The Rachman Review

By Financial Times

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What's The Rachman Review about?

Gideon Rachman, the Financial Times chief foreign affairs columnist talks to the decision-makers and thinkers who are shaping world affairs.

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America’s political meltdown

01.14.2021

After the storming of the Capitol, can America recover its democratic values? Gideon discusses what the recent lawlessness means for the US and its place in the world with Anne-Marie Slaughter, head of New America, a think-tank. See acast.com/privacy for ...

The Rachman Review episodes:

01.14.2021 America’s political meltdown After the storming of the Capitol, can America recover its democratic values? Gideon discusses what the recent lawlessness means for the US and its place in the world with Anne-Marie Slaughter, head of New America, a think-tank. See acast.com/privacy for ...
01.07.2021 David Miliband on the global leadership vacuum The former British foreign secretary championed the UK to remain in the EU. As head of the International Rescue Committee, David Miliband has seen the consequence of a lack of global leadership in helping the world’s vulnerable populations. In this ...
12.17.2020 The best and worst of 2020 Gideon talks to Roula Khalaf, FT editor, and Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator, about the extraordinary events of 2020 - from Covid-19 to the US election and unexpected signs of reconciliation between Israel and Arab Gulf states. See acast.com/privacy for ...
12.10.2020 EU at a turning point EU leaders are facing showdowns on several fronts this week, with the UK over Brexit, and with Hungary and Poland over the rule of law. Gideon discusses what’s at stake with Professor Catherine De Vries of Bocconi University in Italy. ...
12.03.2020 Thai students call for change Gideon talks to Thai opposition leader Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit and John Reed, the FT’s Bangkok bureau chief, about the student protests that have challenged Thailand’s traditional power structures by demanding constitutional change. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
11.26.2020 Ethiopia’s struggle with ethnic nationalism A country that enjoyed decades of economc growth and stability now risks being torn apart by ethnic divisions. Gideon discusses what’s behind the outbreak of violence with Gabriel Negatu, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council in Washington, and David ...
11.19.2020 Macron's world Gideon discusses the international ambitions, and problems, of the French president with Sylvie Kauffmann, editorial director of Le Monde. Are Emmanuel Macron’s views on European integration and strategic independence winning out? Clips: Reuters See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
11.12.2020 Biden’s global goals Ivo Daalder, president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, served as US ambassador to Nato during the Obama years. He joins Gideon Rachman to talk about how Joe Biden may seek to rebuild the US’s broken alliances and project ...
11.04.2020 An American chasm Americans woke on November 4 to find that the result of their presidential election remained unclear. President Donald Trump’s statements about the integrity of the vote and his plan to dispute the final result at the Supreme Court signalled that ...
10.29.2020 Susan Glasser on the pandemic election The columnist has written about life in Trump’s Washington for The New Yorker magazine for almost four years. As voters head to the polls to elect the next US president, Gideon Rachman talks to Glasser about what to expect on ...
10.22.2020 Bringing history back to Burma Western nations have tended to regard the recent history of Myanmar, formerly Burma, as a struggle between democracy and dictatorship. But the country’s colonial past and climate change have also played a key role in its complex problems, Burmese historian ...
10.15.2020 Why humans wage wars Gideon Rachman talks to historian Margaret MacMillan about her study of warfare through the ages and why she fears that, while the manner in which we wage war has changed, our propensity to stumble into conflict remains the same. Clips: ...
10.08.2020 American entanglement in the Middle East Philip Gordon, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, is a long-time Washington insider who worked on Middle East policy for the Obama administration and is now an informal adviser to the Biden campaign. In this episode, Gideon ...
10.01.2020 China’s second world war obsession China’s authorities have started to celebrate the country’s role in the second world war after long regarding it as a subject best forgotten. Gideon talks to the historian Rana Mitter about what’s behind this revised outlook on such a tormented ...
09.24.2020 Mexico's populist president When Andrés Manuel López Obrador, also known as Amlo, took office in late 2018 he promised a fourth political transformation of the country. Gideon Rachman talks to Jude Webber, the FT’s Mexico and Central America correspondent, about how Amlo’s plans ...
09.17.2020 German diplomacy tested by multiple crises From the poisoning of Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny and pressure to cancel the Nord Stream 2 pipeline from Russia, to the refugee catastrophe in Greece and headaches over Brexit, Germany has no shortage of foreign policy crises to deal ...
