, born with an unusual set of genetic changes that rewired their sense of taste, were no longer attracted to the baits—and, unlike their sugar-addicted kin, lived long enough to pass their mutations on to their offspring. Populations of bait-snubbing cockroaches have since been discovered in other parts of the world, even as far away as Russia, each of them apparently evolving their aversion independently, Schal told me. Faced with saccharine death, roaches adapted at warp speed, turning a liability on its head—yet another reason why they remain some of our most persistent pests.

[Read: Why you can’t keep cockroaches out of your home]

Cockroaches’ aversion to sweetness came with costs. Meats, nuts, and super-complex starchy foods, such as beans, still taste mostly fine. But anything that contains a pure infusion of the simple sugar glucose, or that rapidly breaks down into it, registers to the mutant cockroaches as horrifically bitter, says Ayako Wada-Katsumata, an entomologist at North Carolina State University. That’s likely a problem for bugs in the sugar-addicted Western world, Schal said, because they “eat whatever we eat”—candy, pastries, and packaged snacks galore. “Imagine an infestation in a Dunkin’ Donuts,” Schal told me. Starved of low-carb options, the mutant roaches might struggle to eat enough. Wada-Katsumata and Schal haven’t done much work in doughnut shops. But their experiments in the lab do show that when baits are scarce and sugary foods flow free, the mutant cockroaches get rapidly outcompeted by their glucose-loving cousins.

The Atkins-esque diet has taken a toll on German cockroaches’ sex lives too. Prior to Sugargate, the insects had a standard courtship protocol: Males extruded a fatty, sugary “nuptial gift” from a gland on their back to tempt prospective mates into a tryst. Chemically speaking, the secretion is “similar to chocolate,” with comparable allure, Wada-Katsumata told me. If tasty enough, the nuptial gift could coax lady roaches into sitting down for an extended snack—five, six, seven seconds, perhaps longer—enough time for her suitor to initiate an hour-plus-long mating embrace, at the end of which he would deliver a package of sperm.

But the male’s precoital treat holds no appeal for sugar-loathing females. It’s chock-full of maltose, a type of sugar the female’s saliva rapidly converts to glucose. “So at first she is interested,” Wada-Katsumata told me. Within a couple of seconds, though, the taste turns foul—prompting her to skedaddle, her eggs still unfertilized. Weeks may pass before the female is ready to couple anew, if she ever becomes interested in trying again. “She learns that the courtship process is not good because of the bitter taste,” Wada-Katsumata said.

[Read: This cyborg cockroach could save your life someday]

This sounds, in theory, like “it should have been great for humans,” says Justa Heinen-Kay, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Minnesota. And perhaps at first it was, as cockroaches were forced to navigate a “tug-of-war” between poison-survival and sex, says Jessica Ware, an entomologist at the American Museum of Natural History. Sugar-loving roaches were doomed to die in traps, while their keto-dieting kin perished without spawning another generation of pests.

And yet, of course: Faced with this conundrum, cockroaches have tinkered with an evolutionary work-around. By studying lab-reared populations of German cockroaches, Wada-Katsumata and Schal have found that sugar-averse females seem to be producing saliva that’s less effective at converting maltose to glucose, making the taste of nuptial gifts less noxious—while still helping them steer clear of glucose-rich baits. Males have conjured up at least two adaptations to match. They’re tweaking the composition of their gift to contain less maltose in favor of a more complex sugar that’s tougher for roach saliva to break down. And they seem to be engaging the female faster after she begins to feed—as if steeling themselves against the possibility that “she’ll get grossed out and leave,” Heinen-Kay told me.

All of that adds up, once again, to a losing stance for humans. Many of our tasty baits are turning obsolete—and the insects appear to be reproducing just fine. “It reminds us how quickly pests can adapt,” Ware told me, especially under immense pressure from us. This certainly isn’t the first time that our meddling has caused other animals to evolve rapidly over centuries or even just decades: Stripped of tree cover amid rampant deforestation, some of New Zealand’s stone flies jettisoned their ability to fly; under pressure from ivory poachers, elephants in Mozambique have begun to birth tuskless calves.

[Read: African elephants evolved tusklessness amazingly fast]

But the feats of German cockroaches are particularly notable for their speed and breadth, says Chow-Yang Lee, an urban entomologist at UC Riverside. And although other animals may eventually collide with the limits of their adaptive flexibility, cockroaches—already infamous for their ubiquity and near indestructibility—seem to be just warming up. That’s probably part of the reason these roaches are everywhere: on every continent save for Antarctica, ubiquitously plaguing us in and around our homes.

Trap manufacturers haven’t yet given up on concocting baits to accommodate the insects’ new dietary quirks—fattier, saltier, or more savory ones may be available soon. But it may only be a matter of time before the roaches find the loopholes in those new lures too. Lee, who’s been studying the insects for decades, doesn’t dare underestimate their pluck. Among their kin, German cockroaches “are probably the most resilient of all,” he told me. “They overcome challenges over and over. You cannot help but have a lot of respect.”

This is Work in Progress, a newsletter by Derek Thompson about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. Sign up here to get it every week.

Recently I gave myself an assignment: Come up with a framework for explaining generative AI, such as ChatGPT, in a way that illuminates the full potential of the technology and helps me make predictions about its future.

By analogy, imagine that it’s the year 1780 and you get a glimpse of an early English steam engine. You might say: “This is a device for pumping water out of coal mines.” And that would be true. But this accurate description would be far too narrow to see the big picture. The steam engine wasn’t just a water pump. It was a lever for detaching economic growth from population growth. That is the kind of description that would have allowed an 18th-century writer to predict the future.

Or imagine it’s 1879 and you see an incandescent light bulb flutter to life in Thomas Edison’s lab in New Jersey. Is it a replacement for whale oil in lamps? Yes. But that description doesn’t scratch the surface of what the invention represented.  Direct-current and alternating-current electricity enabled on-demand local power for anything—not just light, but also heat, and any number of machines that 19th-century inventors couldn’t even imagine.

Maybe you see what I’m getting at. Narrowly speaking, GPT-4 is a large language model that produces human-inspired content by using transformer technology to predict text. Narrowly speaking, it is an overconfident, and often hallucinatory, auto-complete robot. This is an okay way of describing the technology, if you’re content with a dictionary definition. But it doesn’t get to the larger question: When we’re looking at generative AI, what are we actually looking at?

Sometimes, I think I’m looking at a minor genius. The previous GPT model took the uniform bar exam and scored in the 10th percentile, a failing grade; GPT-4 scored in the 90th percentile. It scored in the 93rd percentile on the SAT reading and writing test, and in the 88th percentile on the LSAT. It scored a 5, the highest possible, on several Advanced Placement tests. Some people are waving away these accomplishments by saying “Well, I could score a 5 on AP Bio too if I could look everything up on the internet.” But this technology is not looking things up online. It’s not rapid-fire Googling answers. It’s a pretrained technology. That is, it’s using what passes for artificial reasoning, based on a large amount of data, to solve new test problems. And on many tests, at least, it’s already doing this better than most humans.

Sometimes, I think I’m looking at a Star Trek replicator for content—a hyper-speed writer and computer programmer. It can code in a pinch, spin up websites based on simple illustrations, and solve programming challenges in seconds. Let’s imagine a prosaic application. Parents can instantly conjure original children’s books for their kids. Here’s a scenario: Your son, who loves alligators, comes home in tears after being bullied at school. You instruct ChatGPT to write a 10-minute, rhyming story about a young boy who overcomes his bully thanks to his magical stuffed alligator. You’re going to get that book in minutes—with illustrations.

Sometimes, I think I’m looking at the nuisance of the century. (I’m not even getting into the most apocalyptic predictions of how AI could suddenly end the human race.) AI safety researchers worry that this AI will one day be able to steal money and bribe humans to commit atrocities. You might think that prediction is absurd. But consider this.  Before OpenAI installed GPT-4’s final safety guardrails, the technology got a human to solve a CAPTCHA for it. When the person, working as a TaskRabbit, responded skeptically and asked GPT if it was a robot, GPT made up an excuse. “No, I’m not a robot,” the robot lied. “I have a vision impairment that makes it hard for me to see the images. That’s why I need the 2captcha service.” The human then provided the results, proving to be an excellent little meat puppet for this robot intelligence.

So what are we to make of this minor genius and content-spewing nuisance? The combination of possibilities makes predictions impossible. Imagine somebody showing you a picture of a tadpole-like embryo at 10 days, telling you the organism was growing exponentially, and asking you to predict the species. Is it a frog? Is it a dog? A woolly mammoth? A human being? Is it none of those things? Is it a species we’ve never classified before? Is it an alien? You have no way of knowing. All you know is that this thing is larval and it might become anything. To me, that’s generative AI. This thing is larval. And it might become anything.

Here is another analogy that comes to mind, grandiose as it might initially seem. Scientists don’t know exactly how or when humans first wrangled fire as a technology, roughly 1 million years ago. But we have a good idea of how fire invented modern humanity. As I wrote in my review of James Suzman’s book Work, fire softened meat and vegetables, allowing humans to accelerate their calorie consumption. Meanwhile, by scaring off predators, controlled fire allowed humans to sleep on the ground for longer periods of time. The combination of more calories and more REM over the millennia allowed us to grow big, unusually energy-greedy brains with sharpened capacities for memory and prediction. Narrowly, fire made stuff hotter. But it also quite literally expanded our minds.

Our ancestors knew that open flame was a feral power, which deserved reverence and even fear. The same technology that made civilization possible also flattened cities. The ancient myths about fire were never simple. When Prometheus stole it from the gods, he transformed the life of mortals but was doomed to live in agony. The people building artificial general intelligence today don’t need media mythmaking to inflate their ego; they already clearly believe in the humanity-altering potential of their invention. But it is a complex thing, playing at Prometheus. They have stolen from the realm of knowledge something very powerful and equally strange. I think this technology will expand our minds. And I think it will burn us.

