Using the examples of the Ottoman Empire, Spain, Austria, France and Germany, this book describes the principal geopolitical features of the expansionist state. It then presents a model of the operation of the expansionist process over space and time. It goes on to apply the geopolitical characteristics of the model to the period after 1945 in order to assess the extent to which the Soviet Union might be considered as being an expansionist state, either actually or potentially. This latter question is obviously once more extremely relevant with the current events in Ukraine.

The new edition of The Cambridge History of Warfare offers an updated comprehensive account of Western warfare, from its origins in classical Greece and Rome, through the Middle Ages and the early modern period, down to the wars of the twenty-first century in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria.