Will the Indian Ocean be at the center of the world in the coming decades?

I love maps. I thought one day I might collect them — I've managed to squirrel away a few old ones over the years from my travels in the former Soviet Union, Germany and Latin America. But the price always gets in the way. Maps aren't cheap, even when they don't provide much of a guide to the world we live in.

But I still love them. One of my favorites shows the world as viewed from the Southern Hemisphere, with the Antarctic floating above it all, and South Africa, Tierra del Fuego, and New Zealand sitting roughly where Alaska, Greenland, and Svalbard would be on most maps.

Well, if you like that kind of thing too, you'll love the next edition of Foreign Affairs.

I'm privileged to get advanced looks at the magazine, the sister publication to the website I run — CFR.org — at the Council on Foreign Relations. The March/April edition, which hits the newstands next week, is led by a tour de force on the Indian Ocean by Robert D. Kaplan, who questions our Mercator-challenged ignorance of it and asserts that it (and not the Atlantic or Pacific) will be at the center of the world in the decades to come. It isn't online just yet, but my bimonthly preview podcast with FA's Managing Editor Gideon Rose is available.

For a deeper look at one of the works that influenced Kaplan’s thinking, see "Asia Looks Seaward," by two U.S. Naval War Academy scholars, Toshi Yoshihari and John R. Holmes.

http://www.globalpost.com/notebook/worldview/090221/will-the-indian-ocean-be-at-the-center-the-world-the-coming-decades