Gideon Rachman has spent decades watching the international order from the Financial Times's foreign affairs desk, and War Is Interested in You reads like a man finally running out of patience for diplomatic hedging. The title, drawn from an aphorism half-attributed to Trotsky, sets the tone: this is not a book for people who think geopolitics is something that happens to other countries. It is an argument that the walls are closing in, and that most Western publics are dangerously uninterested in noticing. The structural diagnosis is clear-eyed. The postwar rules-based order — UN, WTO, NATO, the whole scaffolding — was always weaker than advertised, but it provided a framework in which victims of aggression could plausibly appeal to something beyond raw power. Rachman traces the demolition of that framework through three inflection points: the 2003 Iraq invasion, Obama's three non-interventions between 2012 and 2015 (on Assad, Russia, and China), and now Trump's explicit reversion to sphere-of-influence politics. Each step signalled retreat; each retreat licensed the next provocation. The numbers are stark. Sixty-one conflicts in 2024 alone. Eleven full-blown wars. Sudan's battlefield deaths at 150,000 by mid-2025. Ukraine: the largest land war in Europe since 1945. Iran's disruptions to global shipping. These aren't background noise — they're the signal. And they are beginning to bleed into one another: Russia deploying North Korean troops, Ukraine advising Gulf states on drone use, China watching every Western hesitation over Taiwan like a student noting which exam questions the teacher keeps skipping. Taiwan is the book's sharpest chapter. The arithmetic is bracing: China now fields more warships than the US, and a single Chinese shipyard on Changxing Island reportedly outstrips all American yards combined. For decades, Taiwanese security rested on US naval superiority. That assumption is now empirically false. Trump's May 2025 comment — that a war 9,500 miles away is 'the last thing we need' — did not go unheard in Beijing. Rachman doesn't predict an invasion, but he maps the incentive structure clearly enough that the reader can do the math. The book's honest failure is also its most instructive moment: the chapter surveying mechanisms for peace. The rules-based order is too weak. The Golden Arches theory — no two countries with McDonald's will go to war — was falsified in the 1990s. Democracy promotion has been in reverse since 2006. Deterrence mostly holds but hasn't stopped India-Pakistan skirmishes and won't constrain a China that is actively expanding its nuclear arsenal. Rachman surveys each mechanism with the same conclusion: wanting. What remains is a Donroe doctrine of competing spheres — Washington over the Americas, Beijing over East Asia, Moscow over the former Soviet zone — with authoritarian leaders sorting disputes by phone. It is not a comforting picture, and Rachman does not try to make it one. The writing is Rachman at his most accessible: anecdotal where it needs to be, compressed where it can be. His FT columns have always moved fast, and the book does too — which is both a strength and a mild frustration. The geopolitical architecture gets room; the human cost is catalogued more than inhabited. Sudan's 150,000 dead is a data point; the book does not linger. That is a deliberate editorial choice, not an oversight, but readers hoping for the texture of what this disorder actually feels like from inside it may want to pair this with reportage from those regions. The 1930s comparison is not made cheaply. Rachman notes that 'America First' was popularised in that decade, and the echoes — democratic backsliding, strongman nationalism, undermined institutions, appeasement rationalized as pragmatism — are drawn with care rather than outrage. He is not predicting World War Three. He is describing the conditions under which one becomes plausible, which is the more useful and more honest contribution.
