Foreign policy experts have paid a lot of attention to Russia, China and the Arab states in recent times. In his book Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (2010), Robert D Kaplan, a security expert at the Center for a New American Security in Washington, argues that these people are sniffing up the wrong tree. The next big area that is poised to capture American geopolitical attention is the Indian Ocean.
As Kaplan puts it, “The Cold War forced an artificial dichotomy on area studies in which the Middle East, the Indian Subcontinent, and the Pacific Rim were separate entities. But as India and China become more integrally connected with both Southeast Asia and the Middle East through trade, energy, and security agreements, the map of Asia is reemerging as a single organic unit, just as it was during earlier epochs in history – manifested now in an Indian Ocean map.”
Thus this book is about the various regions that abut the Indian Ocean: Oman, Baluchistan and Sindh, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Burma, Indonesia and Zanzibar. There is a concerted effort on part of these regions to contribute to or dominate over the Indian Ocean. As Kaplan says, “There is already evidence of it. The navies of Thailand, Singapore, and Indonesia, with the help of the U.S. Navy, have banded together to deter piracy in the Strait of Malacca. The navies of India, Japan, Australia, Singapore and the United States … have exercised together off India’s southwestern Malabar coast, in an implicit rebuke to China’s design on the ocean, even as armies of India and China have conducted exercises together near the southern Chinese city of Kunming.”
Kaplan is widely travelled and uses all his experience in writing a deeply thought-provoking book. Note his remarks on Kolkata: “Kolkata demonstrates that poverty is neither exotic nor fascinating. It can be dull, numb, devoid of meaning, and monotonous. The poor, like the dead, are invisible except when they confront us with their ‘loathsomeness,’ then they are like an ‘open grave,’ writes William T Vollmann in Poor People, a book that, by its very calculated repetition, shows just how wretchedly uninteresting poverty is. Poverty is not exotic, it has no saving graces, it is just awful.”
Kaplan concludes the book with an ode to the multicultural Zanzibar. He states that Zanzibar might well portend the future for most countries in the Indian Ocean. Zanzibar is “an effortless confection of Arab, Persian, Indian, and African aesthetics”. Further: “Zanzibar is the global village writ small. It makes globalization seem altogether a normal function of human nature, requiring only technology to allow it.”
We live in exciting times. It remains to be seen how much of Kaplan’s analysis proves prescient and how globalized the world will look a century from now.
As Kaplan puts it, “The Cold War forced an artificial dichotomy on area studies in which the Middle East, the Indian Subcontinent, and the Pacific Rim were separate entities. But as India and China become more integrally connected with both Southeast Asia and the Middle East through trade, energy, and security agreements, the map of Asia is reemerging as a single organic unit, just as it was during earlier epochs in history – manifested now in an Indian Ocean map.”
Thus this book is about the various regions that abut the Indian Ocean: Oman, Baluchistan and Sindh, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Burma, Indonesia and Zanzibar. There is a concerted effort on part of these regions to contribute to or dominate over the Indian Ocean. As Kaplan says, “There is already evidence of it. The navies of Thailand, Singapore, and Indonesia, with the help of the U.S. Navy, have banded together to deter piracy in the Strait of Malacca. The navies of India, Japan, Australia, Singapore and the United States … have exercised together off India’s southwestern Malabar coast, in an implicit rebuke to China’s design on the ocean, even as armies of India and China have conducted exercises together near the southern Chinese city of Kunming.”
Kaplan is widely travelled and uses all his experience in writing a deeply thought-provoking book. Note his remarks on Kolkata: “Kolkata demonstrates that poverty is neither exotic nor fascinating. It can be dull, numb, devoid of meaning, and monotonous. The poor, like the dead, are invisible except when they confront us with their ‘loathsomeness,’ then they are like an ‘open grave,’ writes William T Vollmann in Poor People, a book that, by its very calculated repetition, shows just how wretchedly uninteresting poverty is. Poverty is not exotic, it has no saving graces, it is just awful.”
Kaplan concludes the book with an ode to the multicultural Zanzibar. He states that Zanzibar might well portend the future for most countries in the Indian Ocean. Zanzibar is “an effortless confection of Arab, Persian, Indian, and African aesthetics”. Further: “Zanzibar is the global village writ small. It makes globalization seem altogether a normal function of human nature, requiring only technology to allow it.”
We live in exciting times. It remains to be seen how much of Kaplan’s analysis proves prescient and how globalized the world will look a century from now.
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