Robert D. Kaplan is chief geopolitical analyst for Stratfor, a private global intelligence firm, and the author of 15 books, including, Asia’s Cauldron: The South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific, to be published in March by Random House.

As the events of the past week demonstrate, the Middle East has still not found a solution to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Melting away before our eyes is the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement, in which the British and French carved out spheres of influence in the Levant, leading to the creation of Syria and Iraq. A terrorist Sunnistan has now emerged between the Lebanese city of Tripoli and the Iraqi cities of Ramadi and Fallujah, while a messy child’s finger-painting of different tribalized sovereignties defines Sunni and Shia areas of control between the eastern edge of the Mediterranean and the Iranian plateau. This happens even as a sprawling and fractious Kurdistan sinks tenuous roots atop the corpses of Baathist regimes. But Middle Eastern chaos is but prologue to the drama sweeping much of the temperate zone of Afro-Asia all the way to China. Indeed, so much else is going on beyond the Levant that the media overlooks: not necessarily violent, but increasingly and intensely interrelated. Understanding it all requires not a knowledge of Washington policy alternatives, but of classical geography.

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The ancient Greeks had a term for what they considered the “inhabited quarter” of the globe: the Oikoumene, the temperate zone of the Afro-Asian landmass stretching from North Africa to the confines of western China. Marshall Hodgson, the great historian of the Middle East at the University of Chicago who died in 1968, defined the Oikoumene as more-or-less “Nile-to-Oxus,” a term both grand and suggestive, linking as it did the river valley civilization of Egypt with that of Central Asia, and connoting the intricate tapestry of peoples, trade networks and conflicts from one end of Afro-Asia to another. Nile-to-Oxus perfectly sums up a vast zone of quasi-anarchy that we now can no longer deny. For the Cold War divisions of area studies—which both circumscribe and distort the work of academics, journalists and government analysts—are finally yielding to a more organic and fluid geography: not the geography of globalization in which people desert their cultures for the sake of cosmopolitan values and identities; but the geography of interacting, catalytic instability.

Every place will soon affect every other place—and in an obvious geographical sense. For example, whatever the media fanfare, the interim nuclear deal with Iran essentially secures Tehran’s status as a nuclear power nation much like Japan already is, with a scientific, technological and intellectual base that will one day have the breakout capacity to produce weapons if it ever decides to thwart the West. In that case, Saudi Arabia, less trustful than ever of the United States, will need to make quiet arrangements with its close ally Pakistan for a credible deterrent, thereby fusing the Middle East and South Asia conflict systems—the one dominated by Israel-versus-Iran with the one dominated by Pakistan-versus-India.

At the same time, following the withdrawal of tens of thousands of U. S. troops from Afghanistan in 2014, Iran will fortify its zone of influence in the western and central parts of that country, even as China continues to invest billions to mine copper and explore for oil in its east and north. China is not new to the Greater Middle East: under the 8 th-century Tang emperors, Chinese armies threaded their way as far as Khorasan in northeastern Iran. And Beijing is now building a rail and pipeline network connecting western China with four former Soviet Central Asian republics that abut Afghanistan and Iran. The Chinese-built port at Gwadar in Pakistani Baluchistan, near to the entrance of the Persian Gulf, could eventually bring China into the strategic heart of both South Asia and the Middle East. In fact, one of the reasons why China is so intent upon dominating the South China Sea is that it provides Beijing, via the Strait of Malacca, with access to the Indian Ocean and the Islamic world.

Even more so than China, Myanmar manifests this new and fluid Eurasian geography. Dominating the Bay of Bengal in Southeast Asia, Myanmar is where the spheres of influence of both China in East Asia and India in South Asia overlap, with a webwork of new ports, gas pipelines and roads that will connect northeastern India with southern China. The political opening of Myanmar—with its abundance of hydrocarbons, strategic metals and hydropower—has in recent years begun to transform the geographic nomenclature used by Asia specialists from the narrow “East Asia” to the vaster and more comprehensive “Indo-Pacific.” This is the signal geopolitical development of our time: the expansion of connective tissue between South Asia, East Asia, the Greater Middle East and Central Asia. The spread of “Indo-Pacific” is an expression of how at least two of those regions are already being thought of as one. In history it is often the quiet changes that are the most significant.

