Sir Halford Mackinder, wrote: ‘Great consequences lie in the simple statements that Britain is an island group, set in an ocean, but off the shores of the great continent; that the opposing shores are indented.’ Some people dislike Mackinder’s writings because he was an imperialist and focused on the importance of geography on strategy. But he was also a supporter of democracy and of the League of Nations to help reduce great-power tensions, and was horrified at the rise of Nazism despite having inadvertently influenced some of its leaders’ thinking.
