Ezra's Bookshelf

How to Win a Trade War

by Soumaya Keynes and Chad Bown · 288 pages · ~5 hrs

EconomicsForeign PolicyPolitics & Government

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A clear-eyed and often funny guide to the return of economic conflict, written by two people who have spent their careers inside the machinery of trade policy. Soumaya Keynes, an economics columnist for the Financial Times, and Chad P. Bown of the Peterson Institute begin from the observation that the rules-based trading order most people took for granted has effectively been abandoned, and that nostalgia for it is not a strategy. Rather than mourning, they ask what a country should actually do when tariffs, export controls, and supply chain chokepoints have become standard instruments of statecraft. The book works through the real cases: Trump's tariff rounds and what they did and did not accomplish, China's leverage over rare earth processing, the semiconductor controls meant to slow Beijing's access to advanced chips, and the ways retaliation tends to land on politically chosen targets rather than economically rational ones. Keynes and Bown are careful about the difference between trade actions that serve national security and those that merely wear its language, and they are candid about how often protection benefits a concentrated industry at diffuse public expense. Their tone is conversational and skeptical rather than doctrinaire, and they resist the twin temptations of free-trade absolutism and reflexive economic nationalism. The result is a practical framework for evaluating what any given trade fight is actually for, and whether the country waging it has any plausible path to winning.

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