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Gideon Rachman

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Gideon Rachman
Rachman at the Annual Meeting 2012 of the World Economic Forum at the congress centre in Davos, Switzerland
Born1963 Edit this on Wikidata
England Edit this on Wikidata
Alma mater
OccupationJournalist, columnist, opinion writer, foreign correspondent Edit this on Wikidata
Employer
Awards
Position heldpundit (2006–) Edit this on Wikidata

Gideon Rachman (born 1963) is a British journalist. He became the chief foreign affairs commentator of the Financial Times in July 2006. In 2016, he won the Orwell Prize for political journalism.[1] In the same year, he was awarded with the Commentator Award at the European Press Prize awards.[2]

Early life

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He was born in 1963 in England, son of Jewish South Africans, but spent some of his childhood in South Africa. His uncle, Ronnie Hope, was news editor at The Jerusalem Post.[3] He read History at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, gaining a first class honours degree from Cambridge University in 1984. While at Gonville and Caius, he was a friend of future MI6 renegade agent Richard Tomlinson, whom he provided with a reference for his Kennedy Scholarship application.[4]

He began his career with the BBC World Service in 1984. From 1988 to 1990, he was a reporter for The Sunday Correspondent newspaper, based in Washington, D.C.[2]

He spent 15 years at The Economist newspaper; first as its deputy American editor, then as its South-east Asia correspondent from a base in Bangkok. He then served as The Economist's Asia editor before taking on the post of Britain editor from 1997 to 2000, following which he was posted in Brussels where he penned the Charlemagne European-affairs column.

At The Financial Times, Rachman writes on international politics, with a particular stress on American foreign policy, the European Union and geopolitics in Asia.

Gideon Rachman maintains a blog on the FT site.[5] His brother is Tom Rachman, the author of the novel The Imperfectionists, and his sister Carla is an art historian. Their sister, Emily, died of breast cancer in 2012.[6]

Views

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Rachman with Tunisian bloggers Wissem Tlili and Lina Ben Mhenni in 2018

Rachman is noted for advocating a looser, non-federal European Union. In 2002, he staged a debate in Prospect magazine with Nick Clegg, who was then an MEP for the East Midlands. Clegg argued strongly that Britain should join the European single currency. Rachman disagreed, writing, "I believe the political changes involved in joining the Euro carry enormous risks. I do not believe it is 'progressive' or 'self-confident' to take those risks."[7] More recently, Rachman has argued in the FT that the EU must take a flexible and open approach to the political demands of their member states or face failure.[8] However, during the UK referendum on EU membership, Rachman argued for the UK to vote to stay inside the EU – arguing that the organisation, although flawed, was an important guardian of democratic values and security in Europe. Rachman was also one of the first commentators to predict that the UK would vote to leave the EU.[9]

Rachman has a strong interest in East Asia and the rise of China, and has repeatedly[10][11] warned that inflexibility on the part of both China and the USA may lead to conflict. He has also often focussed on the challenges to US power around the world.[12]

Rachman twice endorsed Barack Obama for the presidency and has defended his foreign policy. He has also been sceptical of the case for intervention in Syria.[13]

Rachman pointed out that the Presidency of Donald Trump historic changes in foreign and domestic policies were inherited by the Biden administration, including opposition to free trade and competition with China. While the Biden team has decried Trump's threat to American democracy, they already share many of Trump's basic assumptions about trade, globalization, and rivalry with China.[14]

Books

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Rachman's first book, Zero-Sum World was published in 2010 in the United Kingdom. It was published under the title Zero-Sum Future in the United States and translated into seven languages, including Chinese, German and Korean.[15] The book was part history and part prediction. It argued that the thirty years from 1978 to 2008 had been shaped by a shared embrace of globalisation by the world's major powers that had created a "win-win world", leading to greater peace and prosperity. Rachman predicted that the financial and economic crisis that began in 2008 would lead to a zero-sum world, characterised by increasing tensions between the world's major powers. The New York Times newspaper praised the book as "perhaps the best one-volume account now available of the huge post-Communist spread of personal freedom and economic prosperity."[16]

