ALSO BY ROBERT D. KAPLAN Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts: The American Military in the Air, at Sea, and on the Ground Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground Mediterranean Winter: The Pleasures of History and Landscape in Tunisia, Sicily, Dalmatia, and the Peloponnese Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos Eastward to Tartary: Travels in the Balkans, the Middle East, and the Caucasus The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War An Empire Wilderness: Travels into America’s Future The Ends of the Earth: From Togo to Turkmenistan, from Iran to Cambodia The Arabists: The Romance of an American Elite Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History Soldiers of God: With Islamic Warriors in Afghanistan and Pakistan Surrender or Starve: Travels in Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, and Eritrea Copyright © 2010 by Robert D. Kaplan Maps copyright © 2010 by David Lindroth, Inc. All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc. Grateful acknowledgment is made to Angel Books, London, for permission to reprint the poem that appears on this page from Particles, Jottings, Sparks: The Collected Brief Poems by Rabindranath Tagore, translated by William Radice (London: Angel Books, 2001). Reprinted by permission. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kaplan, Robert D. Monsoon : the Indian Ocean and the future of American power / Robert D. Kaplan. p. cm. eISBN: 978-0-679-60405-1 1. United States—Foreign relations—Indian Ocean Region. 2. Indian Ocean Region—Foreign relations—United States. 3. Indian Ocean Region—Strategic aspects. 4. National security—United States. 5. National security—Indian Ocean Region. I. Title. DS341.3.U6K374 2010 327.730182′4—dc22 2009049752 www.atrandom.com v3.1 To Grenville Byford Gradual, inexorable, and fundamental changes … are … occurring in the balances of power among civilizations, and the power of the West relative to that of other civilizations will continue to decline. —SAMUEL P. HUNTINGTON The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996) PREFACE THE RIMLAND OF EURASIA The map of Europe defined the twentieth century: from Flanders Fields to Omaha Beach to the Berlin Wall to the burned villages of Kosovo; from the Long European War, lasting from 1914 to 1989, to its bloody aftershocks, Europe was the center of world history. Momentous trends and events happened elsewhere, to be sure. But great power politics, from the collapse of Old World empires to the bipolar struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union, had more to do with Europe than anywhere else. It is my contention that the Greater Indian Ocean, stretching eastward from the Horn of Africa past the Arabian Peninsula, the Iranian plateau, and the Indian Subcontinent, all the way to the Indonesian archipelago and beyond, may comprise a map as iconic to the new century as Europe was to the last one. Hopefully, the twenty-first century will not be as violent as the twentieth, but, to a similar degree, it could have a recognizable geography. In this rimland of Eurasia—the maritime oikoumene of the medieval Muslim world that was never far from China’s gaze—we can locate the tense dialogue between Western and Islamic civilizations, the ganglia of global energy routes, and the quiet, seemingly inexorable rise of India and China over land and sea. For the sum- total effect of U.S. preoccupation with Iraq and Afghanistan has been to fast- forward the arrival of the Asian Century, not only in the economic terms that we all know about, but in military terms as well. Recently, messy land wars have obscured for us the importance of seas and coastlines, across which most trade is conducted and along which most of humanity lives, and where, consequently, future military and economic activity is likely to take place as in the past. It is in the littorals where global issues such as population growth, climate change, sea level rises, shortages of fresh water, and extremist politics—the last of which is affected by all the other factors— acquire a vivid geographical face. What the late British historian C. R. Boxer called Monsoon Asia, at the crossroads of the Indian Ocean and the western Pacific, will demographically and strategically be a hub of the twenty-first- century world.1 Half a millennium ago, Vasco da Gama braved storm and scurvy to round Africa and cross the Indian Ocean to the Subcontinent. Writes the sixteenth- century Portuguese poet Luiz Vaz de Camões about that signal moment: This is the land you have been seeking, This is India rising before you.…2 Da Gama’s arrival in India initiated the rise of the West in Asia. Portuguese seaborne dominance eventually gave way to that of other Western powers— Holland, France, Great Britain, and the United States, in their turn. Now, as China and India compete for ports and access routes along the southern Eurasian rimland, and with the future strength of the U.S. Navy uncertain, because of America’s own economic travails and the diversionary cost of its land wars, it is possible that the five-hundred-year chapter of Western preponderance is slowly beginning to close. This gradual power shift could not come at a more turbulent time for the lands bordering the Indian Ocean’s two halves, the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal: at the top of the Arabian Sea is Pakistan; at the top of the Bay of Bengal is Burma, both highly volatile and populous pivot states. Analysts normally don’t put those two countries in the same category, but they should. Then, of course, there is the whole political future of the Islamic world from Somalia to Indonesia to consider. Besides their proximity to the Indian Ocean, so many of these places are characterized by weak institutions, tottering infrastructures, and young and restive populations tempted by extremism. Yet they are the future, much more than the graying populations of the West. As the late Belgian scholar Charles Verlinden once noted, the Indian Ocean “is surrounded by not less than thirty-seven countries representing a third of the