Nicholas John Spykman, a Dutch-born, naturalised American political scientist active in the 1930s and 1940s, was among the first to develop a geographically-based global strategic vision at the end of the Second World War, shortly before the start of the Cold War. In his famous essay The Geography of the Peace, published in 1944, a few months after his death, Spykman reformulated and partly contested the theories of the British geographer Halford J. Mackinder, famous for the idea that control of the Eurasian Heartland (the World-Island) would guarantee global hegemony to the power that took possession of it. Spykman shifted his attention instead to the coastal belt surrounding Eurasia (and thus the Heartland), which he named Rimland. According to Spykman, this geopolitical ring, which included Western Europe, the Middle East, South Asia and East Asia, represented the real needle in the balance of world power. Rimland was, in his view, the area where most of the population, resources and infrastructure were concentrated and where the great land and sea powers clashed most frequently; in essence, control of this geopolitical ring was crucial for any aspiring hegemonic power. Spykman summed up his proposal in the famous formula: "He who controls Rimland controls Eurasia; he who controls Eurasia controls the fate of the world". Spykman was also one of the first to outline the fundamental role of the United States as an extra-Eurasian maritime power, destined to act to prevent the emergence of a hegemonic superpower in the Old World that could endanger the security of the Western Hemisphere; Spykman was in fact a fierce critic of the isolationist and interventionist policy of the United States between the two world wars. His ideas directly influenced George Kennan's doctrine of containment during the Cold War and the strategy of US alliances: from NATO and SEATO to today's AUKUS (Australia, UK, US).