Imagine that someone—perhaps a man from Florida, or maybe even a governor of Florida—criticized American support for Ukraine. Imagine that this person dismissed the war between Russia and Ukraine as a purely local matter, of no broader significance. Imagine that this person even told a far-right television personality that “while the U.S. has many vital national interests ... becoming further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia is not one of them.” How would a Ukrainian respond? More to the point, how would the leader of Ukraine respond?

As it happens, an opportunity to ask that hypothetical question recently availed itself. The chair of the board of directors of The Atlantic, Laurene Powell Jobs; The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg; and I interviewed President Volodymyr Zelensky several days ago in the presidential palace in Kyiv. In the course of an hour-long conversation, Goldberg asked Zelensky what he would say to someone, perhaps a governor of Florida, who wonders why Americans should help Ukraine.

Zelensky, answering in English, told us that he would respond pragmatically. He didn’t want to appeal to the hearts of Americans, in other words, but to their heads. Were Americans to cut off Ukraine from ammunition and weapons, after all, there would be clear consequences in the real world, first for Ukraine’s neighbors but then for others:   

If we will not have enough weapons, that means we will be weak. If we will be weak, they will occupy us. If they occupy us, they will be on the borders of Moldova and they will occupy Moldova. When they have occupied Moldova, they will [travel through] Belarus and they will occupy Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. That’s three Baltic countries which are members of NATO. They will occupy them. Of course [the Balts] are brave people, and they will fight. But they are small. And they don’t have nuclear weapons. So they will be attacked by Russians because that is the policy of Russia, to take back all the countries which have been previously part of the Soviet Union.

And after that, if there were still no further response? Then, he explained, the struggle would continue:

When they will occupy NATO countries, and also be on the borders of Poland and maybe fight with Poland, the question is: Will you send all your soldiers with weapons, all your pilots, all your ships? Will you send tanks and armored vehicles with your young people? Will you do it? Because if you will not do it, you will have no NATO.

At that point, he said, Americans will face a different choice: not politicians deciding whether “to give weapons or not to give weapons” to Ukrainians, but instead, “fathers and mothers” deciding whether to send their children to fight to keep a large part of the planet, filled with America’s allies and most important trading partners, from Russian occupation.

But there would be other consequences too. One of the most horrifying weapons that Russia has used against Ukraine is the Iranian-manufactured Shahed drone, which has no purpose other than to kill civilians. After these drones are used to subdue Ukraine, Zelensky asked, how long would it be before they are used against Israel? If Russia can attack a smaller neighbor with impunity, regimes such as Iran’s are sure to take note. So then the question arises again: “When they will try to occupy Israel, will the United States help Israel? That is the question. Very pragmatic.”

Finally, Zelensky posed a third question. During the war, Ukraine has been attacked by rockets, cruise missiles, ballistic missiles—“not hundreds, but thousands”:

So what will you do when Russia will use rockets to attack your allies, to [attack] civilian people? And what will you do when Russia, after that, if they do not see [opposition] from big countries like the United States? What will you do if they will use rockets on your territory?

And this was his answer: Help us fight them here, help us defeat them here, and you won’t have to fight them anywhere else. Help us preserve some kind of open, normal society, using our soldiers and not your soldiers. That will help you preserve your open, normal society, and that of others too. Help Ukraine fight Russia now so that no one else has to fight Russia later, and so that harder and more painful choices don’t have to be made down the line.

“It’s about nature. It’s about life,” he said. “That’s it.”

Our full report from Ukraine will appear in a forthcoming issue of The Atlantic.

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A former vice president of the United States identified a sitting president as a mortal danger. In another time, it would have been the Story of the Century. Instead, it was the Kerfuffle of the Week, and it is already dissolving away in the new media cycle.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

Is Ron DeSantis flaming out already? NFL owners are making an example of Lamar Jackson. ChatGPT changed everything. Now its follow-up is here.

Broken Sycophants

Mike Pence stunned Washington at this weekend’s annual Gridiron Club dinner and gained the attention of the media and the ire of the White House by making an offensive joke about the Cabinet member Pete Buttigieg.

At the same event, by the way, Pence affirmed that on January 6, 2021, Donald Trump—at the time, the president of the United States—endangered his life along with the lives of his family, the members and staff of Congress, and numerous law-enforcement officers. Trump did this by inciting a mob to attack the Capitol, stop our constitutional process by force, and allow him to remain in office.

“Donald Trump was wrong,” Pence said at the white-tie event, which was attended by journalists, politicians, and other D.C. insiders. “I had no right to overturn the election, and his reckless words endangered my family and everyone at the Capitol that day, and I know that history will hold Donald Trump accountable.” He continued:

What happened that day was a disgrace. And it mocks decency to portray it any other way. For as long as I live, I will never, ever diminish the injuries sustained, the lives lost, or the heroism of law enforcement on that tragic day.

Yet here we are, three days later, talking about inappropriate jokes. This is the story now? That Pence tried out a dumb gag line aimed at Buttigieg? Make no mistake, the joke was stupid and disrespectful, but perhaps we might zero in on the more important point: Pence told us something horrifying this weekend about the condition of our democracy. The national underreaction to his comments, however, is a warning that we have all become too complacent about the danger my former party now represents.

Let us stipulate here that Pence is shamefully late to this criticism and has no obvious intention of going further. He had his one moment of courage, and there will be no others. My friend Neal Katyal, the former acting solicitor general, was present at the dinner, and he rightly lambasted Pence for posturing while refusing to answer a subpoena about what happened on January 6. “There are great actors at the gridiron,” he tweeted after the dinner. “But no one, and I mean no one, could pretend to be [Mike Pence] with a backbone.”

Nevertheless, we should not lose focus. I am still almost vertiginous at hearing a former constitutional officer of the United States government say what Pence said out loud. After all the violence, all the court cases, all the horrific videos (the stuff that will never air on Tucker Carlson’s show), and all the needless deaths, I am almost relieved that I’m still capable of being shocked. I was a boy during Watergate—I delivered the local newspaper that announced President Richard Nixon’s resignation, in 1974—but that long-ago scandal now seems like a polite comedy of errors next to the conspiracy fueled by Trump’s monstrous narcissism.

Even before Pence’s Gridiron-dinner speech, I had a conversation last week with Tom Joscelyn, one of the principal authors of the House’s January 6 committee report. Joscelyn is worried, as am I, that Americans don’t really yet grasp the degree to which the Republicans have been taken over by their most extreme wing. “The American right is overrun with grievance politics now,” he told me. “And they’ve married that approach to an authoritarian movement and cult of personality” around Trump.

Joscelyn is not a man who rattles easily: He was Rudy Giuliani’s senior counterterrorism adviser back in 2007, when “America’s mayor” was gearing up to run for president. He thinks Giuliani’s sad decline, in which he has become a kind of political Dorian Gray right before our eyes, is emblematic of the Republican collapse and surrender to Trump. He argues, and I agree, that Trump’s opponents, especially those running against him in the GOP, are not taking this threat as seriously as they should. Trump “puts the auto in autocrat,” Joscelyn said, because Trump sublimates everything to his personal needs, including his party. (I would argue that this is why Trump, despite his fascist rhetoric and Mussolini-like strutting, is incapable of the consistency and discipline required to build a truly fascist movement, but that’s an argument for another day.)  

Today, as Joscelyn notes, the GOP has ceased to function as a normal political party. There is no consistent ideology or set of policies, no internal mechanisms to check the power of the Trump cult. Even the people who want to dislodge Trump as the leader of the party and the 2024 nominee dare not to take him on in a direct confrontation. Trump’s critics are often accused of having “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” an irrational hatred of Trump that forces disagreement with Trump on everything, but Joscelyn rightly points out that Trump’s Republican enablers are the ones who have had to betray all of their deepest beliefs merely to avoid being cast out. Trump, he says, “broke his sycophants, not his critics.”

Which brings us back to Pence. It might not sound like much for Pence to admit what millions of people already know, but within the Republican Party, this is about as close as you can get to open heresy; Pence’s team deliberated making even this small move against Trump. Yet Pence’s comments have been shrugged off by both the press and the public.

To put into perspective how numb we’ve become, let’s do a thought experiment. Imagine, for example, if Hubert Humphrey, after the riots that broke out in 1968 at the Democratic National Convention, said later, “Lyndon Johnson encouraged those anti-war protesters and put me and hundreds of other people in danger. History will hold President Johnson accountable.” Those two sentences would have shaken the foundations of American democracy and changed history.

But not today. Instead, we’ve already moved on to whether Pence should apologize for a clumsy and offensive joke. (He should.) This, however, is the danger of complacency. What would have been a gigantic, even existential political crisis in a more virtuous and civic-minded nation is now one of many stories about Donald Trump that rush past our eyes and ears.

Voters are tired, and the national media are committed to treating the GOP as a mainstream party. Trump and his coterie are counting on this exhaustion to return to national power, but so are people such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who is using Trump’s themes of bigotry, grievance, and cultural panic to harness that same authoritarian energy for his own purposes. Republican leaders have no intention of speaking truth—or decency—to their base, and until someone in the party of Lincoln is able to muster even the tiniest fraction of Lincoln’s courage, we will indulge our complacency about the Republicans at our peril.

Related:

Anne Applebaum: History will judge the complicit. (From 2020) The January 6 whitewash will backfire.

