Opinion: George Will: Putin is an open book. U.S. leaders have refused to read it.

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.

George Will’s email address is georgewill@washpost.com.

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