Nov. 14, 2010
BOOK REVIEW: Robert Kaplan's 'Monsoon' Puts Strategic Indian Ocean Countries in Proper 21st Century Perspective
Reviewed By David M. Kinchen
If your world map is centered on the Western Hemisphere -- North and South America -- you're missing a geopolitical perspective of the Indian Ocean, the world's third largest ocean and home to countries vital to American interests even as the 500-year of Western power is being supplanted by indigenous nations -- especially China and India.
That's the view of Robert D. Kaplan expressed in his 13th book, "Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power" (Random House, 384 pages, map, notes, index). I don't know what books President Obama took along on his Asian trip, but I'm guessing "Monsoon" was one of them, especially since Kaplan ("Balkan Ghosts," "Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts," "Imperial Grunts") focuses on India and Indonesia, two countries that Obama visited.
On the world maps common in America, the Indian Ocean all but disappears. The Western Hemisphere is front and center, while the Indian Ocean region is relegated to the edges, split up along the maps’ outer reaches. Maps like the all too common Western Hemisphere-centric ones speak to the geopolitical focus of the 20th Century, emphasizing the Atlantic and Pacific theaters that the great wars of that era were lost and won. Because of the map issue many Americans are barely aware of the Indian Ocean at all, even though it is nearly 6,200 miles wide at the southern tips of Africa and Australia and encompasses 28,350,000 square miles, including the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, making both the Israeli Red Sea port of Elat and the nearby Jordanian port of Aqaba technically part of the Indian Ocean.
In "Monsoon" (derived from the Arabic "mausim" meaning "season") Kaplan graphically and eloquently shows how crucial this dynamic area has become to American power in the 21st century. Like the monsoon itself -- a cyclical weather system that is both destructive and essential for growth and prosperity -- the rise of these countries (including India, Pakistan, China, Indonesia, Burma, Oman, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Tanzania) represents a shift in the global balance that cannot be ignored.
Kaplan, a writer I call a "neorealist" (he's emphatically not a "neocon," despite the efforts of some critics to pigeonhole him as one) posits that the Indian Ocean area will be the true nexus of world power and conflict in the coming years. It is here that the fight for democracy, energy independence, and religious freedom will be lost or won, and it is here that American foreign policy must concentrate if America is to remain dominant in an ever-changing world.
I approach a new book from Kaplan much as I salivate at the arrival of a new Paul Theroux travel book: Both Kaplan and Theroux are magnficent literary stylists whose books make you wish they were twice as long. That was certainly the case with "Monsoon," as i wanted him to expound more on the fascinating country of Indonesia, plus a look at the Indian Ocean aspect of Australia, whose westernmost metropolis, Perth, is an important Indian Ocean port. Perhaps Kaplan will include Australia in his next book. And South Africa, also an Indian Ocean nation that is important is world affairs.
I was particularly enthralled with his chapter on Zanzibar, once an independent country that is now a semi-autonomous part of the mainland nation of Tanzania (the "zan" is Tanzania reflects the duality of the two), formerly the colony known as Tanganyika. I was reminded of John Brunner's 1968 sci-fi classic "Stand on Zanzibar" where he says that the entire population of the world could stand side by side on the island of Zanzibar. Brunner's theme in the dystopian book is overpopulation, certainly a concern in Indian Ocean countries like Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Indonesia, as well as Yemen which Kaplan contrasts with similarly sized but far less populated Oman. (Yemen has more than 23 million residents and Oman has about 3 million). Kaplan compares and contrasts Oman's forward-looking leader, Sultan Qabus and his cohesive country to its conflict ridden next-door neighbor on the Indian Ocean coast, Yemen.
Brunner's image of the human race standing shoulder-to-shoulder on a small island -- Zanzibar has about 950 square miles, about the size of Pocahontas County, West Virginia -- is a powerful metaphor for an impossibly crowded world. By the end of "Stand on Zanzibar" some of the people are knee deep in the Indian Ocean that surrounds the island. Kaplan discusses the issues of explosive population growth, climate change and extremist politics and how they affect this region -- and the rest of the world in this globalized era.
Singapore's iconic Lee Kuan Yew wants the U.S. to continue to stay engaged in the region, Kaplan writes, suggesting that despite his Chinese ethnicity and good relations with China, Yew wants the countervailing influence of the U.S. to continue to offset China's growing power.