09.10.2020 Netanyahu's diplomatic success Israel’s new deal to normalise diplomatic relations with the United Arab Emirates comes without any concessions on the Palestinian peace process. Gideon Rachman talks to Anshel Pfeffer, author of Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu, about whether ...
09.03.2020 Putting existential risk on the agenda What are the biggest threats to the future of human existence on the planet? Not nuclear war or climate change as some might think, but man-made pathogens and thinking machines, the Australian philosopher Toby Ord tells Gideon Rachman. He talks ...
08.27.2020 Investigating ‘the doubts’ about the US presidential election Rumours about the US presidential election abound: is voting by mail secure, can Donald Trump postpone it, will the United States Postal Service be able to deliver ballots in time. Gideon Rachman sorts through what is fact and what is ...
08.20.2020 What China makes of ‘new cold war’ with US Gideon Rachman discusses how America’s tech war on China has affected Beijing’s long-held plan to assert its economic and military strength on the global stage with Steve Tsang, director of the China Institute of SOAS at London University. See acast.com/privacy ...
08.13.2020 The future of Lebanon The Lebanese have survived civil war, decades of rolling blackouts and even managed the influx of 1.5m Syrian refugees, about a quarter of the country's population. But the explosion in Beirut's port in early August that killed scores of people, ...
08.06.2020 Turkey’s assertive foreign policy Gideon Rachman talks to academic and writer Sinan Ulgen about Turkey’s foreign policy under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, focusing on the controversial decision to turn Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia museum back into a mosque and the rationale behind Turkish military interventions ...
07.30.2020 US economist William Spriggs on scars of the pandemic Many countries agreed that the best way to stem the pandemic was to shut down movement, but the US took a different path than its peers in handling the economic fallout. Instead of being kept on payrolls through furlough schemes, ...
07.24.2020 Is US global leadership still possible? Donald Trump’s “America First” policy represented a marked shift in how the US engaged with its allies. Now Democratic presidential contender Joe Biden is focusing his campaign in part on restoring US leadership on the world stage through strategic alliances. ...
07.16.2020 Fabulists and the limits of deception Gideon Rachman talks to FT journalist Michael Peel about the use of false and misleading narratives by world leaders in democracies and dictatorships alike, and how the pandemic may have exposed the limits of doing politics "according to the world ...
07.09.2020 Putin: a president trapped in power Now in power until 2036 after a recent constitutional change, Vladimir Putin is nevertheless facing a difficult future as the Russian economy stagnates and popular unrest grows. Gideon Rachman and Catherine Belton, author and former FT journalist, discuss how the ...
07.02.2020 Black Lives Matter goes international In recent weeks people across the world have joined Black Lives Matter protests in response to the police killing of George Floyd in the US. Some activists are uniting under country-specific banners calling for racial equality. Gideon Rachman hosts a ...
06.25.2020 Brazil: a country without a plan Brazil this week became the second country after the US to register more than 50,000 deaths from Covid-19. President Bolsonaro’s mis-handling of the pandemic has led to calls for his impeachment and even fears of a military coup. Gideon Rachman ...
06.18.2020 India’s twin crises: coronavirus and China India is facing two crises: coronavirus and China. Despite one of the toughest lockdowns in the world, the country has not been able to bring the pandemic under control. Hospitals in New Delhi are overwhelmed. Now a long-standing border dispute ...
06.11.2020 Is global oil dominance coming to an end? Will the current pandemic hasten the end of the oil era, and if so what impact will this have on the global economy and geopolitics? Gideon Rachman discusses the future of energy with former BP chief executive Lord Browne and ...
06.04.2020 George Floyd and the politics of protest The killing of George Floyd by Minnesota police officers sparked protests in cities across the United States and a government crackdown after nights of unrest. Gideon Rachman talks to Omar Wasow, a professor at Princeton University, about how narratives about ...
05.28.2020 A new diplomacy in the Pacific Rim Australia is in the crosshairs of China’s ‘wolf warrior’ diplomacy after Prime Minister Scott Morrison called for an inquiry into the origins of the coronavirus outbreak. Gideon Rachman talks to Michael Fullilove, director of the Lowy Institute, about what the ...
05.21.2020 Merkel’s pandemic moment A German court’s challenge to the supremacy of EU law has brought Chancellor Angela Merkel back into the limelight after she had been regarded as a spent force. Gideon Rachman talks to Constanze Stelzenmüller of the Brookings Institution about Angela ...
