“Geography can tell us much more about the goals and strategies of a state than its ideology or foreign policy,” says the famous American publicist and geopolitician Robert Kaplan. He is convinced that the future of countries and continents can be understood in the context of such objective parameters as climate, territory, availability of water resources, and landscape diversity. Tracing the history of regions, countries and “hot spots” of the planet, the author offers his own holistic theory about the coming cycle of conflicts that will occur throughout Eurasia - in Europe, Russia, China, Turkey, Iran, and the Arab Middle East. Kaplan relies in his research on modern scientific data and on classical works of the past century. He argues: knowing geography, you can clearly see those boundaries that should not be crossed. You just need to go up to the map and look at it carefully.