China is building a seaport in Gwadar, in the tumultous Baluchistan region of Pakistan, a seaport that will be run by Singapore for the benefit of China. Kaplan discusses how Gwadar will affect central Asia and China. China would also like to built a $20 billion canal across the Isthmus of Kra in Thailand that will rival the Panama Canal and bypass the dangerous and narrow Strait of Malacca between Malaysia and Indonesia and make China a two-ocean Navy country. The canal, and an accompanying land bridge transportation corridor -- China thinks big -- would be close to the Chinese island of Hainan, with its major aviation naval facilities. Kaplan discusses both the Baluchistan and Sindh regions of Pakistan and their conflicts with the rest of the nation, demonstrating how unstable artificially constructed countries like Pakistan -- and Yugoslavia and Iraq -- are.
Other issues addressed by Kaplan include:
* The relatively unknown image of the Arabs as a cosmopolitan seafaring race, not just a desert-dwelling people prone to extremities of thought.
* The ethnic groups of Burma that will soon be as relevant to international affairs as the various groups and sects of Iraq and Yugoslavia have been.
* The history of Indian Ocean piracy going back thousands of years and how to solve the current Somali version.
* The future of China's naval power and its other port building efforts in Sri Lanka.
* The doctrinal threads of the world's fourth most populous nation with 240 million people, Indonesia, which has also the largest Muslim population of any nation.
Kaplan's "Monsoon" covers the region from the Horn of Africa to the Indonesian archipelago and beyond, offering fascinating insights into the economic and naval strategies of China and India and how they will affect U.S. interests. Kaplan provides an on-the-ground perspective on the more volatile countries in the region, plagued by weak infrastructures and young populations tempted by extremism. This, in one of the most nuclearized areas of the world, is a dangerous mix, but essentially the author is optimistic about the future. That China and the U.S. are too dependent on each other to go to war is a unifying, optimistic thread in "Monsoon."
About the author
Robert David Kaplan, born in 1952 in New York City, is an American journalist, currently a National Correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly, and the author of 13 books. His writings have also been featured in The Washington Post, The New York times, The New Republic, The National Interest, Foreign Affairs and The Wall Street Journal, among other newspapers and publications. His more controversial essays about the nature of U.S. power have spurred debate in academia, the media, and the highest levels of government. A frequent theme in his work is the reemergence of cultural and historical tensions temporarily suspended during the Cold War. Kaplan is a Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security in Washington. In 2009, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates appointed Kaplan to the Defense Policy Board.
Publisher's web site: www.atrandom.com
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BOOK REVIEW: Robert Kaplan's 'Monsoon' Puts Strategic Indian Ocean Countries in Proper 21st Century Perspective
Reviewed By David M. Kinchen
If your world map is centered on the Western Hemisphere -- North and South America -- you're missing a geopolitical perspective of the Indian Ocean, the world's third largest ocean and home to countries vital to American interests even as the 500-year of Western power is being supplanted by indigenous nations -- especially China and India.
That's the view of Robert D. Kaplan expressed in his 13th book, "Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power" (Random House, 384 pages, map, notes, index). I don't know what books President Obama took along on his Asian trip, but I'm guessing "Monsoon" was one of them, especially since Kaplan ("Balkan Ghosts," "Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts," "Imperial Grunts") focuses on India and Indonesia, two countries that Obama visited.
On the world maps common in America, the Indian Ocean all but disappears. The Western Hemisphere is front and center, while the Indian Ocean region is relegated to the edges, split up along the maps’ outer reaches. Maps like the all too common Western Hemisphere-centric ones speak to the geopolitical focus of the 20th Century, emphasizing the Atlantic and Pacific theaters that the great wars of that era were lost and won. Because of the map issue many Americans are barely aware of the Indian Ocean at all, even though it is nearly 6,200 miles wide at the southern tips of Africa and Australia and encompasses 28,350,000 square miles, including the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, making both the Israeli Red Sea port of Elat and the nearby Jordanian port of Aqaba technically part of the Indian Ocean.
In "Monsoon" (derived from the Arabic "mausim" meaning "season") Kaplan graphically and eloquently shows how crucial this dynamic area has become to American power in the 21st century. Like the monsoon itself -- a cyclical weather system that is both destructive and essential for growth and prosperity -- the rise of these countries (including India, Pakistan, China, Indonesia, Burma, Oman, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Tanzania) represents a shift in the global balance that cannot be ignored.
Kaplan, a writer I call a "neorealist" (he's emphatically not a "neocon," despite the efforts of some critics to pigeonhole him as one) posits that the Indian Ocean area will be the true nexus of world power and conflict in the coming years. It is here that the fight for democracy, energy independence, and religious freedom will be lost or won, and it is here that American foreign policy must concentrate if America is to remain dominant in an ever-changing world.
