The fact that a majority of South Koreans now favor their country obtaining nuclear weapons suggests that Mr. Putin’s moves in Ukraine put at risk the world’s nuclear nonproliferation regime.
In 1993 the great German poet and essayist Hans Magnus Enzensberger predicted that the Cold War would be followed by an age of chaos, violence and conflict. Reflecting on what he observed in Yugoslavia and the urban riots in the United States, he saw a world defined by an “inability to distinguish between destruction and self-destruction.” In this world, “there is no longer any need to legitimize your actions. Violence has freed itself from ideology.”
Mr. Enzensberger was right. He was just too early.
Ivan Krastev is the chairman of the Center for Liberal Strategies, a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna and the author of “Is It Tomorrow Yet? Paradoxes of the Pandemic.
