In case you hadn't noticed, the Middle East is going from bad to worse these days.  

The Syrian civil war grinds on. Israel and the Palestinians spent the last month in another pointless bloodletting (most of the blood being Palestinian). ISIS keeps expanding its control in parts of Iraq, placing thousands of members of the Yazidi religious sect in peril and leading the Obama administration to consider airstrikes or some form of airborne humanitarian aid. Meanwhile, officials back in Baghdad snipe mostly at each other. Libya continues to unravel, belying the high-fives that liberal hawks gave themselves back when Qaddafi fell. A U.S. general was shot and killed in Afghanistan, and another disputed election threatens democracy there and may give the Taliban new opportunities to make gains at Kabul's expense. Turkey's Prime Minister Recip Erdogan has been calling Egyptian President Abdul Fattah al-Sisi a "tyrant," an irony given Erdogan's own authoritarian tendencies. A diplomatic spat between Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar remains unsettled. Nature even seems to be against us: the MERS virus on the Arabian Peninsula may be transmissible by airborne contact. I'm sure you could find some good news if you tried, but you'd have to squint pretty hard.

Assuming you're not living in a cave or completely off the grid (in which case you won't be reading this), you're probably aware that this week marks the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of World War I. The war was arguably the greatest man-made disaster of modern times: it bankrupted the European powers, killed or wounded some 37 million people, allowed communists to seize power in Russia, and sowed the seeds for an even more destructive world war two decades later.

I had a valuable learning experience last week, prompted by a hasty tweet I sent out on the subject of Ukraine.

When I heard the news about the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17, my first thought was that this was another case where our failure to understand the risks of the situation and to move swiftly to resolve a simmering crisis had contributed to a tragic outcome. The people who shot down the plane were responsible for what happened, of course, but the tragedy might never have occurred had the EU and the United States been less eager to pull Ukraine into the Western orbit and less reluctant to cut a deal with Moscow that would have guaranteed Ukrainian neutrality. So I took to my Twitter feed and tried to make this point, writing, "Airliner tragedy in #Ukraine shows US & EU erred by not pushing to keep Ukr. as neutral buffer state, not potential EU/NATO member."

Will the United States and Iran succeed in reaching an agreement on Iran's nuclear program, and will U.S. President Barack Obama and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani be able to overcome the hard-liners who remain at best wary of a deal and at worst fervently opposed? Secretary of State John Kerry struck a somewhat upbeat tone at a recent press conference, but he is often more optimistic than circumstances warrant.

If you've been obsessing over recent events in Iraq and Syria, or perhaps the World Cup, you probably haven't spent much time thinking about the evolving situation in Asia. But if you stand back and take the long view of global developments, the shift in economic and military power toward Asia will be far more significant than the events that have been dominating the headlines of late. For realists, the distribution of material power has always been a central driving force in world politics, and that is why smart geopoliticians will not lose sight of Asia for long.