War Is Interested In You: The Threat of World War Three with Gideon Rachman

Gideon Rachman will be at the Royal Geographical Society on Wednesday 28 October, talking about the threat of World War Three. It's a night organised by Intelligence Squared, and Rachman won't be on his own — he'll be joined by Stephen Sackur, the former BBC foreign correspondent who presented HARDtalk for 19 years until 2025. The talk runs from 7:00 to 8:30 pm, and it closes with a Q&A where you can put your questions directly to him.

Rachman is the Financial Times' chief foreign affairs commentator and one of the most authoritative voices in global affairs. He joined the FT in 2006 after 15 years at The Economist, where he worked as a correspondent in Washington D.C., Brussels and Bangkok and won the 2016 Orwell Prize. He's written several books — Zero Sum World, Easternization, The Age of Strongmen and War Is Interested In You — and it's the themes of that last one he'll be drawing on here. He'll be setting out how the world arrived at this moment, why he believes what happens in Taiwan will determine the future of geopolitics, and what else may be coming next.

So, the evening is built around that specific line of thinking: the road to where we are now, the central role of Taiwan, and the outlook beyond that. It's a conversation with Sackur rather than a lecture, and the Q&A at the end means you get to weigh in yourself. The Royal Geographical Society is at 1 Kensington Gore, Kensington, London SW7 2AR, and tickets go from £20 to £68.