Composed at the end of the First World War, Halford Mackinder’s Democratic Ideals and Reality: A Study in the Politics of Reconstruction poured the coldwater of geographical determinism over the liberal idealism of Woodrow Wilson’s proposed new world order. Mackinder suggested that while a disarmed world of global law and national self-determination remained a noble ideal, geographical realities made it dangerous folly to expect it any time soon. Instead, Mackinder warned that a world brimful of super-powers and their colonies would see various attempts at global hegemony, and that, should any one power bring under its sway the resource basket of oil, wheat, and coal to be found in West Russia, the Ukraine, and the Caspian Basin, it stood fair to dominate a unipolar world. Against this possibility, treaties and law were paper tigers, only a countervailing and superior military force could offer any real protection.