7.Halford J. Mackinder, Democratic Ideals and Reality: A Study in the Politics of Reconstruction [1919] (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 1942).
8.John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire since 1405 (New York: Bloomsbury, 2008).
9.Matthew White, The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History’s 100 Worst Atrocities (New York: Norton, 2012), 563. Most observers agree that World War II was the deadliest war in history. Where World War I ranks depends on whether one is distinguishing between civil wars and interstate wars, how one deals with the issue of civilian versus military casualties, and whether one disaggregates the Second Sino-Japanese War from World War II, among other factors.
10.See Paul Chamberlin, The Cold War’s Killing Fields: Rethinking the Long Peace (New York: HarperCollins, 2018).
11.Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A Short History of the World, 1914–1991 (New York: Vintage, 1996).
12.There is a very useful, although somewhat specialized, literature on Mackinder and his contributions to the study of geopolitics. The most helpful sources are cited in the longer discussion of Mackinder in chapter 1.
13.Halford J. Mackinder, “The Geographic Pivot of History,” Geographical Journal, April 1904, 421–37.
14.Mackinder was concerned, in 1904, about Russia and (to a lesser degree) Germany, two autocracies with modern or modernizing economies. The theme would be better developed in his later book, Democratic Ideals and Reality.
15.Richard Overy, Why the Allies Won (New York: Norton, 1997), 320.
Chapter 1: Mackinder’s World
1.The railway technically opened in 1903 but was still missing the final stretch of track, around Lake Baikal.
2.Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (New York: Penguin, 2017), 196.
3.Chris Miller, We Shall Be Masters: Russian Pivots to East Asia from Peter the Great to Putin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021), 122.
4.Fritz Fischer, War of Illusions: German Policies from 1911 to 1914, translated by Marian Jackson (New York: Norton, 1975), 471.
5.Telegram from American Consul at Vladivostok to Secretary of State, November 8, 1917, Box 10, State Department Correspondence, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Files, FDRL.
6.Mark Edele, Stalinism at War: The Soviet Union in World War II (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), 68.
7.Albert Weeks, Russia’s Life-Saver: Lend-Lease Aid to the U.S.S.R. in World War II (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2004).
8.Carlotta Gall, “ ‘Created to Scare the Population’: How One Russian Brigade Terrorised Bucha,” Irish Times, May 23, 2022; Andrew Roth, “Russian Ships, Tanks and Troops on the Move to Ukraine as Peace Talks Stall,” Observer, January 23, 2022; Mark Krutov, “The Dead of the 64th: A Notorious Russian Army Unit and Its High Casualty Rate,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, August 10, 2022.
9.Fred Pleitgen, Claudia Otto, and Ivana Kottasová, “ ‘There Are Maniacs Who Enjoy Killing,’ Russian Defector Says of His Former Unit Accused of War Crimes in Bucha,” CNN, December 13, 2022.
10.Miller, We Shall Be Masters, 117.
11.Zachary Carter, The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes (New York: Random House, 2020), 274.
12.Halford J. Mackinder, “The Round World and the Winning of the Peace,” Foreign Affairs, July 1943, 595. See also Gerry Kearns, Geopolitics and Empire: The Legacy of Halford Mackinder (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
13.W. H. Parker, Mackinder: Geography as an Aid to Statecraft (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 2.
14.Leo Amery, My Political Life, vol. 1 (London: Hutchinson, 1953), 228; Parker, Mackinder, 21; Simone Pelizza, “Geopolitics, Education, and Empire: The Political Life of Sir Halford Mackinder, 1895–1925,” PhD dissertation, Leeds University, March 2013, 35.
15.Geoff Sloan, “Haldane’s Mackindergarten: A Radical Experiment in British Military Education?,” War in History, July 2012, 323.