Post-American Afghanistan will be the next flashpoint in this process, whether through chaos or commercial development or both. Afghanistan, without the stabilizer of the U. S. military, will become an even weaker, more amorphous polity than it already is, with intensified links and spheres of influence awarded to Iran, China, the former Central Asian republics and Pakistan.

Regarding Pakistan, the current bifurcation of the Indian Subcontinent is likely not history’s last word on political arrangements there. Pakistan, if it does not further integrate its provinces Baluchistan and Sindh into the Punjabi heartland—and if it cannot manage a more turbulent eastern and southern Afghanistan—could gradually be reduced to a rump state of Greater Punjab, with the Baluch and Sindhis aligning themselves with a Greater India and a Pushtunistan straddling the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. None of this is nearly as improbable as it sounds, given the unraveling of Syria, Iraq, Libya and Yemen in recent years, and given Pakistan’s structural similarities to those countries, in the form of regionally based ethnic groupings or violent sectarian splits. Much will depend on what happens in Afghanistan in the months following the U. S. troop drawdown. Indeed, Afghanistan in terms of strategic geography is like Myanmar: a universal joint for two or more antiquated Cold War-era regions, linking the Middle East, Central Asia, South Asia and East Asia via ripple effects felt in western China.

Whether a place descends into anarchy or marches forward toward greater cohesion and development affects the type of interaction that it will have with adjoining regions, but not necessarily whether the interaction takes place. A chaotic Afghanistan affects every country around it, as would a chaotic Myanmar if its different religious and ethnic groups were to further undermine central authority in the capital Naypyidaw. On the other hand, an Afghanistan or Myanmar that draws infrastructure and transportation investment also erases the artificial divisions of area studies by leading to a more fluid geography.

What happens inside China itself is actually the most critical factor in all of this— far more important than what happens in Syria, Iraq, or Iran. This is not because of the continued economic rise of China—quite the contrary. The Chinese economy is slowing down. Chinese statistics lie. The present GDP growth rate of 7.5 percent is probably significantly lower, and especially so on the Pacific coast. China’s economy exists inside a massive credit bubble. Entire “ghost cities” where few people live were built during the real estate boom. China’s particular engine of economic growth for a third of a century—competitively priced exports and attendant low wages—is grinding to a halt. Chinese leaders understand they need to rebalance the economy. But this does not mean at all that they can suceed in doing so. There may be few things harder for a relatively small autocratic elite, with fragile political legitimacy, than to engineer a soft landing for an economy of more than 1.3 billion people that has been overheating for decades.

Keep in mind that China, albeit to a lesser extent than the former Soviet Union, constitutes a prison of nations: with Tibetans in the southwest, Turkic Muslim Uighurs in the west and Inner Mongolians in the north. The minorities live mainly in the dry tablelands, rich with hydrocarbons, minerals and metals—and particularly with sources of ground water—that the ethnic-Han Chinese in the arable, lowland cradle require for their survival. The ultimate question about China is a geographic one: As it enters a long period of economic uncertainty with the possibility of social and political unrest, can the dominant Hans maintain control over the minorities bordering Central and South Asia? Or will upheaval in Tibet and Sinkiang Province in the far west fuse with the belt of violent political upheaval stretching literally from Nile-to-Oxus? Remember that Central Asia itself is threatened by nascent Islamic fundamentalism, just like in China’s Sinkiang Province next door, home to Uighur Turkic Muslims.

Because what has transpired across the Greater Middle East since 2011 has been less about the rise of democracy than about the breakdown of central authority, one shudders at what might obtain in the case of a Chinese Spring, or some variation of it, given the regional differences and tensions both within and outside the Han core. China could expand and contract simultaneously. China, as I’ve mentioned, is constructing pipelines and a transportation grid throughout Central Asia (where it is rubbing up against the influences of Russia and Iran), even as it has been building or helping to finance deep-water port projects throughout the Indian Ocean as far away as East Africa. Moreover, Beijing has been mightily expanding its naval, air, and ballistic missile power to cover the East China and South China seas. China is also in a position to overwhelm Mongolia and the Russian Far East demographically, even as it pursues a divide-and-conquer strategy in the way it deals with the economies of South East Asia. But China could also severely contract through economic and social unrest, especially in the ethnic borderlands.

