Free Trade

How To Win a Trade War? Lose Less Than Your Opponents.

The only winning move is not to play. But if you must, a new book offers some suggestions.

Eric Boehm | 6.1.2026 12:00 PM

Share on FacebookShare on XShare on RedditShare by emailPrint friendly versionCopy page URL Add Reason to Google

Media Contact & Reprint Requests

(Photo: Simon & Schuster)

How To Win a Trade War: An Optimistic Guide to an Anxious Global Economy, by Soumaya Keynes and Chad Bown, Simon & Schuster, 288 pages, $30

The ancient Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu advised that "he who wishes to fight must first count the cost." Joshua, the brilliant (for its time) computer in the 1983 film WarGames, did the counting and concluded that "the only winning move is not to play."

Both lines find their way into How To Win a Trade War. This is no arid academic analysis, and it does not read like one. Instead, Soumaya Keynes, a journalist at the Financial Times, and Chad Bown, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, have crafted a witty, fast-paced analysis of how the global trading system has unraveled in the aftermath of COVID, Brexit, and (most importantly) President Donald Trump's electoral successes.

The book's greatest strength is its accessibility. Trade policy can be difficult to explain and boring to read. How To Win a Trade War is neither difficult nor boring, as Keynes and Bown use a plethora of analogies both to guide the reader and to insert their perspective. Trade is like dancing, trade deficits are like video game consoles, and tariffs are like marijuana. OK, libertarians might object to that last one, but their point is that even when tariffs feel good, they inevitably obscure reality, cost money, and make you (or your economy, at least) more lethargic.

Or take the populist obsession with the idea that global trade has hollowed out America's economy. "When a country has an unemployment rate of only 4 percent," as the U.S. does, complaining that trade is responsible for a........

© Reason.com