I’m finally reading Robert Kaplan’s Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power.

So far, I like it. It seems pretty balanced and Kaplan seems to have traveled extensively around the area. Pretty much the same territory as The Post American World by Fareed Zakaria (who was born in India). Their perspectives don’t differ that much, but Kaplan goes deeper into the region. That’s understandable since Zakaria was covering, supposedly, the whole world.

One of the most important points I get from all my reading on the region is that U.S. policy toward India during the Cold War was utterly inexplicable. Or maybe explicable…just tragically wrong-headed. Yeah, that could be said about a lot of places, but in the case of India it’s particularly weird.