Reading Alan Furst now

I have been making my way through Alan Furst's oeuvre, and specifically the "Night Soldiers" group of books about Europe between the wars, the set of books which have brought him success. I first blogged about them sometime around 2010, so it's probably safe to assume that I started reading them around then.

Not long after that, Xi Jinping came to power. Until then we were all operating under the Washington Consensus-The World is Flat-End of History mindset: the Cold War was over, globalism was bringing benefit to everyone, first and foremost by virtue of our having outsourced most manufacturing to China and also by tighter integration at the top end of the value chain as more Chinese and also Indians came to the US for technical and scientific education, with lots of them choosing to stay on H1B visas.

Since then, the world has changed markedly. China had already been emboldened by coming through the financial crisis in better shape than the West. Then came gulags in Xinjiang, the fall of Hong Kong, clearly stated desires to take back Taiwan, wolf warrior diplomacy... Then there's Russia. First supporting Assad and Maduro, then taking back Crimea, using cyberops to destabilize democracies around the world, finally invading Ukraine.

Now it is hard not to read Furst differently. There is a new urgency to his murky world of survivors and patriots with war drums beating first in the distance, then increasingly close, but also questions raised. Decades from now, will we come back to look at Xinjiang and think of it as our Sudetenland? Or was it Hong Kong? Or was the whole earth is flat/globalization mindset that lulled us into complacency?

Of course the West has never been pure as the driven snow. We have always been slipping along with our own moral ambiguities, doing deals with the devil whenever it suits us. Does this place us in a position of zero moral authority from the outset? Or can we claim a bit of innocence because at least we're trying? Or is China also trying, in its own, very different way?