Gideon Rachman

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.

He started his career with the BBC World Service in 1984. From 1988 to 1990, 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.

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

Gideon Rachman maintains a blog on the FT.com site.

Views

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 later to become Britain's Deputy Prime Minister. Clegg argued strongly that Britain should join the European single currency. Rachman disagreed, writing that - "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.