Gideon Rachman (born 1963) is a journalist who has been the Financial Times chief foreign affairs commentator since July 2006.
He studied at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge University where he obtained a first class honours degree in History in 1984. While at Gonville and Caius, he was a friend of future MI6 agent Richard Tomlinson, whom he provided with a reference for his Kennedy Scholarship application.[1]
He started his career with the BBC World Service in 1984. From 1987 to 1988, he was a visiting fellow and Fulbright scholar at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. During the next two years he became a reporter for The Sunday Correspondent, stationed in Washington DC.
He spent 15 years at The Economist; first as its deputy American editor, then as its South-east Asia correspondent, stationed 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 stationed in Brussels where he penned the Charlemagne European-affairs column. In his last position at The Economist, he was editor of the business section.[2]
At The Financial Times, Rachman writes on international politics, with a particular stress on American foreign policy, the European Union and globalisation. He was named foreign commentator of the year in Britain's annual Comment Awards in 2010.
He has in the past also written articles as a freelancer for Prospect Magazine and was a contributing editor to The Washington Quarterly from 1996-2006. He also made regular appearances on TV and radio and has been a speaker at the Council on Foreign Relations, the London School of Economics and the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Gideon Rachman maintains a blog on the FT.com site.
In December 2008, Rachman published a controversial blog post on the Financial Times online entitled, "And now for a world government"[3] which radio show host Alex Jones among others have cited as proof of an elitist plot to establish global governance. [4]
His brother is Tom Rachman, the author of the novel The Imperfectionists.
In 2010, Rachman published his first book, "Zero-Sum World" in the UK. It was published under the title Zero-Sum Future in the US and translated into seven languages, including Chinese, German and Korean. The book was part history and part prediction. It argued that the thirty years from 1978-2008 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. He stressed rising tensions between the US and China, and political disarray inside the European Union. The New York Times praised the book as "perhaps the best one-volume account now available of the huge post-Communist spread of personal freedom and economic prosperity."[5]