The definitive guide to trade wars just dropped. Its authors have one message for Washington: Study your enemy

Soumaya Keynes and Chad Bown have spent nearly a decade talking about trade. They started as podcast partners—nights and weekends, no advertising, holding down day jobs at the Financial Times and the Peterson Institute for International Economics, respectively—because their employers were fine with this particular side hustle.

Their origin story is, by Keynes’s own telling, a little absurd. When she was at The Economist and trying to launch an economics podcast, she auditioned several co-hosts, including Bown. They were pleased with their wonky pilot, but a colleague confided: “By the end of it, I lost the will to live.” Keynes knew she had a match. “I was like, ‘Cool, he’s the guy I want to do my podcast with.'”

Their schedule was naturally interrupted when Keynes gave birth last year and decided she needed a new project, so calling Bown was the obvious move. The result is How to Win a Trade War, their first book together. It published this spring—right as President Donald Trump boarded Air Force One for Beijing to meet President Xi Jinping—and it may be the most useful thing you can read to understand what just happened, and what comes next. As Fortune caught up with Keynes and Bown, they were backstage in New York, beaming at their forthcoming appearance with Jon Stewart on The Daily Show.

At a moment when the White House is improvising trade strategy in real time, Keynes and Bown offer something rarer: a historical framework for what actually works—and a bracing argument that America is still getting it wrong.

At a moment when the White House is improvising trade strategy in real time, Keynes and Bown offer something rarer: a historical framework for what actually works—and a bracing argument that America is still getting it wrong.

The Trump-Xi summit formed a natural news peg, Keynes said, but so did April 2, the one-year anniversary of Trump’s tariffs liberation day, and Keynes expects many more to come.

“This whole summer is going to be real busy with trade stuff, because basically, the Trump administration is going to be rebuilding its tariff wall, we’re going to have all the results of the investigations,” she said, referring to the investigations needed to erect new tariffs after the Supreme Court struck down many of Trump’s as unconstitutional. But the main thing, she and Bown said, as they recently argued in The New York Times, is the Beijing summit left the core economic conflict unresolved.

Beneath the headline diplomacy of Beijing summits and tariff truces, Keynes and Bown contend, the U.S.-China economic rivalry has moved into terrain that America is not well-equipped to navigate—and Washington needs to study its rival more carefully than it has been willing to admit.

“There’s still a lot of learning that we have to do,” Keynes said. “We don’t live in a perfect world.”

A big part of their book, she explained, is that countries have to use some “imperfect tools” to look after their interests, and try and manage the consequences as best they can.

America’s industrial policy problem

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