Gideon Rachman

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 and "superb" by the Daily Telegraph. Yale 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."

Gideon Rachman maintains a blog on the FT site. His brother is Tom Rachman, the author of the novel The Imperfectionists. Their sister, Emily, died of breast cancer in 2012.

Rachman's first book, Zero-Sum World was published in 2010 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. 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."

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. The Observer has also listed him as one of Britain's 300 leading intellectuals. He has been a visiting fellow at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University (1988–89) and at the Nobel Institute in Oslo (2013).

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." 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. 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.

He spent 15 years at The Economist; 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.

He was born 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. 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.

He began his career with the BBC World Service in 1984. From 1988 to 1990, he was a reporter for The Sunday Correspondent, based in Washington DC.

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. In the same year, he was awarded with the Commentator Award at the European Press Prize awards.