Last War of the World-Island: The Geopolitics of Contemporary Russia

Between the two world wars of the 20th century, Karl Haushofer, a retired German general and professor of political geography at Munich University, used the geopolitical ideas and concepts of Friedrich Ratzel, Rudolf Kjellen and Halford Mackinder, to formulate a geopolitics for Germany's revival as a great power. Haushofer has been characterized – mostly unfairly – as the geopolitical conscience of Adolf Hitler. Nazi foreign policy was driven by a combination of geopolitics, nationalism, and racial ideology. Hitler's decision to attack Soviet Russia, for example, directly contradicted Haushofer's geopolitical advice.