A summary at FPRI on Kaplan’s latest work on the new balance of power.
Kaplan feels that we tend to divide the world up artificially into old Cold War classifications of the Middle East, the South Asian Indian subcontinent, and the Pacific Rim of East Asia. These divisions were forced on the U.S. by the Cold War, in which the country had a whole world to patrol, in a way. And so Washington broke it up into academic specialties in order to get a better grip on things. But increasingly, as China, North Korea, Japan, and India do more and more trade with Iran and Syria, and the Indian and Chinese navies are increasingly in the Persian Gulf, these boundaries are breaking apart. A holistic map of Eurasia is reasserting itself. Any conflict with Iran would involve India and China in some way, because of all the trade they do there. The Persian Gulf is about to become much more clogged with oil supertankers than it ever was. That is because among a number of big phenomena going on in the world today, Kaplan said, one is the growth of the Chinese and Indian middle classes.India has 1.5 billion people. Its middle class is growing from 200 million to a predicted 350 million. China has similar statistics. Middle classes are acquisitive, Kaplan observed. They buy things and consume a lot of energy. And so the growth of these middle classes means tremendous energy consumption, much of which is going to have to be solved by oil. Ninety percent of India’s energy requirements are going to be filled by oil in the Persian Gulf within a few years, as opposed to 65 percent today. China’s statistics are similar. We are about to see a major energy highway from the Persian Gulf across the Indian Ocean to the strait of Malacca to China and Japan and across the Persian Gulf to the west coast of India. Energy politics are going to tie China and India much more closely to the Arab and Persian world than they ever were before.
This is why the U.S. position now in the Middle East is untenable, Kaplan argued. The U.S. has to find a way gradually, with carrots and sticks, to open up Iran and have some sort of normalized relationship with that country. The rest of the world is not going to wait the U.S. out, but is moving closer to Iran and Russia, because crude oil petroleum prices are going to continue to go up over the long run because of the growth of middle classes around the world.
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Jing added these pithy words on 18 Apr 08 at 5:55 pmNot to be nitpicky but whoever wrote that article is more than a little innumerate. I read it a few days ago in print at the local Barnes & Noble. For one thing, India seems to have gained 400 million people (1.5 billion vis-a-vis 1.1), also it mentioned that India being the largest economy in the mid-future which given past and present growth rates isn’t technically possible. I’ve really become tired of the term “middle class” as it is virtually meaningless since different standards are being applied. No one bothers actually citing actual figures of consumption. For example, in 2006, per capita disposable income (that is income less neccessities) in urban India (that is the wealthiest 30%) was around 80 cents per day. I believe MasterCard or some other credit card agency calculated that only people with exchange rate incomes of $5000 USD or higher were really relevant as global consumers, and even then they had to be geographically concentrated in metropolitan areas.
IJ added these pithy words on 19 Apr 08 at 10:14 amThe U.S. has to find a way to have some sort of normalized relationship with Iran. The rest of the world is not going to wait the U.S. out, but is moving closer to Iran and Russia
Only an extract from Afghanistan moves to center stage:
The United States’ monopoly of the Afghan war is beginning to come under serious public challenge. . . Ahmadinejad’s statement [this week] is the first time that Tehran has questioned frontally at the highest level of leadership the raison d’etre of the US intervention in Afghanistan.
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