(Column by George Will, June 6) Recently, 20,000 people were evacuated from the center of the German city of Cologne because of a timely reminder from the past: three unexploded bombs dropped on the pulverized city during World War II. A thousand miles to the east, reverberations from explosions in Ukraine are part of Europe’s present. And of its foreseeable future, in part because of past misjudgments.
Consider 1994. That was three years after the disintegration of the Soviet Union. And five years after U.S. political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s influential essay argued that humanity’s ideological evolution had culminated in “the end of history”: the exhaustion of all social systems hitherto considered plausible alternatives to open, liberal societies.
In 1994, Ukraine surrendered the Soviet-era nuclear weapons it possessed, receiving in exchange U.S., British, French, Russian and Chinese security guarantees. Twenty years later, Russia seized Crimea. And began supporting insurrections aimed at dismembering Ukraine.
Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine’s minister of foreign affairs from 2020 to 2024, writing in Foreign Affairs, says, “The stark reality is that neither Russia nor Ukraine has much of an incentive to stop the fighting.” What Vladimir Putin calls “the root causes of the conflict” are really one cause: Ukraine’s existence as a sovereign nation.
Although there is no excuse for it, there is a reason for the failure of U.S. leaders to understand Putin. He is an open book who has been reading himself to the world since long before he published his 2021 essay “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.” This farrago of ethnic mysticisms and history seen through a pseudo-theological lens is Putin’s “Mein Kampf.” His resentments and revenge aspirations are all there. But are largely ignored or disbelieved by the West’s statesmen and publics who complacently believe that the end of history meant the end of toxic nonsense such as this:
Putin believes Russia is a “civilization-state” with cultural-cum-religious significance, rights and responsibilities that justify the erasure of other nations. Which is why the Economist correctly says that for Putin, “war has become an ideology.”…. [The full column is at this link.]