Today’s News

A Russian military jet hit the propeller of an American drone, causing the drone to go down over the Black Sea, according to U.S. officials. Russia has denied contact with the drone. Meta, Facebook’s parent company, plans to lay off another 10,000 workers—its second round of job cuts in recent months. Ohio is suing Norfolk Southern after one of its trains, carrying hazardous chemicals, was derailed in the state last month.

Dispatches

Work in Progress: The end of Silicon Valley Bank is also the end of a Silicon Valley myth, Derek Thompson writes.

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Evening Read

CBS Photo Archive / Getty

How Not to Cover a Bank Run

By Brian Stelter

On September 17, 2008, the Financial Times reporter John Authers decided to run to the bank. In his Citi account was a recently deposited check from the sale of his London apartment. If the big banks melted down, which felt like a distinct possibility among his Wall Street sources, he would lose most of his money, because the federal deposit-insurance limit at the time was $100,000. He wanted to transfer half the balance to the Chase branch next door, just in case.

When Authers arrived at Citi, he found “a long queue, all well-dressed Wall Streeters,” all clearly spooked by the crisis, all waiting to move money around. Chase was packed with bankers too. Authers had walked into a big story—but he didn’t share it with readers for 10 years. The column he eventually published, titled “In a Crisis, Sometimes You Don’t Tell the Whole Story,” was, he wrote this week, “the most negatively received column I’ve ever written.”

Read the full article.

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P.S.

Now that The Last of Us, HBO’s series based on the game of the same name, has aired its finale, I’ll write about the show later in the week. I hope The Last of Us, which has been remarkable in every aspect, illustrates how, for many years, computer games have had plots more intricate and more involving than much of the stuff Hollywood has been cranking out now for decades. (I say this fully aware of the creativity of this year’s Best Picture, Everything Everywhere All at Once. But I will remind you that it is also the 30th anniversary of The Beverly Hillbillies, a terrible movie full of great actors that I think was an early sign of American cultural exhaustion.)

I have particularly high hopes—that I fear will be dashed—for Amazon Prime’s upcoming Fallout series. Unlike The Last of Us, the Fallout games, set long after a global nuclear war, leaven the despair and violence of postapocalyptic survival with outrageous humor. If you’ve been watching Hello Tomorrow!, the Apple TV+ series that features the always excellent Billy Crudup selling lunar condos in a reimagined 1950s full of robots and floating cars—and yes, we are living in a golden age of television—you have a taste of what the world of Fallout looks like. I can only hope that Amazon’s series about life after the Bomb doesn’t turn out to be a bomb itself.

— Tom

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

Photo-illustrations by Oliver Munday

Very few Americans—or, for that matter, very few people on the planet—can remember a time when freedom of the seas was in question. But for most of human history, there was no such guarantee. Pirates, predatory states, and the fleets of great powers did as they pleased. The current reality, which dates only to the end of World War II, makes possible the commercial shipping that handles more than 80 percent of all global trade by volume—oil and natural gas, grain and raw ores, manufactured goods of every kind. Because freedom of the seas, in our lifetime, has seemed like a default condition, it is easy to think of it—if we think of it at all—as akin to Earth’s rotation or the force of gravity: as just the way things are, rather than as a man-made construct that needs to be maintained and enforced.

But what if the safe transit of ships could no longer be assumed? What if the oceans were no longer free?

Every now and again, Americans are suddenly reminded of how much they depend on the uninterrupted movement of ships around the world for their lifestyle, their livelihood, even their life. In 2021, the grounding of the container ship Ever Given blocked the Suez Canal, forcing vessels shuttling between Asia and Europe to divert around Africa, delaying their passage and driving up costs. A few months later, largely because of disruptions caused by the coronavirus pandemic, more than 100 container ships were stacked up outside the California Ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles, snarling supply chains throughout the country.

[Read: The ship stuck in the Suez Canal is glorious]

These events were temporary, if expensive. Imagine, though, a more permanent breakdown. A humiliated Russia could declare a large portion of the Arctic Ocean to be its own territorial waters, twisting the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea to support its claim. Russia would then allow its allies access to this route while denying it to those who dared to oppose its wishes. Neither the U.S. Navy, which has not built an Arctic-rated surface warship since the 1950s, nor any other NATO nation is currently equipped to resist such a gambit.

Or maybe the first to move would be Xi Jinping, shoring up his domestic standing by attempting to seize Taiwan and using China’s anti-ship ballistic missiles and other weapons to keep Western navies at bay. An emboldened China might then seek to cement its claim over large portions of the East China Sea and the entirety of the South China Sea as territorial waters. It could impose large tariffs and transfer fees on the bulk carriers that transit the region. Local officials might demand bribes to speed their passage.

[Read: The world’s most important body of water]

Once one nation decided to act in this manner, others would follow, claiming enlarged territorial waters of their own, and extracting what they could from the commerce that flows through them. The edges and interstices of this patchwork of competing claims would provide openings for piracy and lawlessness.

The great container ships and tankers of today would disappear, replaced by smaller, faster cargo vessels capable of moving rare and valuable goods past pirates and corrupt officials. The cruise-ship business, which drives many tourist economies, would falter in the face of potential hijackings. A single such incident might create a cascade of failure throughout the entire industry. Once-busy sea lanes would lose their traffic. For lack of activity and maintenance, passages such as the Panama and Suez Canals might silt up. Natural choke points such as the straits of Gibraltar, Hormuz, Malacca, and Sunda could return to their historic roles as havens for predators. The free seas that now surround us, as essential as the air we breathe, would be no more.

If oceanic trade declines, markets would turn inward, perhaps setting off a second Great Depression. Nations would be reduced to living off their own natural resources, or those they could buy—or take—from their immediate neighbors. The world’s oceans, for 70 years assumed to be a global commons, would become a no-man’s-land. This is the state of affairs that, without a moment’s thought, we have invited.

Everywhere I look, I observe sea power manifesting itself—unacknowledged—in American life. When I drive past a Walmart, a BJ’s Wholesale Club, a Lowe’s, or a Home Depot, in my mind I see the container ships moving products from where they can be produced at a low price in bulk form to markets where they can be sold at a higher price to consumers. Our economy and security rely on the sea—a fact so fundamental that it should be at the center of our approach to the world.

It is time for the United States to think and act, once again, like a seapower state. As the naval historian Andrew Lambert has explained, a seapower state understands that its wealth and its might principally derive from seaborne trade, and it uses instruments of sea power to promote and protect its interests. To the degree possible, a seapower state seeks to avoid direct participation in land wars, large or small. There have been only a few true seapower nations in history—notably Great Britain, the Dutch Republic, Venice, and Carthage.

I grew up on a dairy farm in Indiana and spent 26 years on active duty in the Navy, deploying in support of combat operations in the Middle East and Yugoslavia, both at sea and in the air. I did postgraduate work at several universities and served as a strategist and an adviser to senior officials in the Pentagon. Yet I have always remained, in terms of interests and outlook, a son of the Midwest. In my writings I have sought to underscore sea power’s importance and the reliance of our economy on the sea.

Despite my experience, I was never able to convince my mother. She spent the last years of her working life at the Walmart in my hometown, first at the checkout counter and then in accounting. My mother followed the news and was sharply curious about the world; we were close, and spoke often. She was glad that I was in the Navy, but not because she saw my work as essential to her own life. “If you like Walmart,” I often told her, “then you ought to love the U.S. Navy. It’s the Navy that makes Walmart possible.” But to her, as a mother, my naval service mostly meant that, unlike friends and cousins who deployed with the Army or Marine Corps to Iraq or Afghanistan, I probably wasn’t going to be shot at. Her perspective is consistent with a phenomenon that the strategist Seth Cropsey has called seablindness.

Today, it is difficult to appreciate the scale or speed of the transformation wrought after World War II. The war destroyed or left destitute all of the world powers opposed to the concept of a mare liberum—a “free sea”—first enunciated by the Dutch philosopher Hugo Grotius in 1609. The United States and Great Britain, the two traditional proponents of a free sea, had emerged not only triumphant but also in a position of overwhelming naval dominance. Their navies were together larger than all of the other navies of the world combined. A free sea was no longer an idea. It was now a reality.

In this secure environment, trade flourished. The globalizing economy, which allowed easier and cheaper access to food, energy, labor, and commodities of every kind, grew from nearly $8 trillion in 1940 to more than $100 trillion 75 years later, adjusted for inflation. With prosperity, other improvements followed. During roughly this same period, from the war to the present, the share of the world’s population in extreme poverty, getting by on less than $1.90 a day, dropped from more than 60 percent to about 10 percent. Global literacy doubled, to more than 85 percent. Global life expectancy in 1950 was 46 years. By 2019, it had risen to 73 years.

All of this has depended on freedom of the seas, which in turn has depended on sea power wielded by nations—led by the United States—that believe in such freedom.

But the very success of this project now threatens its future. Seablindness has become endemic.

The United States is no longer investing in the instruments of sea power as it once did. America’s commercial shipbuilding industry began losing its share of the global market in the 1960s to countries with lower labor costs, and to those that had rebuilt their industrial capacity after the war. The drop in American shipbuilding accelerated after President Ronald Reagan took office, in 1981. The administration, in a nod to free-market principles, began to shrink government subsidies that had supported the industry. That was a choice; it might have gone the other way. Aircraft manufacturers in the United States, citing national-security concerns, successfully lobbied for continued, and even increased, subsidies for their industry in the decades that followed—and got them.

It is never to a nation’s advantage to depend on others for crucial links in its supply chain. But that is where we are. In 1977, American shipbuilders produced more than 1 million gross tons of merchant ships. By 2005, that number had fallen to 300,000. Today, most commercial ships built in the United States are constructed for government customers such as the Maritime Administration or for private entities that are required to ship their goods between U.S. ports in U.S.-flagged vessels, under the provisions of the 1920 Jones Act.

