David Rennie

David Rennie is the Geopolitics Editor and columnist of The Economist, the world’s most influential news magazine of business and politics. With 27 years of experience as a foreign correspondent and a six-year posting as the Beijing Bureau Chief and Chaguan columnist, Rennie is more than a seasoned journalist—he is a well-regarded, go-to expert on international politics. Rennie’s insights are so trusted that he has now been asked to write five different weekly columns for The Economist, two of them launches of new columns.

Rennie’s geopolitics beat pulls together his rich experience and high-level contacts in China, the United States, the European Union, and Britain. His mandate is to explain the forces shaping an increasingly complex and fragmented world, to spot patterns, and make connections that shed light on the fast-changing global order. He is uniquely placed to identify the political risks confronting investors and companies, and to predict how globalization and international governance will evolve in coming years. He offers a top insider’s perspective on the biggest global trends of the moment.

As trade and security tensions mount between the West and giants like China, Rennie brings to bear decades of reporting from four continents, from the Oval Office to the trenches of Afghanistan. As Washington bureau chief he profiled presidential candidates and political leaders at the national, state and local level, including interviewing Donald Trump multiple times. He spent many months on the road, taking the view that American politics cannot be understood from an office inside the Beltway. He has traveled with U.S. cabinet secretaries on official trips around the globe to a dozen countries. Rennie’s access to decision-makers and his near-constant world travel have given him a front-row seat as populist forces have upended governments and elites across the West. Few other commentators are as qualified to explore and explain the links between events like Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, the rise of China and what may come next.

Rennie became a full-time journalist after college, working for the London Evening Standard from 1992 to 1996. He joined the London Daily Telegraph in 1996, moving to the foreign department in 1998 with postings in Sydney, Australia, Beijing, Washington, D.C., and Brussels. From 2006 until he joined The Economist, he was also a contributing editor of the Spectator magazine. As a foreign correspondent David Rennie has reported from more than 50 countries. He has covered riots, earthquakes and, in 2001, the U.S.-led war against the Taliban in Afghanistan, where he embedded with Northern Alliance fighters. Rennie joined The Economist in 2007, writing its European column from Brussels. His early warnings that the E.U. also faced a crisis of democratic legitimacy earned him invitations to lecture at Harvard and Boston University in 2009 and the 2010 UACES/Thomson Reuters “Reporting Europe” award. From 2010 to 2012 Rennie wrote the magazine’s column on Britain, based in London. As British political editor he travelled the world with the then prime minister David Cameron.

David Rennie is also an author, media presence, and award-winning journalist. In 2012, Rennie wrote a short book on Britain’s strained relations with Europe for the Centre for European Reform, predicting—four years ahead of the Brexit vote—that “British membership of the E.U. can no longer be taken for granted—especially if the euro-sceptics are accorded their wish of a referendum on membership.” Rennie is a frequent guest on radio and television, helping to contextualize complex global issues for broad audiences. He is a contributing panelist on NPR’s daily news talk show 1A and often appears on other US public radio programs like Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and The World. His media presence extends to TV outlets like CNN, BBC, PBS Newshour, Charlie Rose, and CBS’s Face the Nation. Additionally, Rennie is the co-host of The Economist’s award-winning Drum Tower podcast, launched in late 2022, alongside Alice Su. In 2023, the Asia Society awarded the Osborn Elliott Prize for Excellence in Journalism on Asia to David Rennie and Sue-Lin Wong for their coverage of China.

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