West Asia: Redrawing the geopolitical map for the 21st century

For more than a century, the term “Middle East” has served as a convenient but misleading shorthand—an imperial cartographic artifact rooted in British strategic priorities rather than regional realities. In a new book West Asia: A New American Grand Strategy in the Middle East, Mohammed Soliman argues that this inherited vocabulary no longer merely obscures reality; it distorts policy and, more importantly, grand strategy.

Soliman is the Director of the Strategic Technologies and Cyber Security Program at the Middle East Institute (MEI), USA.

The world that produced the Middle East as a geopolitical category, defined by oil, the British Empire, and the Cold War camps—has dissolved. In its place, Soliman sees the emergence of “West Asia,” a transregional system stretching from the Eastern Mediterranean through the Arabian Gulf to the Indian Ocean and South Asia.


This reframing reflects a structural transformation in how trade, people, capital, technology, and logistics flow across Eurasia. Soliman’s analysis, grounded in first-hand observation during his work and travels across the Arabian Gulf states, depicts a region undergoing rapid integration with Asia rather than Europe. Trade, capital, digital infrastructure, and diplomaticnetworks increasingly bind the Gulf to India, Southeast Asia, and East Africa. The result is a geopolitical center of gravity shifting eastward, with the Arabian Peninsula functioning as a connective hub between Europe and Asia rather than a peripheral energy supplier.

At the heart of Soliman’s argument is a critique of the post-Cold War U.S. strategy of nation-building. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, followed by the upheavals of the Arab Spring, did not produce stable democracies or a durable balance of power. Instead, they fractured states and enabled the rise of assertive regional powers, particularly Iran and Turkey. Soliman contends that Washington must abandon the ambition to remake societies and instead pursue “order-building,” a realist strategy focused on stabilizing the regional balance through order building that allows America to delegate security roles to willing partners across West Asia.

Soliman’s argument recalls George Kennan’s warning that the United States should never allow a rival power to dominate the world’s major industrial centers, today largely concentrated in Asia. He also channels Alfred Thayer Mahan’s emphasis on sea power and the decisive importance of controlling the maritime routes that run from the Mediterranean through the Indian Ocean. His intellectual thread runs forward to Shinzo Abe’s Indo-Pacific vision, which reframed the Indian and Pacific Oceans as a single strategic space. What Soliman adds is a push further west: he argues that the Mediterranean and the Gulf are not peripheral to this system but integral to it, forming the hinge that connects Europe to the wider Asian theater.

For India, the implications are profound. Soliman places New Delhi at the eastern pillar of the West Asian system, arguing that its economic growth, energy security, and strategic reach are increasingly tied to the Gulf and the Mediterranean. Yet the book does not assume a benign environment. Soliman identifies competing geopolitical visions, particularly Turkey’s efforts to expand influence across the Muslim world and the parallel attempt by China and Russia to construct a Eurasian bloc through infrastructure, military presence, and financial arrangements. These rival projects underscore the centrality of connectivity itself as an arena of competition. Corridors, ports, and digital infrastructure are not neutral; they shape trade patterns, regulatory standards, and political alignments.

In response, Soliman proposes a new American grand strategy built on a “lattice-work” of partnerships rather than rigid, hierarchical alliances. In his view, NATO is an exceptional arrangement—one rooted in the specific historical and geographic realities of post-1945 Europe, not a template to be replicated everywhere.

Soliman belongs to a new generation of American strategists and policy intellectuals rethinking U.S. power in an era defined less by the Atlantic world than by the rise of Asia. His work reflects extensive engagement with Riyadh, New Delhi, Abu Dhabi, and Tokyo—capitals that now sit closer to the center of global economic growth and political momentum than traditional transatlantic hubs. A jet-setter but no instinctive Atlanticist, he seems more at home in Asia’s power centers than in Munich or Davos. He views China not as an isolated adversary, but as a systemic challenge embedded in the broader transformation of Asia.

At its core, West Asia is less a textbook and more a challenge to the prevailing geopolitical imagination. It argues that the Atlantic era is giving way to a Pacific-centric world, but that this transition will be decided not only in East Asia but across the broader maritime rimland linking Europe to Asia. For readers in India and beyond, Soliman’s book offers a provocative framework for understanding a rapidly changing geopolitical landscape. Whether one accepts all of its prescriptions or not, the core insight is difficult to dismiss: the old maps no longer capture the realities of power. As economic gravity shifts toward Asia, the lands between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean are becoming the hinge on which the twenty-first century may turn. In declaring that the “Middle East” is obsolete and that “West Asia” has arrived, Soliman urges policymakers, investors, and scholars to rethink not just a region, but the architecture of global order itself.