What has been the most unnoticed strategic consequence of the Iraq War?

Hastening the arrival of the Asian Century, argues Robert D. Kaplan [1], a correspondent for The Atlantic and professor at the United States Naval Academy, on today's New York Times' op-ed page.

While the American government has been occupied in Mesopotamia, and our European allies continue to starve their defense programs, Asian militaries — in particular those of China, India, Japan and South Korea — have been quietly modernizing and in some cases enlarging. Asian dynamism is now military as well as economic.

The military trend that is hiding in plain sight is the loss of the Pacific Ocean as an American lake after 60 years of near-total dominance.

For more coverage of China's militarization, see "China's Weapons Buildup [2]" in this month's Security Management.