Geopolitics in the Indian Ocean and in Inner Asia

The Revenge of Geography
By Robert D. Kaplan - Foreign Policy

People and ideas influence events, but geography largely determines them, now more than ever. To understand the coming struggles, it’s time to dust off the Victorian thinkers who knew the physical world best.




Center Stage for the 21st Century - Power Plays in the Indian Ocean
By Robert D. Kaplan - Foreign Affairs

.... Already the world’s preeminent energy and trade interstate seaway, the Indian Ocean will matter even more as India and China enter into a dynamic great-power rivalry in these waters.

.... The Indian Ocean -- the world's third-largest body of water -- already forms center stage for the challenges of the twenty-first century.

.... The greater Indian Ocean region encompasses the entire arc of Islam, from the Sahara Desert to the Indonesian archipelago.

From Beijing to Bahrain - Who is missing out on 'global rebalancing'?
By Rick Carew - WSJ

Ben Simpfendorfer, author of "The New Silk Road," still believes the world is witnessing "early tremors of a historic global rebalancing." Mr. Simpfendorfer, the Royal Bank of Scotland's China economist, bases his thesis on research on the links between China's booming manufacturing and a Middle East enriched by high oil prices. He's well-placed to do the work: He speaks Mandarin Chinese and Arabic and spent three years living in the Middle East and eight years in Hong Kong.

The New Silk Road: How a Rising Arab World Is Turning Away from the West and Rediscovering China, by Ben Simpfendorfer

China’s final frontier
By Parag Khanna - Prospect

The remote, rebellious western provinces of Tibet and Xinjiang are China’s poorest, but they hold vast natural wealth which Beijing is determined to control. On a 3,000-mile trek I saw how far the government is bending the whole central Asian region to its will.

.... And China is poised to win the 21st-century version of the great game in central Asia. Many people focus on China’s neo-mercantilist quest for energy and influence in Africa, the middle east and even South America, but every superpower abroad is an empire at home. And China’s internal consolidation is the story of a multi-ethnic empire being reborn using strategies familiar from America’s westward expansion—combined with the more postmodern extension of the EU.