The U.S. Navy, too, has been shrinking. After the Second World War, the Navy scrapped many of its ships and sent many more into a ready-reserve “mothball” fleet. For the next two decades, the active naval fleet hovered at about 1,000 ships. But beginning in 1969, the total began to fall. By 1971, the fleet had been reduced to 750 ships. Ten years later, it was down to 521. Reagan, who had campaigned in 1980 on a promise to rebuild the Navy to 600 ships, nearly did so under the able leadership of his secretary of the Navy, John Lehman. During Reagan’s eight years in office, the size of the Navy’s fleet climbed to just over 590 ships.

Then the Cold War ended. The administrations of Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton slashed troops, ships, aircraft, and shore-based infrastructure. During the Obama administration, the Navy’s battle force bottomed out at 271 ships. Meanwhile, both China and Russia, in different ways, began to develop systems that would challenge the U.S.-led regime of global free trade on the high seas.

Russia began to invest in highly sophisticated nuclear-powered submarines with the intention of being able to disrupt the oceanic link between NATO nations in Europe and North America. China, which for a time enjoyed double-digit GDP growth, expanded both its commercial and naval shipbuilding capacities. It tripled the size of the People’s Liberation Army-Navy and invested in long-range sensors and missiles that could allow it to interdict commercial and military ships more than 1,000 miles from its shores. Both Russia and China also sought to extend territorial claims into international waters, the aim being to control the free passage of shipping near their shores and in their perceived spheres of influence. In short: Autocratic powers are trying to close the global commons.

Today the United States is financially constrained by debt, and psychologically burdened by recent military conflicts—for the most part, land-based actions in Iraq and Afghanistan fought primarily by a large standing army operating far from home—that turned into costly quagmires. We can no longer afford to be both a continentalist power and an oceanic power. But we can still exert influence, and at the same time avoid getting caught up in the affairs of other nations. Our strategic future lies at sea.

Americans used to know this. The United States began its life purposefully as a seapower: The Constitution explicitly directed Congress “to provide and maintain a Navy.” In contrast, the same article of the Constitution instructed the legislature “to raise and support Armies,” but stipulated that no appropriation for the army “shall be for a longer Term than two Years.” The Founders had an aversion to large standing armies.

George Washington pushed through the Naval Act of 1794, funding the Navy’s original six frigates. (One of these was the famous USS Constitution, “Old Ironsides,” which remains in active commission to this day.) In his final address to the American people, Washington advocated for a navalist foreign policy, warning against “attachments and entanglements” with foreign powers that might draw the young nation into continental European wars. The strategy he advised instead was to protect American trade on the high seas, and advance America’s interests through temporary agreements, not permanent alliances. This seapower approach to the world became the sine qua non of early American foreign policy.

In time, conditions changed. The U.S. was preoccupied by sectional conflict and by conquest of the continent. It turned inward, becoming a continental power. But by the end of the 19th century, that era had come to a close.

In 1890, a U.S. Navy captain named Alfred Thayer Mahan published an article in The Atlantic titled “The United States Looking Outward.” Mahan argued that, with the closing of the frontier, the United States had in essence become an island nation looking eastward and westward across oceans. The nation’s energies should therefore be focused externally: on the seas, on maritime trade, and on a larger role in the world.

Mahan sought to end the long-standing policy of protectionism for American industries, because they had become strong enough to compete in the global market. By extension, Mahan also sought a larger merchant fleet to carry goods from American factories to foreign lands, and for a larger Navy to protect that merchant fleet. In a few thousand words, Mahan made a coherent strategic argument that the United States should once again become a true seapower.

[From the December 1890 issue: The United States looking outward]

Mahan’s vision was profoundly influential. Politicians such as Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge advocated for larger merchant and naval fleets (and for a canal through Central America). Mahan, Roosevelt, and Lodge believed that sea power was the catalyst for national power, and they wanted the United States to become the preeminent nation of the 20th century. The swift expansion of the Navy, particularly in battleships and cruisers, paralleled the growing fleets of other global powers. Leaders in Britain, Germany, France, and Italy had also read Mahan, and they wanted to protect commercial access to their overseas empires. The resulting arms race at sea helped destabilize the balance of power in the years leading up to the First World War.

This is not the place to relate every development in the evolution of America’s naval capability, much less that of other nations. Suffice to say that, by the 1930s, new technologies were transforming the seas. Aircraft, aircraft carriers, amphibious assault craft, and submarines had all been developed into more effective weapons. During the Second World War, the oceans once again became battlefields. The fighting proceeded in a way Mahan himself had never envisioned, as fleets faced off against ships they could not even see, launching waves of aircraft against each other. In the end, the war was won not by bullets or torpedoes but by the American maritime industrial base. The United States began the war with 790 ships in its battle force; when the war ended, it had more than 6,700.

Alfred Thayer Mahan (Photo-illustration by Oliver Munday. Source: HUM Images / Universal Images Group / Getty.)

No nation could come close to challenging the American fleet, commercial or naval, on the high seas after the war. So great was its advantage that, for decades, no one even tried to match it. In concert with allies, the United States created an international system based on free and unhindered trade. It was the culmination of the Mahanist Age.

[From the June 1919 issue: The future of sea-power]

For the first time in history, open access to the seas was assumed—and so people naturally gave little thought to its importance and challenges.

A new seapower strategy involves more than adding ships to the Navy. A new strategy must start with the economy.

For 40 years, we have watched domestic industries and blue-collar jobs leave the country. Now we find ourselves locked in a new great-power competition, primarily with a rising China but also with a diminishing and unstable Russia. We will need heavy industry in order to prevail. The United States cannot simply rely on the manufacturing base of other countries, even friendly ones, for its national-security needs.

In 1993, Deputy Secretary of Defense William Perry invited the executives of leading defense contractors to a dinner in Washington—a meal that would enter national-security lore as the “Last Supper.” Perry spelled out projected cuts in defense spending. His message was clear: If the American defense industrial base was going to survive, then mergers would be required. Soon after, the Northrop Corporation acquired the Grumman Corporation to form Northrop Grumman. The Lockheed Corporation and Martin Marietta became Lockheed Martin. A few years later, Boeing combined with McDonnell Douglas, itself the product of a previous merger. Among the shipbuilders, General Dynamics, which manufactures submarines through its Electric Boat subsidiary, bought Bath Iron Works, a naval shipyard, and the National Steel and Shipbuilding Company.

[From the October 2007 issue: The Navy’s new flat-Earth strategy]

These mergers preserved the defense industries, but at a price: a dramatic reduction in our overall industrial capacity. During World War II, the United States could claim more than 50 graving docks—heavy-industrial locations where ships are assembled—that were greater than 150 meters in length, each one able to build merchant craft and naval warships. Today, the U.S. has 23 graving docks, only a dozen of which are certified to work on Navy ships.

The United States will need to implement a seapower industrial policy that meets its national-security needs: building steel plants and microchip foundries, developing hypersonic glide bodies and autonomous unmanned undersea vehicles. We will need to foster new start-ups using targeted tax laws, the Defense Production Act, and perhaps even a “Ships Act” akin to the recent CHIPS Act, which seeks to bring back the crucial semiconductor industry.

We also need to tell the companies we once encouraged to merge that it’s time for them to spin off key industrial subsidiaries in order to encourage competition and resilience—and we need to reward them for following through. In 2011, for example, the aerospace giant Northrop Grumman spun off its shipbuilding holdings to form Huntington Ingalls, in Newport News, Virginia, and Pascagoula, Mississippi. Adding more such spin-offs would not only increase the nation’s industrial depth but also encourage the growth of parts suppliers for heavy industries, companies that have endured three decades of consolidation or extinction.

Shipbuilding, in particular, is a jobs multiplier. For every job created in a shipyard, five jobs, on average, are created at downstream suppliers—well-paid blue-collar jobs in the mining, manufacturing, and energy sectors.

Most of the civilian merchant ships, container ships, ore carriers, and supertankers that dock in American ports are built overseas and fly foreign flags. We have ignored the linkage between the ability to build commercial ships and the ability to build Navy ships—one reason the latter cost twice as much as they did in 1989. The lack of civilian ships under our own flag makes us vulnerable. Today we remember the recent backlog of container ships in the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, but tomorrow we could face the shock of no container ships arriving at all should China prohibit its large fleet from visiting U.S. ports. Today we’re proud to ship liquefied natural gas to our allies in Europe, but tomorrow we might not be able to export that energy to our friends, because we don’t own the ships that would carry it. We need to bring back civilian shipbuilding as a matter of national security.

To revive our merchant-shipbuilding base, we will need to offer government subsidies on a par with those provided to European and Asian shipbuilders. Subsidies have flowed to commercial aviation since the establishment of commercial airlines in the 1920s; Elon Musk’s SpaceX would not be enjoying its present success were it not for strong initial support from the U.S. government. Shipbuilding is no less vital.

Reindustrialization, in particular the restoration of merchant-shipbuilding capacity and export-oriented industries, will support the emergence of a new, more technologically advanced Navy. The cost of building Navy ships could be coaxed downward by increasing competition, expanding the number of downstream suppliers, and recruiting new shipyard workers to the industry.

Wherever American trade goes, the flag traditionally follows—usually in the form of the Navy. But the new Navy must not look like the old Navy. If it does, we will have made a strategic mistake. As rival powers develop ships and missiles that target our aircraft carriers and other large surface vessels, we should make greater investments in advanced submarines equipped with the latest in long-range maneuvering hypersonic missiles. We should pursue a future in which our submarines cannot be found and our hypersonic missiles cannot be defeated.

