Asia's Cauldron Quotes

“Europe is a landscape; East Asia a seascape. Therein lies a crucial difference between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, Asia's Cauldron: The South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific

“Take the most dangerous power in the South China Sea, China. While the century of humiliation at the hands of the Western powers “is a period etched in acid on the pages of Chinese student textbooks today,”
― Robert D. Kaplan, Asia's Cauldron: The South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific

“The United States fought against the prospect of a Vietnam unified by the communist North. But once that unification became fact, the new and enlarged Vietnamese state became a much greater threat to communist China than to the United States. Such can be the ironies of history. Champa,”
― Robert D. Kaplan, Asia's Cauldron: The South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific

“The South China Sea functions as the throat of the Western Pacific and Indian oceans—the mass of connective economic tissue where global sea routes coalesce. Here is the heart of Eurasia’s navigable rimland, punctuated by the Malacca, Sunda, Lombok, and Makassar straits. More than half of the world’s annual merchant fleet tonnage passes through these choke points, and a third of all maritime traffic worldwide.2”
― Robert D. Kaplan, Asia's Cauldron: The South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific

“Without the Indian Subcontinent, in other words, there could not have been a Vietnam in any cultural or aesthetic sense.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, Asia's Cauldron: The South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific

“it is not only our values that matter, but the military might that backs them up. Truly, in international affairs, behind all questions of morality lie questions of power. Humanitarian intervention in the Balkans in the 1990s was possible only because the Serbian regime was not a great power armed with nuclear weapons, unlike the Russian regime, which at the same time was committing atrocities of a similar scale in Chechnya where the West did nothing; nor did the West do much against the ethnic cleansing in the Caucasus because there, too, was a Russian sphere of influence. In the Western Pacific in the coming decades, morality may mean giving up some of our most cherished ideals for the sake of stability. How else are we to make at least some room for a quasi-authoritarian China as its military expands? (And barring a social-economic collapse internally, China’s military will keep on expanding.) For it is the balance of power itself, even more than the democratic values of the West, that is often the best preserver of freedom. That also will be a lesson of the South China Sea in the twenty-first century—one more that humanists do not want to hear.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, Asia's Cauldron: The South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific

“China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) sees U.S. battle networks—“which rely heavily on satellites and the Internet to identify targets, coordinate attacks, guide ‘smart bombs’ and more”—as its “Achilles’ heel.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, Asia's Cauldron: The South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific

“Walter Benjamin’s famous vision of history as a vast heap of wreckage of incidents and events that keeps piling higher and higher into infinity, with progress signifying merely more wreckage waiting to happen.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, Asia's Cauldron: The South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific

“The news coverage of the Indian Ocean tsunami indicates how the South China Sea may appear to the world through the media’s distorting mirror.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, Asia's Cauldron: The South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific