In a interview conducted by Foreign Affairs, Robert Kaplan argues,
Everybody knows about the Taiwan Strait, but the key area to watch is actually the South China Sea, which may be as important in the twenty-first century as the Persian Gulf has been in the twentieth century. The South China Sea is an international waterway, it is the gateway to the Indian Ocean, it's got energy reserves, it's got problems of piracy, the potential Islamic terrorism. But even though it's an international waterway, the Chinese see it in Monroe Doctrine terms -- it's something that is part of their patrimony. They see the South China Sea the way the U.S. saw the Caribbean when it was expanding its power under President Theodore Roosevelt.
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