05.14.2020 China comes out of lockdown China was once the epicentre of the coronavirus outbreak, but now the country is coming out of lockdown. Gideon Rachman talks to FT correspondents Yuan Yang and James Kynge about how quickly China can find a new normal. See acast.com/privacy ...
05.07.2020 Joseph Nye on presidential morality during the pandemic Gideon Rachman talks to American political scientist Joseph Nye about how the moral stances adopted by past US presidents boosted the country's soft power and why Donald Trump is squandering this legacy. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
04.30.2020 Coronavirus in Africa Gideon Rachman discusses how African countries are coping with the pandemic with Donald Kaberuka, a Rwandan economist and former president of the African Development Bank, who has been appointed by the African Union to be one of its four special ...
04.23.2020 Politics and perils of running the WHO Gro Harlem Brundtland, former WHO chief, talks to Gideon Rachman about how she handled the SARS pandemic, why the world was not prepared for coronavirus and the lessons we need to learn to avert another disaster. See acast.com/privacy for privacy ...
04.16.2020 Francis Fukuyama on coronavirus and the crisis of trust Gideon Rachman talks to writer Francis Fukuyama about the way different political systems have responded to the pandemic and about the crisis of trust that has undermined some countries’ efforts to tackle the disease. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out ...
04.08.2020 Coronavirus and curbs on democratic freedoms Gideon Rachman talks to journalist and historian Anne Applebaum about the threat to democracy as authoritarian leaders like Viktor Orban in Hungary exploit public willingness to have freedoms curtailed during the coronavirus crisis. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
04.01.2020 New York hit by double shock Gideon Rachman talks to the FT's Gillian Tett about New Yorkers' battle to contain the coronavirus pandemic and the shock to the US financial system that the virus has carried in its wake. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
03.25.2020 Life in Europe's coronavirus hotspots Foreign affairs columnist Gideon Rachman discusses how the coronavirus epidemic has been handled in Italy and Spain with the local FT correspondents, Miles Johnson in Rome and Daniel Dombey in Madrid. How are citizens reacting to the lockdown and what ...
03.18.2020 Pandemics in the age of hyperconnectivity In this week's Rachman Review, Gideon Rachman speaks to Ian Goldin of Oxford University - an economist who has long warned of the dangers of pandemics. Professor Goldin explains his theory of "the butterfly defect" in globalisation - in which ...
03.11.2020 How Saudi Arabia and Iran's rivalry is unravelling the Middle East Why has the Middle East been in turmoil for decades? Author Kim Ghattas argues that the contest for supremacy between the Saudis and the Iranians is key to understanding the region's troubles. In conversation with Gideon Rachman, she explains why ...
03.04.2020 Human rights under threat from politics Gideon Rachman talks to Andrew Gilmour, former UN assistant secretary-general for human rights about the increase in human rights violations over the past ten years and the UN ambassadors and countries politicising their human rights work. You can read Andrew ...
02.26.2020 How is Modi's ideology shaping Indian society? The ideology shaping India today is markedly different from the time of its first post-independence prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. Narendra Modi and his Bharitaya Janata Party, the BJP, are leading with a Hindu nationalist philosophy, which is sparking protests across ...
02.19.2020 Is there a Democrat that can beat Trump? With the Democratic primaries underway and Super Tuesday on the horizon this week's episode takes a look at the US presidential election. Is there a Democratic frontrunner? Can we predict how the public will vote? How likely is it that ...
02.12.2020 Bolsonaro’s isolationism and deference to Trump Celso Amorim, who served as foreign minister under former Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, talks to Gideon Rachman about Jair Bolsonaro’s rise to power, his subordination to the US and whether he’ll have a lasting impact on the ...
02.05.2020 The global politics of climate change Gideon Rachman talks to historian Adam Tooze about his forthcoming book on the origins of the climate crisis and the prospects for international agreement to curb emissions and avert disaster. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
01.29.2020 'Let's just get out of there' is not a strategy General John Allen, head of the Brookings Institution and former Nato forces commander, talks to Gideon Rachman about the importance of clear objectives and staying power in the Middle East and Afghanistan. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
01.22.2020 Taiwan treads fine line between democracy and China In the wake of Tsai Ing-Wen’s re-election as President of Taiwan, Gideon Rachman discusses the Asian island's future ties with China and the rest of the world with Shelley Rigger, a professor at Davidson College in the US and Taiwan ...

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