Indian Ocean: The URIC Acid Test

The Indian Ocean, the third largest ocean in the world (after the Pacific and the Atlantic), occupies approximately 20 percent of the Earth’s sea surface, covering a total area of 73.56 million square miles. The Indian Ocean represents an increasingly significant avenue for global trade and arena for global security. Rising prosperity in Asia, growing dependence on natural resource flows linking producers and consumers across the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, and globalized supply chains and distribution networks are knitting the region ever more closely together by sea. At the same time, emerging problems ranging from piracy and territorial disputes in the regional seas to global environmental pressures on coastal and marine resources pose significant governance challenges for maritime policymakers around the Indian Ocean region (IOR). As such it is the ocean of the future and a potential game changer because whoever will control of the Indian Ocean will have substantial control over world trade and global wealth. This paper describes the strategic significance of the Indian Ocean and the tension that its strategic role can cause among the major powers, as well as possible consequences, particularly a second world-led military and market hegemony. The Indian Ocean therefore stands as an acid test to the major military presence of the URIC (United States, Russia, India, and China) within its environs.