India's history-geopolitics linkage

ROBERT KAPLAN of the Center for a New American Security analyzes the millenial history of India contrasting it with that of China and states that India would emerge as the key Eurasian pivot state because of its effect on relations between the United States and China. In a CNAS report "South Asia's Geography of Conflict", he provides an analysis of New Delhi's worldview  based on the geopolitics and geographical history of South Asia cautioning that the Washington-New Delhi relationship should not fall victim to the proclivity of U.S. to poor understanding of local histories.

Pax Americana along the South China Sea

ROBERT KAPLAN, fellow at the Center for a New American Security states that the China's advantageous hub-like geography abutting Central Asia, South-East Asia and East Asia has been mostly overlooked in any analysis of Chinese economic dynamism or strategic assertiveness and although its seaboard was as extensive as its continental interior, it faced a far tougher proposition at sea. In an op-ed in The New York Times, "The Geography of Chinese Power", he opines that a Chinese absorption of Taiwan would be considered a failure of U.S. power by the states in the Pacific and a strengthened U.S. air and sea presence in Oceania presented a compromise between resisting a Greater China at all costs and assenting to a future in which the Chinese Navy policed the first island chain.