[Elliot Ackerman: The arsenal of democracy is reopening for business]

The Navy, however, is not just a wartime force. It has a peacetime mission unique among the military services: showing the flag and defending American interests by means of a consistent and credible forward presence. Commanders have identified 18 maritime regions of the world that require the near-continuous deployment of American ships to demonstrate our resolve. During the Cold War, the Navy maintained approximately 150 ships at sea on any given day. As the size of the fleet has fallen—to its present 293—the Navy has struggled to keep even 100 ships at sea at all times. The service’s admirals recently suggested a goal of having 75 ships “mission capable” at any given moment. Right now the fleet has about 20 ships going through training workups and only about 40 actively deployed under regional combatant commanders. This has created vacuums in vital areas such as the Arctic Ocean and the Black Sea, which our enemies have been eager to fill.

The chief of naval operations recently called for a fleet of some 500 ships. He quickly pointed out that this would include about 50 new guided-missile frigates—small surface vessels able to operate closely with allies and partners—as well as 150 unmanned surface and subsurface platforms that would revolutionize the way wartime naval operations are conducted. The frigates are being assembled on the shores of Lake Michigan. The construction of the unmanned ships, owing to their nontraditional designs and smaller sizes, could be dispersed to smaller shipyards, including yards on the Gulf Coast, along the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, and on the Great Lakes, where ships and submarines were built for the Navy during World War II. These types of ships, combined with advanced submarines, will allow us to exert influence and project power with equal vigor.

Across the 50 years of my life, I have watched the importance of the oceans and the idea of freedom of the seas largely fade from national awareness. The next great military challenge we face will likely come from a confrontation on the sea. Great powers, especially nuclear-equipped great powers, dare not attack one another directly. Instead, they will confront one another in the commons: cyberspace, outer space, and, most crucially, at sea. The oceans would be battlefields again, and we, and the world, are simply not ready for that.

Some voices, of course, will argue that America’s interests, diffuse and global, might best be served by expanding our commitments of land forces to places like Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and South Korea as demonstrations of American resolve, and that air and naval forces should be diminished to pay for such commitments. Others—those in the “divest to invest” school—believe in the promise of future technology, arguing that more traditional warfare platforms and missions should be phased out to fund their newer and more efficient missiles or cybersystems. The first approach continues a path of unnecessary entanglements. The second proceeds along a path of promise without proof.

A seapower-focused national-security strategy would give new advantages to the United States. It would not too subtly encourage allies and partners in Eurasia to increase investment in land forces and to work more closely together. If they build more tanks and fully staff their armies, the United States could guarantee transoceanic supply lines from the Western Hemisphere. The 70-year practice of stationing our land forces in allied countries, using Americans as trip wires and offering allies a convenient excuse not to spend on their own defense, should come to an end.

A seapower strategy, pursued deliberately, would put America back on course for global leadership. We must shun entanglements in other nations’ land wars—resisting the urge to solve every problem—and seek instead to project influence from the sea. We must re-create an industrialized, middle-class America that builds and exports manufactured goods that can be carried on U.S.-built ships to the global market.

We knew all this in the age of Alfred Thayer Mahan. The Chinese are showing us that they know it now. The United States needs to relearn the lessons of strategy, geography, and history. We must look outward across the oceans, and find our place upon them, again.

This article appears in the April 2023 print edition with the headline “America’s Future Is at Sea.”

Photographs by Ryan Pfluger

Arnold Schwarzenegger nearly killed me.

I had joined him one morning as he rushed through his daily routine. Schwarzenegger gets up by six. He makes coffee, putters around, feeds Whiskey (his miniature horse) and Lulu (his miniature donkey), shovels their overnight manure into a barrel, drinks his coffee, checks his email, and maybe plays a quick game of chess online. At 7:40, he puts a bike on the back of a Suburban and heads from his Brentwood, California, mansion to the Fairmont Miramar Hotel in Santa Monica. From there he sets out on the three-mile bike ride to Gold’s Gym, where he has been lifting on and off since the late ’60s. The bike ride is his favorite part of the morning. It is also, I learned while following behind him on that foggy day in October, a terrifying expedition.

Schwarzenegger can be selective in his observance of traffic signals. He zipped through intersections with cars screeching behind him. I braked hard and, being neither an action hero nor a stunt double, barely stayed upright. Drivers honked and yelled at the speeding cyclist in the lead until they realized who he was. “Heyyyy, Mister Arnold!” the double-taking driver of a landscaping van shouted out his window.

Schwarzenegger does not wear a helmet and seems to enjoy being recognized, startling commuters with drive-by cameos. He describes his ride as a kind of vigorous nostalgia trip, a time when the former Mr. Universe, Terminator, Barbarian, Governor of California, etc.—one of the strangest and most potent alloys of American celebrity ever forged—can reconnect with something in the neighborhood of a pedestrian existence. “It’s like a Norman Rockwell,” Schwarzenegger told me. “We talk to the bus driver. We do the garbage man, the construction worker. Everyone’s got their beautiful, beautiful jobs and professions.” These days, Schwarzenegger’s own beautiful profession is to essentially be an emeritus version of himself.

We made it intact to Gold’s Gym in Venice, the birthplace of bodybuilding in the ’60s and ’70s, and a cathedral to the sport ever since. Schwarzenegger will always be synonymous with the place, and with the spectacle of specimens at nearby Muscle Beach. The Venice Gold’s is a tourist attraction but also a serious gym—loud with the usual clanking and grunting, and redolent with the pickled scent of sweat.

“Say hi to Heide,” Schwarzenegger told me, pointing to 82-year-old Heide Sutter, who was working out in a skintight tracksuit. “She is a landmark,” he said. “She’s actually the girl who is sitting on my shoulder in the Pumping Iron book. She was topless in the shot.” Perhaps I recognized her? Not immediately, no. I didn’t even realize that Pumping Iron was a book. I knew it only as a movie, the 1977 documentary about the fanatical culture of bodybuilding. “Everybody wants to live forever,” went the opening refrain of the title song. Schwarzenegger, then 28, was the star of the film and a testament to the idea that humans could mold themselves into gods—bulging comic-book gods, but gods nonetheless.

“The most satisfying feeling you can get in the gym is the pump,” he says in the movie. “It’s as satisfying to me as coming is, as in having sex with a woman and coming … So can you believe how much I am in heaven?”

Now the aging leviathan jumped into a series of light repetitions. He likes to emphasize a different body part each day of the week. He was focused today (a Thursday) on his back and chest muscles. He did light bench presses, pectoral work on an incline chest machine, and some lat pull-downs. I did a few reps myself on an adjacent machine, to blend in.

For the most part, the muscled minions at Gold’s left the king alone. “This is one of the few places where Arnold is treated normally,” said Daniel Ketchell, Schwarzenegger’s chief of staff, who hovered between us. A few tourists from Germany defied protocol and approached the bench, asking for selfies. “Don’t worry about it,” Schwarzenegger said, blowing them off. “We have a mutual friend,” tried another intruder, and Schwarzenegger scowled, muttering indecipherably, possibly in German.

As someone who spent years perfecting his body, Schwarzenegger has always been attuned to the nuances of decline. Paul Wachter, a friend and business partner, first met him in 1981, when Wachter was about to turn 25. “Arnold said, ‘Once you hit 26, it’s all downhill with the body,’ ” Wachter recalled. “He said, ‘You can still be in shape, but the peak is over at 26.’ ”

Schwarzenegger is now 75. He observed his birthday on July 30 by trying not to notice it. The only memorable thing about the milestone was that he tested positive for COVID that morning. He felt lousy for a few days and recovered.

I wanted to talk with Schwarzenegger because I was curious about what aging felt like for someone with a name, body, and global platform so huge that they hardly seemed subject to time. What does it feel like to be perpetually compared with your long-ago peak? “They play Pumping Iron in a loop in some of the gyms,” Schwarzenegger told me, grinning at the idea of his souped-up old self still presiding over the pretenders. We all get soft and dilapidated, but it cuts much harder when you’ve been “celebrated for years for having the best-developed body,” as he put it. “You get chubby. You get overweight, you get older and older.” Just imagine, he added wistfully, “the change I saw.”

Left: Schwarzenegger at the Mr. Steiermark competition in Graz, Austria, 1963 or ’64. Right: Performing in “Articulate Muscle: The Male Body in Art” at the Whitney Museum in New York, 1976. (RGR Collection / Alamy; Elliott Erwitt / Magnum)

As I watched him complete his workout, Schwarzenegger was barely clearing 120 pounds on the bench press. After decades of abuse, the man’s shoulders are toast. His knees are shot, his back is sore, and he has undergone multiple heart procedures, including three separate valve-replacement surgeries, the last in 2020. Two of them devolved into 10-plus-hour ordeals that nearly killed him on the table. Still, let it be recorded that on a foggy October morning at Gold’s Gym in Venice, I was lifting heavier weights than Arnold Schwarzenegger was.

After our workout, Schwarzenegger stood a few feet away and looked me over, paying particular attention to my bare legs.

“You have very good calves,” he observed. “Very well defined.” And calves are important, he added: “They are one of the muscles that the old Greeks used to idolize.” Big deltoids are also coveted. In addition to abs and obliques. But he always takes note of a person’s calves. This was easily the highlight of my day, if not my five decades among Earth mortals.

A couple of years ago, Howard Stern asked Schwarzenegger on the air where he thought we all go after we die. “The truth is, we’re six feet under, and we’re going to rot there,” Schwarzenegger said. Some other authority gets to play the Terminator, and on a schedule of their choosing. Schwarzenegger wasn’t afraid of death, he added. “I’m just pissed off about it.”

