Geopolitical Analyst & Author

James Crabtree is a geopolitical analyst and author, with extensive experience living and working in Asia. He is currently a distinguished visiting fellow in the Asia programme of the European Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin, a non-resident distinguished fellow at the Asia Society in New York, and a columnist for Foreign Policy magazine. His first book “The Billionaire Raj: A Journey Through India’s New Gilded Age”, was short-listed as FT / McKinsey business book of the year and named an Amazon book of the year. He is currently writing his second book — The Perimeter: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Supremacy in the Pacific — examining the future of America’s military presence in Asia, due to be published in 2026 by W. W. Norton & Company.  

Previously, he was the Singapore-based Executive Director of the Institute of International Strategic Studies in Asia, where he led the organisation of the Shangri-La Dialogue security summit, and an Associate Professor in Practice at the Lee Kuan Yew School, Asia’s leading school of public policy. Prior to that James spent ten years as a journalist and foreign correspondent, notably for the Financial Times, where he was both Mumbai Bureau Chief and Comment Editor. He writes for a range of global publications from the FT to The New York Times. Before moving abroad he worked as a senior advisor in the UK Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, under Prime Ministers Gordon Brown and Tony Blair. He has also worked for various think tanks in London and Washington DC, and spent a number of years living in America, initially as a Fulbright Scholar at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.