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The functional role of Eurasia’s surrounding sea lanes has changed substantially over the past three decades, with broader implications on land for the continent’s role in world affairs. Until recent decades largely a venue for local trading, since the early 1990s the Indian Ocean and surrounding bodies of water have become arenas for intense, large-scale trans-continental commerce, as the economies of the rimlands have expanded. Energy, industrial raw materials, and food products have flowed to Northeast Asia and Europe, balanced by industrial exports. The expansion of commodity trade has much further to go, especially in the South and Southeast Asian rimlands of the Indian Ocean, as both energy and food consumption expand from their still-low per capita base in these heavily populated nations. Three other dimensions of transformation complement the expansion of commodity trade and manufactured exports. Beneath the seas, raw material extraction is rising, even as the information revolution transforms Eurasia’s oceans, through the rapid expansion of undersea fiber-optic cables, and sub-surface military technology advances. Global warming is also making Arctic transport and resource development, long rendered impractical by climate, increasingly feasible. These multiple maritime transformations all have geopolitical implications on land. In the aggregate, the changes benefit China and Russia, rendering their prospective partnership of enhanced global strategic value. The embedded strengths of the industrial democracies, however, remain formidable, especially in the technological realm, leveraged by their market orientation. The changing geopolitics of Eurasia’s waterways thus intensifies challenges to the industrial democracies, increasing the future importance of multilateral collaboration, although whether these marginal changes in capacity will provoke thorough going systemic transformation still remains unlikely.
