Gideon Rachman's 'War Is Interested in You': A Bleak Map of a Dangerous World

Gideon Rachman, the Financial Times foreign affairs columnist, has published a new survey of global diplomacy titled War Is Interested in You, and its central question is stark: are we on the brink of a new world war?

The review, published by the Guardian on 26 October, calls the book a foreign affairs expert's bleak assessment of the state of global security. That framing is earned. War talk is no longer fringe material — it is increasingly invoked by leaders, soldiers and officials, from Donald Trump to Vladimir Putin to the heads of military and intelligence services.

Where does the title come from?

Rachman borrows his title from an expression sometimes attributed to Trotsky: "You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you." The idea is simple and grim. Conflict doesn't much care whether we like to think about it. It will come knocking on our doors regardless.

It's a fitting epigraph for a book whose argument is that avoidance is not a strategy. The title line does the work a hundred policy papers can't.

What does the book actually catalogue?

Humanity, the review concedes, is in a particularly unsafe spot right now. But seeing the security issues laid out — catalogued, mapped and analysed — makes them seem almost overwhelming. The reviewer's summary runs like this:

• The most powerful nuclear-armed states — the US, China and Russia — are led by unscrupulous, self-dealing "strongmen".
• Each of those leaders plays with the nationalist "Great Again" politics epitomised by Trump.
• Democracy is being rolled back around the world.
• Even bastions of liberalism such as the UK, France and Germany seem vulnerable to takeover by the Putin-friendly far right.
• The so-called rules-based international order (the network of institutions meant to constrain state power through law) and its institutions — the UN, the WTO, Nato — are being deliberately undermined by those same strongmen.

The reviewer's verdict on that order: it is as weak now as it has ever been.

That's quite a ledger. Three nuclear powers, three transactional leaders, one eroding institutional buffer — and a far right waiting in the wings in Europe's core democracies.

Is it as bad as it reads?

The review doesn't dispute the urgency. It flags the theme as an urgent one for Rachman to explore, and it treats the book's catalogue as accurate rather than alarmist. Its reservation is about effect, not evidence. The problem with the book, as the reviewer presents it, is one of scale: the case is so comprehensive that it threatens to overwhelm the reader rather than mobilise them.

Still, comprehensiveness is arguably the point. A book that aims to map the whole terrain of contemporary insecurity can't be blamed for the terrain looking bleak.

Why does this book matter now?

Because the question in its subtitle — how close is world war three? — is being asked by exactly the people who would know. When the heads of military and intelligence services, not just columnists, invoke the possibility of a new world war, the debate has shifted from hypothetical to operational.

Rachman's contribution is to gather that diffuse anxiety into a single, ordered account of how the world's security architecture got this brittle — from strongman politics in Washington, Beijing and Moscow to the hollowing of the UN, the WTO and Nato. Readers who finish it may not feel reassured. They will, at least, feel briefed.

Whether briefing counts as preparedness is the question Trotsky's old line leaves hanging.