The Rachman Review

Okay, After the comments from Russian, so what? Ukraine is a sovereign state in international community. She has the absolute rights to decide what organization, Allies and Relation she wants to deal with. No matter how insecure Kremlins thought, no excuse could vindicate for Russia’s pugnacious stance and aggressive campaign to Ukraine. No excuse, there is no persuasive reason to compensate Russia’s insecurity.

Rachman ought to be to geopolitics journalism what his colleague Martin Wolf is to economics comment and analysis. Yet somehow he doesn’t quite pull it all together. I have wondered why, both for his written pieces and for his podcast (which is now more than a couple of years old). He has amazing connections in the world of boffins and pointy-headed grand strategists as well as hardboiled politicians. Yet what he produces week after week both in print as well as audio are narrow and siloed views. The great non-reporter journalists are those who can give us a cross-cutting view of politics and economics, across space and across time. In other words, Gideon, using your fantastic connections to make connections so that we get a panoramic view of world affairs

I’ve been listening to the show for months now. Hoping that I will actually hear something interesting and engaging. Boy was I wrong. Most of the episodes are way too long and boring with people calling on bad audio lines from their shoddy mobile phones. This is not a quality show. Even the host sounds like he’s sitting in the bathroom with his laptop, that’s how much it reverberates. Generally lacks quality content and I can’t stand listening to the audio quality, especially not for the length of time that this would require.

I have not heard a more cogent and thoughtful analysis of Afghanistan till this podcast. Too bad so many Afghans had to die for what was essentially a war that was designed/prolonged by American corruption. She also has a blog where she describes this train wreck happening (a few years ago). Upon listening to her, the collapse of the Afghan Govt seems inevitable. Sad that so many people who were given 'hope' have been dropped back into the medivieal Taliban regime's second innings...