Domestic upheaval need not lead to a shriveling of China’s ability to project power. Upheaval could make an embattled regime in Beijing more nationalistic and, therefore, more aggressive toward its neighbors in the Pacific Basin, as we have seen in recent weeks with the declaration of a Chinese air defense identification zone in the East China Sea. Because of the media focus on the Middle East, security in the Pacific has been unconsciously taken for granted for too long. But we should now consider a world undergoing varying levels of unrest across the whole swath of the early-21st century Oikoumene: figuratively from Nile-to-Oxus, and specifically from North Africa to interior China, with an increasingly congested and nervous naval environment extending from Somalia to the Sea of Japan. In this way, the Greater Indian Ocean becomes the maritime organizing principle for the Oikoumene, with the South China Sea joining the Levant, Afghanistan and Myanmar as nodal points of conflict, with the potential to detonate horizontally into adjacent regions.

Then there is Africa. As Chinese-financed port projects take shape along the Indian Ocean coast, railroad networks expand from the coast to the African interior, rich with hydrocarbons and strategic minerals and metals. Meanwhile, the population of sub-Saharan Africa could grow from 1.1 billion people to 4.1 billion people by the end of the century, according to the World Population Review. And this is not necessarily a linear projection, but one based on declining birth rates. So even as the interior of Africa becomes interconnected with the Oikoumene, and urban middle classes burgeon on the African continent, conflict, too, will proliferate there: for despite advances in agriculture, environmentally fragile zones such as the Sahel and the water-starved slums of major cities will simply be unable to support a population growing so dramatically in absolute numbers.

And it’s often those fundamental factors of absolute population growth, resource scarcity and climate change—not just evil individuals or disputes between groups—that drives conflict, as I elaborated on 20 years ago in my February 1994 Atlantic cover story, “The Coming Anarchy.” The breakdown of states here and there across sub-Saharan Africa since the late-1990s is a demonstration of this. Such chaos will merge with the burgeoning anarchy along the North African coast, where Libya has already crumbled into its constituent parts, igniting further unrest in nearby Sahelian countries like Mali and Niger. (And this is not to mention tribal conflict in the Central African Republic and South Sudan.) Algeria is on the brink of a political transition that could weaken its grip upon its own Saharan back-of-beyond. Tunisia, as central authority weakens even there, is less and less in control of its southern borderlands. But we might not always hear about it right away—academic and journalistic elites pay far too much attention to fellow civil society types in foreign capitals, and not enough time exploring the security situation on the ground in remote border regions where the writ of governments no longer obtains.

So just as modernism—that is, the Industrial Revolution—did not lead to a reduction in conflict, neither will postmodernism, as defined by the electronic and communications revolution. Electronic and satellite communications; further developments in rail, road, and maritime transport; technological advances in warfare; and absolute rises in population are together not negating geography, but only making geography more claustrophobic through the shrinkage of distance. Thus, the collapse of leftover Cold War-area designations will continue as conflict sweeps across traditional geographical boundaries.

What does all this mean for the United States? Rather than think in terms of the Middle East, Central Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia and East Asia, we should now think in terms of an Afro-Asian Oikoumene on land and a Greater Indian Ocean rimland connecting Africa with the Western Pacific at sea. It is only at sea and from the sea where the United States will still yield considerable influence by virtue of its naval and air power. The proliferation of irregular conflict and internal rebellions, violent or not, across Afro-Asia, will reduce the power of centrally controlled regimes, and consequently make it harder for Washington to project influence in foreign capitals, and will in any case make policymakers more reluctant to even try. Thanks to America’s exalted geographical position and abundant energy resources, its power will grow in relative terms, while its ability to affect political outcomes on the ground in the Eastern Hemisphere will continue to diminish. The United States would then be a nexus of prosperity that views Hodgson’s Nile-to-Oxus with a mixture of morbid fascination and magisterial indifference. And that indifference could yet emerge as the great moral issue of our time.

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly named Yangon as the capital of Myanmar; the capital of Myanmar is Naypyidaw.