Over the last decade, the center of world power continues to be silently shifting from Europe to Asia. With essential oil reserves of several billion barrels, around nine hundred trillion cubic feet of gas, and several centuries’ well worth of contending territorial statements, the South China Ocean in particular is normally a simmering container of potential turmoil. The underreported armed service buildup in the region where the Western Pacific fits the Indian Ocean means that it will likely be a hinge point for global war and about Asia’s Cauldron: The South China Ocean and the finish of a Stable Pacific serenity for the foreseeable future.

In Asia’s Cauldron, Robert D. Kaplan offers up a stunning snapshot from the countries surrounding the South China Ocean, the conflicts brewing in your community in the dawn of the twenty-first century, and their implications for global peacefulness and stability. Among the world’s most perceptive foreign policy professionals, Kaplan interprets America’s passions in Asia in the framework of an increasingly assertive China. He points out how the region’s exclusive geography fosters the growth of navies but also impedes aggression. And he attracts a dazzling parallel between China’s quest for hegemony in the South China Sea and the United State governments’ imperial adventure in the Caribbean more than a century ago.

To understand the future of discord in East Asia, Kaplan argues, one must understand the goals and motivations of its leaders and its people. Component travelogue, part geopolitical primer, Asia’s Cauldron will take us on the trip through the region’s increase towns and ramshackle slums: from Vietnam, where the superfueled capitalism of the erstwhile colonial capital, Saigon, inspires the geostrategic pretensions of the official seat of authorities in Hanoi, to Malaysia, in which a unique mix of authoritarian Islam and Western-style consumerism creates quite possibly the best postmodern culture; and from Singapore, whose ‘benevolent autocracy’ helped foster an financial miracle, to the Philippines, in which a different brand of authoritarianism under Ferdinand Marcos led not to financial development but to decades of corruption and crime.

At a time when every day’s news seems to contain some new story-large or small-that directly pertains to conflicts over the South China Sea, Asia’s Cauldron can be an indispensable guidebook to a corner of the world which will affect all of our lives for a long time to come.