Emotionally, Schwarzenegger has always been a padlocked gym. But he’s felt a change lately, a more reflective shift. People close to him have noted a degree of openness, a desire to confide, that wasn’t present back when he was young and invincible. Schwarzenegger told me that he recently attended the premiere of the new Avatar film (directed by his old friend James Cameron) and found himself crying in the dark. Someone will tell a story and he’ll choke up out of nowhere. He asks himself: “Why did this have an impact on me today when it would have had none in the 1970s?”

The day before our helter-skelter bike ride, I had caught Schwarzenegger leaning against a doorway of the Chinese Theatre, on Hollywood Boulevard. He was waiting to give a brief speech in honor of Jamie Lee Curtis, who was about to get her hand- and footprints embedded in cement.

“I was trying to think of a big word,” Schwarzenegger told me. “You know, a forever thing, or something like that.” He kept landing on verewigt; German for “immortalized.” “It means ‘forever,’ ” he said. Ketchell encouraged the boss to not overthink it. “Just say ‘immortalized,’ ” Ketchell told him. This is Hollywood—speak in the native platitude.

Curtis walked into the theater and greeted Schwarzenegger. They performed ritual Hollywood shoulder rubs on each other. The two go way back: Schwarzenegger once did a Christmas special with her father, Tony Curtis. They have houses near each other in Sun Valley. In 1994, Schwarzenegger and Curtis co-starred in True Lies, the Cameron action comedy. That was the same year Schwarzenegger’s own massive hands and feet were set at the Chinese Theatre. He mentioned this more than once.

Schwarzenegger with Jamie Lee Curtis in True Lies, 1994 (Colaimages / Alamy)

Schwarzenegger introduced me to Curtis, who told me how much she appreciated Arnold’s “showing up” for her. “Showing up” was a big part of the job these days. Then Curtis headed to the stage, while Schwarzenegger stayed behind in the doorway, squinting out into the glare. He looked fidgety, maybe bored. He asked me whether I had seen the spot where his hands and feet were imprinted.

Yes, I’d seen it. I’ll be back, Schwarzenegger had signed in the concrete—his signature line, first uttered in The Terminator, before his character circled back and murdered two dozen police officers. Schwarzenegger has been tossing out “I’ll be back”s ever since. The phrase carries “intimations of the eternal return,” an overheated critic once wrote in The Village Voice. But it lands a little differently now that the aging gargantuan is inching closer to the point of no return.

The reminders are everywhere, the worst one being that Schwarzenegger’s friends keep dying. Jim Lorimer, a sidekick and business partner of more than 50 years, and an early promoter of bodybuilding in America, died in November (Schwarzenegger spoke at his funeral). George Shultz, the Reagan-era secretary of state who became a close mentor, died in early 2021. The hardest loss was the Italian champion Franco Columbu, another Pumping Iron icon, known as the “Sardinian Strongman,” who died of an apparent heart attack in 2019. “I love you Franco,” Schwarzenegger wrote in an Instagram tribute. “You were my best friend.” Schwarzenegger listed a roster of other deaths, each depleting him more. “It’s wild, because these are not just friends,” he told me. “If people have a tremendous impact on your life, that means that a chunk of you is being ripped away.”

On the morning when we went to Gold’s, Schwarzenegger made a small detour afterward to show me the one-bedroom apartment he used to share with Columbu at 227 Strand Street, in Santa Monica. They lived there for about a year in the late ’60s, not long after each had landed in the States, while they were both making a living laying bricks. The dwelling, a blue-and-beige box with institutional windows, betrayed no trace of the behemoths who’d once resided there.

Schwarzenegger stared up at the soulless space. “He was the best,” he said of his friend.

For my ninth birthday, my parents got me a subscription to Sports Illustrated. One of the first issues I received featured photos from the 1974 Mr. Olympia contest, in New York. It was won, naturally, by the man SI called “enough of a legend for his first name to evoke a response wherever a barbell is picked up with purpose.”

Schwarzenegger won Mr. Olympia seven times, and Mr. Universe four. But he is dissatisfied by nature, and from a young age not easily contained. At 21, he set out for America. He felt alienated by the complacency of his boyhood friends: They aspired to a government job with a pension, maybe; church on Sunday; the usual. “I say to myself, Are we really just clowns? And just do the same fucking things as the guy before? … And I’m like, What the fuck? I better get out of here.” Standing on a stage in South Africa after winning Mr. Olympia yet again, Schwarzenegger felt the same old restlessness. “I looked around and said to myself, I’ve got to get out of this.”

Schwarzenegger at age 11 in art class in Thal, Austria, 1958 (Michael Ochs Archives / Getty)

He charged into showbiz and became similarly huge, making $35 million a film at his peak. “But then I outgrew that,” he said, mentioning Terminator 3, which brought in a burly $433 million at the box office in 2003. “And somehow I feel like I was standing on that stage again in South Africa.”

Next? Politics! He’d always been intrigued by the business; he married a Kennedy, and George H. W. Bush appointed him chairman of the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports (he claims to have presented 41 with a calf machine). And then, oh look, California was about to recall its pencil-necked governor, Gray Davis. Schwarzenegger jumped in and won his first attempt at elected office, also in 2003. He loved the job, telling me that of all the titles he has racked up, Governor is the one he cherishes the most.

Schwarzenegger was reelected by 17 points in 2006, though his popularity cratered by the time he left office, devoured by the usual bears of budgets, legislatures, and ornery voters. At that point he was not only term-limited by California law; he was also promotion-limited by Article II, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution. He has often said he would definitely run for president if he could, except he was born in Austria.

Instead, upon leaving Sacramento, Schwarzenegger was greeted by scandal. He admitted to fathering a son in the 1990s with Mildred Patricia Baena, a family housekeeper for 20 years. Mildred and Schwarzenegger’s wife, Maria Shriver, had been in the house pregnant with his children at the same time.

After the story came out, Schwarzenegger retrenched for a while, tried to repair relations with his five kids, including his no-longer-secret teenage son, Joseph Baena. He and Shriver tried marriage counseling. It did not suit him, and it did not save the marriage. “I think I went two or three times,” Schwarzenegger told me. He dismissed the therapist as a “schmuck” who was “definitely on her side.” He admitted that he’d “fucked up” but did not believe the situation required any deeper exploration. “The fucking weenie gets hard and I fucking lose this brain and this happened,” he said. “It’s one of the biggest mistakes that so many successful people make, you know, so what am I going to say?”

What to do next? Susan Kennedy (no relation to Maria), Schwarzenegger’s chief of staff during the Sacramento years, told me that he missed his position as governor. “He had to learn a new role as a senior statesman”—one who was no longer in office. He took on a few film projects and did his various events and causes and summits. His friends saw that he was struggling. “To wake up without a purpose is a dangerous place to be,” Jamie Lee Curtis told me.

Meanwhile, another celebrity tycoon, Donald Trump, jumped into politics and landed in the White House on his first try, leaving Schwarzenegger with the dregs of The Celebrity Apprentice. Arnold’s Apprentice went about as well as Trump’s presidency.

“Hey, Donald, I have a great idea. Why don’t we switch jobs?” Schwarzenegger tweeted in response to the president’s taunting of the show’s ratings, before it was killed in 2017.

During the scary early months of the pandemic, Schwarzenegger began posting homemade PSA videos on social media as a lark. They showed him drowsing around his 14,000-square-foot mansion in Brentwood, smoking cigars and sitting in his hot tub. He led exercise tutorials and taught proper hand-washing techniques. “I wash my hands a minimum of 50 times a day,” he blustered into the camera from the kitchen sink. An ensemble of whimsical pets roamed in and out of the frame—Whiskey, Lulu, an assortment of tiny and massive (Twins style) Yorkies and malamutes.

[Arnold Schwarzenegger: Don’t be a schmuck. Put on a mask.]

Suddenly, Schwarzenegger was enjoying one of those random social-media moments—quarantined and yet everywhere at once. He was a goofball colossus called back into action. People loved the role: Arnold in winter. Conan the Septuagenarian. I watched the clips again and again. Wear a mask! Don’t party with your friends like a dumbass! Exercise! The videos were an escape from my remote-work quicksand. The protagonist looked unsettled but also purposeful. Or maybe I was projecting. I very well could have been projecting.

Then Schwarzenegger watched the ransacking of the U.S. Capitol by Trump’s supporters on January 6, 2021. He was horrified, and felt moved to make a different kind of video. Flanked by American and Californian flags, he talked about coming as “an immigrant to this country.” He compared January 6 to Kristallnacht, the “Night of Broken Glass,” in 1938, which, he said, had been perpetrated by “the Nazi equivalent of the Proud Boys.” According to Schwarzenegger’s team, the video was viewed 80 million times. It was the biggest thing he’d done since he’d left office. “You never plan these things,” he told me.

Governor Schwarzenegger celebrating his victory on Election Night in Los Angeles, 2006 (David McNew / Getty)

As he ended the message, Schwarzenegger brandished his famous Conan sword. Because of course he did.

“The more you temper a sword, the stronger it becomes,” he said, suggesting that the same was true of American democracy. “I believe we will come out of this stronger, because we now understand what can be lost.” I remember thinking this was a hopeful take.

Schwarzenegger was born two years after World War II ended and grew up, as he put it, “in the ruins of a country that suffered the loss of its democracy.” His father, Gustav Schwarzenegger, was a police chief in Graz, Austria, and fought for the Nazis. Schwarzenegger has spoken more freely of late about his father’s activities and his own attempts to reconcile with them. History need not repeat—that has been his essential theme. Hatred and prejudice are not inevitable features of humanity. “You don’t have to be stuck in that,” he told me. Humans “have the capacity to change.”

