The book is based on predictive geopolitics and focuses on the territorial supremacy of nations and superpowers-both onshore and offshore. It attempts to help the reader develop a world geopolitical view to interpret events and trends. From a realist geopolitical world view focusing on the Eurasian World Island and its surrounding maritime highway trade routes and chokepoints, the authors accept the lessons of macro-history to dramatically forecast that the present fragmenting world is moving towards a mix of continent-wide civilizational superpowers. In this dramatic shift in the world's distribution of political and commercial power, and therefore military might, they foresee the implosion of the United States, as the world moves into a post-Anglo Saxon and post-globalization era. The book suggests that there will be two main continent-wide civilizational superpowers and two political blocs of nations: a German-led Catholic Europe, an Asian conglomerate mainly centered around China and Russia, and a largely pan-Arab Islamist bloc under Iran. In this unfolding scenario, economic and political trends could be both complicated and intensified by a world oil shortage; dwindling supplies against rising demand, resulting in price hikes, will threaten economic development, further fanning the fires for acute clash between the newly formed superpowers and blocs. We could be on the verge of what many historians would call an axial period in the history of civilization-a period in which the world will be changed greatly as it exits this era. What makes this most dramatic now is that this time, in such a conflicted state of world affairs, mankind possesses an abundance of mass-destruction weapons. Civilization clash is not new, but this time the authors argue it will be a quantum leap different because of the numbers of peoples, and the economic, political and military power held in each civilizational superpower and bloc.