In August 2016, Rachman published a book entitled Easternisation - War and Peace in the Asian Century. The book argues that 500 years of Western domination of global politics is coming to an end as the result of the rise of new powers in Asia. It focussed on the threat of conflict between the US and China, America's eroding global position and rivalries between China and its neighbours. The book was called "masterly" by the Sunday Times[17] and "superb" by The Daily Telegraph. British historian, Paul Kennedy, said – "This is truly one of those works you can say you wished our political leaders would read and ponder its great implications."[18]

In 2022 his third book, The Age of the Strongman, was published in Bodley Head. It was named a Best Book of the Year by The Economist, Foreign Affairs, The Times (UK) and Sunday Times.[19]

Awards

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As well as winning the Orwell and European Press Prize awards, Rachman was named foreign commentator of the year in Britain's comment awards in 2010.[20] The Observer has also listed him as one of Britain's 300 leading intellectuals.[21] He has been a visiting fellow at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University (1988–89) and at the Nobel Institute in Oslo (2013).

Works

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Wikimedia Commons has media related to Gideon Rachman.

References

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  1. ^ "Gideon Rachman". The Orwell Foundation. Retrieved 26 December 2021.
  2. ^ a b "Gideon Rachman - Groupe d'études géopolitiques". geopolitique.eu. Retrieved 26 December 2021.
  3. ^ Zatman, Alex. "LUCK HELPS GIDEON TO SUMMIT OF JOURNALISM". Jewish Telegraph. Retrieved 10 July 2018.
  4. ^ Rachman, Gideon (14 February 2008). "My friend, the renegade spy". Financial Times.
  5. ^ "Gideon Rachman". Financial Times.
  6. ^ Rachman, Tom (27 May 2016). "How I mourned my sister through the books she left behind". The Washington Post. Retrieved 30 May 2016.
  7. ^ Nick Clegg: Is joining the euro still too big a risk for Britain?, Prospect (20 January 2002). Retrieved 11 May 2014.
  8. ^ "If Europe cannot bend it will break". Financial Times. Retrieved 30 May 2016.
  9. ^ Rachman, Gideon (21 March 2016). "Wake up — Britain is heading for Brexit". Financial Times. Retrieved 26 January 2023.
  10. ^ Rachman, Gideon (9 November 2015). "China is sailing into a sea of troubles". Financial Times. Retrieved 30 May 2016.
  11. ^ Rachman, Gideon (28 September 2015). "The ideas that divide China and America". Financial Times. Retrieved 30 May 2016.
  12. ^ Rachman, Gideon (12 October 2015). "A global test of American power". Financial Times.
  13. ^ Rachman, Gideon (16 April 2018). "The realities of Syria's war remain unchanged by western strikes". Financial Times. Retrieved 27 September 2019.
  14. ^ Rachman, Gideon (7 August 2023). "Why Joe Biden is the heir to Trump". Financial Times. Retrieved 26 February 2024. But these are largely differences in implementation rather than underlying philosophy. Much as they would be loath to admit it, the Biden team has come to share many of Trump's basic assumptions — about trade, globalisation and rivalry with China.
  15. ^ MacShane, Denis (10 December 2010). "Zero-Sum World, By Gideon Rachman". The Independent. Retrieved 28 November 2019.
  16. ^ Malcomson, Scott (28 January 2011). "Diminished Expectations". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 26 December 2021.
  17. ^ Fenby, Jonathan (31 July 2016). "Books: Easternisation: War and Peace in the Asian Century by Gideon Rachman". The Times.
  18. ^ Dibbert, Taylor (18 September 2016). "Gideon Rachman on Books and Writing". HuffPost. Retrieved 26 December 2021.
  19. ^ Publisher site
  20. ^ "Gideon Rachman". The Orwell Prize. Retrieved 28 November 2019.
  21. ^ Naughton, John (7 May 2011). "Britain's top 300 intellectuals". The Observer. ISSN 0029-7712. Retrieved 28 November 2019.
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