When Schwarzenegger first made it big in Hollywood, he approached the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the Holocaust research and human-rights group, seeking to learn about his father’s complicity. Gustav’s record came back relatively clean. He “was definitely a member of the Nazi Party, but he worked in areas like the post office,” Rabbi Marvin Hier, the founder and CEO of the center, told me. Researchers there found “no evidence whatsoever about war crimes.” But it may be more complicated than that. According to Michael Berenbaum, a Holocaust scholar at American Jewish University, records suggest that Gustav was “in the thick of the battle during the most difficult times,” when some of the “most horrific military and nonmilitary killings” occurred.

Schwarzenegger rarely spoke publicly about his father’s past until Trump became president and emboldened a new generation of white nationalists. “Arnold always told us the goal after he left office was to stay out of politics and focus on policy,” Ketchell told me. “But when the president is calling neo-Nazis good people, it’s hard to just focus on gerrymandering.”

[Arnold Schwarzenegger: The America I love needs to do better]

After the violent march on Charlottesville, Virginia, by torch-bearing white nationalists in 2017, Schwarzenegger went hard at the neo-Nazis in a video. “Let me be just as blunt as possible,” Schwarzenegger said. “Your heroes are losers. You’re supporting a lost cause. And believe me, I knew the original Nazis.” The video drew nearly 60 million views.

Schwarzenegger can be a bit of a brute and a pig and could easily have been canceled half a dozen times over the years. Just days before the special election for governor in 2003, several women came forward to say that Schwarzenegger had groped them, and a few other accusations of sexual misconduct followed. He denied some and didn’t directly address others, but he issued a blanket apology for his behavior. “I have done things that were not right which I thought then was playful,” he said at the time. “But I now recognize that I have offended people. And to those people that I have offended, I want to say to them, I am deeply sorry.”

The stay-at-home Arnold character from the pandemic videos changed how people viewed him, he believes. “The whole fitness thing was mostly guys, the movie thing was mostly guys, the Republican thing was mostly guys,” Schwarzenegger explained. “Then you had the fucking affair, and now of course the guys are on your side, and the girls are saying, ‘Fuck this, fuck this, I’m out of here, this guy was a creep all along … I hope Maria leaves him,’ and all that.” But the videos—those turned things around. “Now, all of a sudden, I have all these broads coming up to me saying, ‘Oh, you won me over with this video.’ ”

[Arnold Schwarzenegger: I have a message for my Russian friends]

After Russia invaded Ukraine, in early 2022, Schwarzenegger made a video urging Vladimir Putin to call off the war and the Russian people to resist their government. He said those who were demonstrating on the streets of Moscow were his “heroes.” And he once again invoked his father, likening Gustav’s experience fighting with the Nazis in Leningrad to that of the Russian troops fighting in Ukraine. His father “was all pumped up by the lies of his government” when he arrived in Leningrad, Schwarzenegger said. He departed a broken man, in body and mind.

After COVID restrictions were relaxed and the world reopened, Schwarzenegger receded again from the daily scenery. He had provided guidance and diversion during those rudderless months, and I had begun to miss him. I wanted to see how he was doing.

He was hard to get to, though. Beginning in May 2022, Schwarzenegger had cloistered himself in Toronto for several months filming a spy-adventure show for Netflix called FUBAR. While there, he was informed that he had won a prize for his work combatting prejudice. The first annual Award for Fighting Hatred was given by the Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation (AJCF). Schwarzenegger is a sucker for such prizes and displays the biggies in his home and office alongside his gallery of bodybuilding trophies, sculptures of himself, busts of Lincoln, nine-foot replicas of the Statue of Liberty, and whatnot. He couldn’t receive his AJCF award in person because he was tied up with FUBAR, but vowed to visit the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Poland as soon as he could.

Filming wrapped in early September, and Schwarzenegger went home to Los Angeles for a few days before heading off to Munich to meet some people at Oktoberfest. From there, the plan was to make a quick day trip to southern Poland before returning to Germany to shoot an ad for BMW.

He would be at Auschwitz a few days after Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year. Schwarzenegger’s people encouraged me to be there.

I arrived at the town of Oświęcim, the site of the camp, with a group of donor and publicist types who were connected with AJCF. We were met at the entrance to the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum by staff members, Arnold appendages, and a few strays, including a woman in a Good Vibes sweatshirt. No one seemed to know quite how to act. Distinct layers of surreal piled up before us.

Let’s stipulate that celebrity visits to concentration camps can be tricky. Schwarzenegger appeared mindful of this as he rolled up in a black Mercedes. He stepped gingerly into a thicket of greeters, and tried to strike a solemn pose. Originally, the thought was to do a standard arrival shot for photographers. But the keepers of the site are sensitive to gestures that might convey triumphal stagecraft or frivolity. “There are better places to learn how to walk on a balance beam,” management was moved to tweet after visitors kept posting selfies on the railway tracks leading into the camp. Every visit here is something of a balance beam, but especially for the son of a Nazi.

“Not a photo op,” a staff member reminded everyone as Schwarzenegger began his tour. Photographers clacked away regardless. Schwarzenegger wore a blue blazer and green khaki pants, and appeared to have had his hair tinted a blacker shade of orange for the occasion. He flashed a thumbs-up—always the thumbs-up.

“No autographs please!” a random Voice of God from within the entourage called out. “Please be respectful.”

Schwarzenegger was accompanied by his girlfriend, Heather Milligan; his nephew, Patrick Knapp Schwarzenegger; and Knapp Schwarzenegger’s Texan wife, Bliss. They toured the grounds like students. “What happened here?” Schwarzenegger asked his guide, Paweł Sawicki, pointing up at a watchtower. Sawicki delivered a recital of unimaginables: 1.3 million people were exterminated at the 500-acre camp, about 1.1 million of them Jews. Victims were pulled from cattle cars and triaged by SS doctors deciding who among them was fit to work, who would be used as guinea pigs for Nazi scientists, and who would be murdered immediately.

Nearly all of those “spared” upon arrival would eventually die of starvation, exhaustion, hypothermia, or random beatings. They were gonged awake at 4:30 a.m., then fed rations of moldy bread, gray soup, and dirty water. “The word I will use a lot today is dehumanization,” Sawicki said.

Schwarzenegger viewed the gallows where the camp commandant, Rudolf Höss, had been hanged. He asked questions about the complicit enterprises—whether the firm that made the crematoria ovens had known what they would be used for (it had). His retinue was led into Block 4A, to a room that contained eyeglasses, dishes, and prosthetics that had belonged to the victims. Another exhibit featured piles of their hair.

The last thing Schwarzenegger did before he left was step toward a black desk where a guest book awaited his inscription. Visitor registers can present a special hazard for celebrities. Some have committed egregious faux pas. Donald Trump at Yad Vashem, for instance: “It’s a great honor to be here with all my friends,” the then-president wrote breezily at the Israeli Holocaust memorial and museum in 2017. “So amazing and will never forget!” This was judged to lack gravity.

But it was not nearly as bad as Justin Bieber’s blunder at the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. “Anne was a great girl,” the pop star wrote in 2013. “Hopefully she would have been a Belieber.” Hopefully Schwarzenegger would attempt nothing like this.

Schwarzenegger has worked hard to place himself on the right side of the genocide. Auschwitz officials were glad to have him visit, because he brought with him media attention and the gift of global awareness. “I have been fighting this cause … for years and years and years,” he said in a brief statement to the Polish press at the end of his tour. “I’ve been working with the Jewish Center of Los Angeles … I celebrated Simon Wiesenthal’s 80th birthday in Beverly Hills. We all have to come collectively together and say ‘Never again.’ ”

Photographers positioned themselves around the register as Schwarzenegger approached. Clearly, the safe play would be to simply sign his name. Please be respectful. Nothing cute, if only as a humanitarian pausing of The Brand. But no.

“I’ll be back,” Schwarzenegger scrawled.

After leaving the complex, Schwarzenegger visited a small synagogue in Oświęcim, an otherwise charming village if not for, you know, the history. There, he met an 83-year-old Jewish woman, Lydia Maksimovicz, who as a toddler had spent 13 months at the camp as a “patient” of the notorious Nazi doctor Josef Mengele. She told him about how Mengele had performed experiments on her: drained her blood, and injected her with solutions in an effort to change the color of her irises. Mengele apparently had taken a liking to young Lydia and privileged her life above the other children’s. Now, eight decades later, Arnold Schwarzenegger was engulfing her in a bear hug.

“People like Lydia show us how important it is to never stop telling these stories about what happened 80 years ago,” Schwarzenegger said in brief remarks. “This is a story that has to stay alive.” He vowed to “terminate” hate and prejudice once and for all. “I love being here!” he gushed. “I love fighting prejudice and hatred!” A woman connected with the AJCF tried to hand him a special box of cigars, but was intercepted by an aide. He reiterated that he would be back.

The Auschwitz visit left Schwarzenegger feeling depressed. He stopped off in Vienna afterward to receive a lifetime-achievement award from some Austrian sports outfit, and the friends who saw him there kept wondering if he was okay. He seemed dazed.

“We were sitting on the plane, and we both just shook our heads and were like, ‘Wow, can you imagine?’ ” Knapp Schwarzenegger, his nephew, told me. “It was a somber mood for sure.”

Knapp Schwarzenegger is an entertainment lawyer in Beverly Hills, and was the only child of Schwarzenegger’s only sibling, his older brother, Meinhard, who died in a drunk-driving accident when Patrick was 3. Schwarzenegger brought Patrick to America as a teenager and effectively adopted him; they remain exceptionally close.

Knapp Schwarzenegger said their family history added a fraught dimension to the experience of visiting Auschwitz. They’d been particularly struck by the tour guide’s stories of how the Nazis committed atrocities at the camp and then went home to their families. “That was the hard part,” Knapp Schwarzenegger said, thinking of Gustav, “the loving grandfather,” who died when Knapp Schwarzenegger was 4. “How can ordinary people like that do such a thing? … It hits much closer to home when you’ve had personal experience with that.”

