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.