I approach a new book from Kaplan much as I salivate at the arrival of a new Paul Theroux travel book: Both Kaplan and Theroux are magnficent literary stylists whose books make you wish they were twice as long. That was certainly the case with "Monsoon," as i wanted him to expound more on the fascinating country of Indonesia, plus a look at the Indian Ocean aspect of Australia, whose westernmost metropolis, Perth, is an important Indian Ocean port. Perhaps Kaplan will include Australia in his next book. And South Africa, also an Indian Ocean nation that is important is world affairs.
I was particularly enthralled with his chapter on Zanzibar, once an independent country that is now a semi-autonomous part of the mainland nation of Tanzania (the "zan" is Tanzania reflects the duality of the two), formerly the colony known as Tanganyika. I was reminded of John Brunner's 1968 sci-fi classic "Stand on Zanzibar" where he says that the entire population of the world could stand side by side on the island of Zanzibar. Brunner's theme in the dystopian book is overpopulation, certainly a concern in Indian Ocean countries like Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Indonesia, as well as Yemen which Kaplan contrasts with similarly sized but far less populated Oman. (Yemen has more than 23 million residents and Oman has about 3 million). Kaplan compares and contrasts Oman's forward-looking leader, Sultan Qabus and his cohesive country to its conflict ridden next-door neighbor on the Indian Ocean coast, Yemen.
Brunner's image of the human race standing shoulder-to-shoulder on a small island -- Zanzibar has about 950 square miles, about the size of Pocahontas County, West Virginia -- is a powerful metaphor for an impossibly crowded world. By the end of "Stand on Zanzibar" some of the people are knee deep in the Indian Ocean that surrounds the island. Kaplan discusses the issues of explosive population growth, climate change and extremist politics and how they affect this region -- and the rest of the world in this globalized era.
Singapore's iconic Lee Kuan Yew wants the U.S. to continue to stay engaged in the region, Kaplan writes, suggesting that despite his Chinese ethnicity and good relations with China, Yew wants the countervailing influence of the U.S. to continue to offset China's growing power.
China is building a seaport in Gwadar, in the tumultous Baluchistan region of Pakistan, a seaport that will be run by Singapore for the benefit of China. Kaplan discusses how Gwadar will affect central Asia and China. China would also like to built a $20 billion canal across the Isthmus of Kra in Thailand that will rival the Panama Canal and bypass the dangerous and narrow Strait of Malacca between Malaysia and Indonesia and make China a two-ocean Navy country. The canal, and an accompanying land bridge transportation corridor -- China thinks big -- would be close to the Chinese island of Hainan, with its major aviation naval facilities. Kaplan discusses both the Baluchistan and Sindh regions of Pakistan and their conflicts with the rest of the nation, demonstrating how unstable artificially constructed countries like Pakistan -- and Yugoslavia and Iraq -- are.
Other issues addressed by Kaplan include:
* The relatively unknown image of the Arabs as a cosmopolitan seafaring race, not just a desert-dwelling people prone to extremities of thought.
* The ethnic groups of Burma that will soon be as relevant to international affairs as the various groups and sects of Iraq and Yugoslavia have been.
* The history of Indian Ocean piracy going back thousands of years and how to solve the current Somali version.
* The future of China's naval power and its other port building efforts in Sri Lanka.
* The doctrinal threads of the world's fourth most populous nation with 240 million people, Indonesia, which has also the largest Muslim population of any nation.
Kaplan's "Monsoon" covers the region from the Horn of Africa to the Indonesian archipelago and beyond, offering fascinating insights into the economic and naval strategies of China and India and how they will affect U.S. interests. Kaplan provides an on-the-ground perspective on the more volatile countries in the region, plagued by weak infrastructures and young populations tempted by extremism. This, in one of the most nuclearized areas of the world, is a dangerous mix, but essentially the author is optimistic about the future. That China and the U.S. are too dependent on each other to go to war is a unifying, optimistic thread in "Monsoon."
About the author
Robert David Kaplan, born in 1952 in New York City, is an American journalist, currently a National Correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly, and the author of 13 books. His writings have also been featured in The Washington Post, The New York times, The New Republic, The National Interest, Foreign Affairs and The Wall Street Journal, among other newspapers and publications. His more controversial essays about the nature of U.S. power have spurred debate in academia, the media, and the highest levels of government. A frequent theme in his work is the reemergence of cultural and historical tensions temporarily suspended during the Cold War. Kaplan is a Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security in Washington. In 2009, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates appointed Kaplan to the Defense Policy Board.
Publisher's web site: www.atrandom.com
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