Gustav was haunted by the war, his body racked with shrapnel and his conscience with God only knows what. He “would come home drunk once or twice a week, and he would scream and hit us and scare my mother,” Schwarzenegger said in the January 6 video. Somehow, Schwarzenegger emerged intact. “My grandmother did the best she could,” Knapp Schwarzenegger told me, “but that affects you as a child. For Arnold, it made him stronger and more determined. And for my dad, it crushed him.”

Rabbi Hier, of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, speculated that Schwarzenegger’s visit to Auschwitz could have been driven by shame, by a desire “to repent for the embarrassment of having such a father.” But Schwarzenegger does not concede to this narrative—to feeling guilty or embarrassed. His recurring message is more upbeat, if a bit deflecting. “We don’t have to go and follow,” Schwarzenegger told me. “My father was an alcoholic. I am not an alcoholic. My father was beating the kids and his wife, and I’m not doing that. We can break away from that and we can change.”

A few weeks after the trip to Auschwitz, I visited Schwarzenegger at his mansion in Brentwood, located in an extravagant hillside cul-de-sac of celebrity homes. Tom Brady and Gisele Bündchen used to have a place down the road (in better days), as did Seal and Heidi Klum (also in better days). Maria used to live here too, in the mansion with Arnold (ditto).

I waited for Schwarzenegger on the patio where he smokes his cigars. He walked in and Whiskey and Lulu greeted him with a maniacal duet of braying. Two dogs wandered over to nuzzle him. An attendant brought him a cigar and a decaf espresso, and some treats for his dog-and-pony show. He took incoming FaceTime calls and kept raising his voice and shoving his face up into his iPad like my mother does.

Milligan, Schwarzenegger’s girlfriend, called to see how his day had gone. They have a comfortable, domestic vibe. She had been Schwarzenegger’s physical therapist, helping him through rehab for a torn rotator cuff about a decade ago. Ketchell, who had accompanied Schwarzenegger to the interview, wanted to make it clear that the pair had not become romantically involved until after Milligan stopped working with Schwarzenegger professionally.

A bust of Schwarzenegger in his office in Santa Monica (Ryan Pfluger for The Atlantic)

Schwarzenegger and I hadn’t had a chance to talk much in Poland, save for a brief kibitz outside one of the gas chambers. I wanted to debrief him. What had it been like to witness the death camp firsthand?

“We know people were killed there and exterminated and blah blah blah.” (He has an unfortunate tic, when speaking about grave topics, of trailing off his sentences and adding filler words like blah blah blah and all that stuff.) It’s one thing, he said, to be told about “all the gassing, the torture, all this misery, and all that kind of stuff. You can read about it, see documentaries about it, see movies—the Schindler’s List, all this stuff.” But actually seeing the eyeglasses, the hair—that added a dimension of reality. “I’m a visual person; it’s one of my things,” Schwarzenegger said. “When I was walking around, I was going back to that era.”

Did he have any regrets about signing “I’ll be back”? Some social-media congregants had criticized the message as “tacky” and “flippant,” among other things. Schwarzenegger said that he had been made aware of the blowback and had meant no offense. “I wanted to write ‘Hasta la vista, baby,’ ” he said. Another signature line, this one from Terminator 2. (Yes, he was serious.) “I meant, you know, ‘Hasta la vista to hate and prejudice.’ ” But then he worried that Hasta la vista might come off as glib and dismissive—as in “Buh-bye, I will never come back here again.” So he opted for the more forward-looking “I’ll be back.”

His hosts had felt the need to tweet a defense: “The inscription was meant to be a promise to return for another more indepth visit.” In other words, Schwarzenegger was speaking literally, and did in fact plan to return. “That is what he said, so we expect Mr. Schwarzenegger will come back,” Paweł Sawicki, his tour guide, who doubles as Auschwitz’s chief press officer, told me.

I wondered if this had always been the plan, or if he had I’ll-be-backed himself into a corner and now had to schlep all the way to Poland again to prove his sincerity.

Definitely, it was the plan. In fact, he said, he was thinking about an annual road-trip-to-Auschwitz kind of thing. “I already told Danny DeVito and some of my acting friends that we’re going to take a trip next year,” he said. “Maybe Sly Stallone. I’m going to find a bunch of guys and we’re going to fly over there, and I want to be a tour guide.”

He contemplated the possibilities: “Imagine bringing businesspeople.” Maybe they could auction off some seats on the plane and give the proceeds to the museum. “We have to figure out something that is a little bit snappy and interesting,” he mused. Afterward, they could go to Munich for Oktoberfest, or something fun like that.

In early 2021, a few days after Schwarzenegger made his January 6 video, then-President-elect Joe Biden FaceTimed to thank him. They spoke for a few minutes, and at one point, Schwarzenegger offered his services to the incoming administration. “I told Biden that anytime he needs anything, he should let me know, absolutely,” he said. He’s heard nothing from the White House since. It’s complicated, he figures. Schwarzenegger, who is still a Republican, is not without baggage. The housekeeper-love-child-divorce episode remains a blotch. Celebrity politicians in general have seen better days: The likes of Trump and Dr. Oz have not exactly enhanced the franchise. In any event, Schwarzenegger gave no impression that he’s waiting by the phone.

But in the conversations I had with him, he betrayed a strong whiff of existential stir-craziness. “I felt like I was meant for something special,” Schwarzenegger told me that first morning after our workout, while we talked about his childhood in Austria. “I was a special human being, meant for something much bigger.”

At his bodybuilding peak, in Pumping Iron, Schwarzenegger spoke with a kind of youthful yearning—or megalomania—of enduring through time: “I was always dreaming about very powerful people. Dictators and things like that. I was just always impressed by people who could be remembered for hundreds of years, or even, like Jesus, be for thousands of years remembered.”

If only he could have run for president. That remains his recurring lament. Entering the Mr. Universe of political campaigns would have been the logical last rung of his life’s quest for something bigger. Schwarzenegger said he thinks he could win. This is hard to imagine—a moderate Republican prevailing through the MAGA maelstrom of the GOP primaries? And he’s not about to become a Democrat, either. (“I don’t want to join a party that is destroying every single fucking city,” he told me. “They’re screwing up left and right.”) Still, if they tweaked the Constitution, he told me, he would love to run, even at 75, which he insists is “just a number” and not that old. It’s not like he’s 80 or something!

In the meantime, what if Biden asked him to be secretary of state? I admit, it was me who raised the possibility. But Schwarzenegger warmed instantly to the idea, listing several reasons he would want the job and be perfect for it. George Shultz was one of his idols, and pretty much lived forever too (he died at 100). Schwarzenegger is a big believer in celebrity as a global force, in the power of being so widely, unstoppably known. Who would be bigger than Arnold Schwarzenegger? Who could possibly compare?

“I mean, look at the guy we have now,” Schwarzenegger told me. Antony Blinken “is, like, a clearly smart guy, but, I mean, on the world stage, he’s a lightweight. He doesn’t carry any weight.” (Blinken, who is leading U.S. efforts to contain Russia and China, could not be reached for comment.)

Schwarzenegger told me he really does want to live forever. Not everyone would, at his age. But not everyone has had his life, either. “If you have the kind of life that I’ve had—that I have—it is so spectacular. I could not ever articulate how spectacular it was.” He was trying to project gratitude, but something else came through—a plaintiveness in that gap between the tenses.

I had a final visit with Schwarzenegger in late December, this time at his Santa Monica office suite. He wore a bright-red atrocity of a Christmas sweater and took a seat next to me at a conference table. Schwarzenegger has always been a creature of obsessive routine, dating to the strict training regimens of his bodybuilding days. But he emphasized to me that he is following no grand plan in this final stage. “The truth is that I am improvising,” he told me. He is trying to pass on what he knows, and just signed a deal to write a self-help book that will codify his advice for life. The working title: Be Useful.

The next morning, I was walking to a Starbucks near Santa Monica Pier, when who should dart by on his bike? “Hey, Arnold,” I called out.

He pulled over and accused me of being a “lazy sonofabitch” for not riding with him. He wore sunglasses emblazoned with I’ll be back, and his white beard glowed in the dawn sun.

We chatted on the street, and Schwarzenegger suggested that I talk to a friend of his named Florian for this story. Florian, who sometimes stays in Austrian monasteries, apparently, has some elaborate theory of Arnold. “He would have an interesting perspective,” Schwarzenegger said. “He’s 6 foot 10, has big hair, and he FaceTimed me last night while he was shaving at 11 p.m. Who the fuck shaves at 11 p.m.?”

Florian does. His full name is Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, a German and Austrian filmmaker who won an Oscar for his 2006 thriller, The Lives of Others. Later, I emailed him. He declined to share any grand theories. “These thoughts are very personal,” he explained. “At some point soon, I’ll turn them into a book myself. Hopefully to coincide with the release of a movie I direct with Arnold in the lead.” He made sure to mention that Schwarzenegger was his hero.

In the meantime, the hero was idling on his bike, telling me that he has more things in the works—retrospective things (a Netflix documentary about his life) and new adventures (Return to Auschwitz ! ). He was also planning a trip to Ukraine; in late January, an invitation would arrive from the office of President Volodymyr Zelensky, praising Schwarzenegger’s “honest stance and clear vision of good and evil.”

I imagined Schwarzenegger dropping into Kyiv, unarmed except for the Conan sword. He would drive out the Russians, end the war, and detour to Moscow to take down Putin. At least that’s how the Hollywood action version would end.

“There will be more,” Schwarzenegger promised that morning. I kept expecting him to ride off, but he seemed to want to linger.

This article appears in the April 2023 print edition with the headline “Arnold’s Last Act.”