Learning to Lose Less: A Review of How to Win a Trade War: An Optimistic Guide to an Anxious Global Economy

Bown, Chad P., and Soumaya Keynes. How to Win a Trade War: An Optimistic Guide to an Anxious Global Economy. Simon & Schuster, 2026. 288 pp. ISBN 978-1-6682-2131-0.

Chad Bown and Soumaya Keynes titled their 2026 book How to Win a Trade War with deliberate, deadpan irony. The phrase sounds triumphalist, even jingoistic, yet the volume that follows is, in the words of the Wall Street Journal‘s Theodore Bunzel, “user-friendly, well-researched, and engaging,” and—crucially—not a victory manual (Bunzel). The book lands at a moment when the postwar liberal trade order, the rules-based system Bown elsewhere calls the regime of “market access and reciprocal exchange,” is being deliberately dismantled, mostly from within (Bown, “Steel, Aluminum”). Its central, almost paradoxical argument is that in a world where the referee has walked off the pitch, the responsible move is to learn how to play the game better, not to pretend the match has been cancelled.

This review situates the book in the careers of its two authors, summarizes its argumentative arc, and assesses its contribution to the rapidly expanding 2025–26 literature on what the Financial Times has labeled the “anxious global economy.”

The partnership behind the book has nearly a decade of history. Chad P. Bown is the Reginald Jones Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE) and served as Chief Economist of the U.S. Department of State in the Biden administration from January 2024 to January 2025 (“Chad P. Bown”). Earlier in his career he was a senior economist on President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, a lead economist at the World Bank, and a tenured professor of economics at Brandeis University; he has published extensively on the political economy of trade policy, industrial policy, and supply chains (“Chad P. Bown”; Bown, Curriculum Vita).

Soumaya Keynes is an economics columnist at the Financial Times and host of The Economics Show with Soumaya Keynes (“About the FT: Soumaya Keynes”). Previously she spent eight years at The Economist, latterly as Britain economics editor, and won a comment award from the Society for American Business Editors and Writers (Keynes, IFS). She is, as one interviewer noted, also a great-great-niece of John Maynard Keynes, the architect of the 1944 Bretton Woods system whose vision of penalties for both surplus and deficit countries, she argues, has direct relevance to the imbalances of the 2020s (Keynes, Keen On America; Mercatus Center).

Bown and Keynes co-founded Trade Talks in 2017, the podcast that made them, in Tim Harford’s 2018 phrase, “a nerdy (but witty) dive into the details of how trade negotiations and agreements work” (qtd. in Keynes, LinkedIn). That chemistry carries over into the book. As Bown put it at the PIIE launch in May 2026, “you, the reader, really want to fight a trade war and you come to us, the two reluctant trade nerds to ask how” (Bown and Keynes, “Book Launch”). The conceit, he said, is a how-to guide for readers who already know that the polite multilateral option has been taken off the table.

The book opens with a striking pivot. Bown had previously told audiences that the only winning move in a trade war is not to play—a line borrowed, as Reason‘s Brian Doherty notes, from the 1983 film WarGames (Doherty). How to Win a Trade War accepts the premise of the old line but rejects its conclusion: as the world of 2026 makes clear, the game is being played, with or without the United States, and refusing to engage simply means absorbing the costs. In Keynes’s words from the Marketplace interview, “We can’t wish that we were in that perfect world. We’ve got to be pragmatic, and maybe the best we can do is manage the fallout” (“If Trade Wars Are the New Normal”).

The authors therefore redefine “winning.” It does not mean vindication, a favorable balance-of-payments outcome, or a triumphant return to 1998. It means, as Bown told the LSE audience, “doing the best you can … minimizing your losses” while taking “active policies to help you do so” (Bown, “LSE Book Launch”). The book’s central methodological claim is that trade wars, properly understood, are not solely about tariffs. As Keynes puts it: “Trade wars involve parties weaponizing trade flows, using trade to coerce other actors, make others do what they want” (“If Trade Wars Are the New Normal”). From that broader definition flows the rest of the book, a guided tour of the supply chains, subsidies, stockpiles, and export controls that constitute twenty-first-century economic warfare.

A central conceptual move is the disaggregation of “the trade war” into three distinct conflicts, each requiring a different response.

The first is the Trump-led tariff conflict of 2025–26, a sprawling, sometimes chaotic dispute that has seen duties imposed on allies and adversaries alike. The authors are unenthusiastic about its design, but they are firm that this is not the conflict that will define the next decade. As Bown explained in the EconoFact EF Chats interview, “the Trump specific bits of trade policy…this kind of chaos, the uncertainty around that, that is much, much more likely to be temporary than these underlying structural difficulties with China” (Bown and Keynes, “EF Chats”).

The second and, in the authors’ view, more fundamental conflict is the slow-burn economic confrontation with China. Beijing’s 2015 Made in China 2025 industrial strategy, its extensive system of subsidies to state-linked firms, and the “dual circulation” doctrine articulated by Xi Jinping in 2020, under which China would be insulated from dependence on the world while making the world dependent on China, are, the authors argue, the structural drivers of global trade friction (Bown and Keynes, “EF Chats”; Bown, “C-SPAN2”). As Bown told the PIIE launch audience: “China is fundamentally different. It’s a non-market economy, lots of subsidies, industrial policy” (Bown, “C-SPAN2”). For the United States and the EU, the question is how to compete with a system that, in the IMF’s summary of the book, “broke many of the price signals that should regulate markets” (Van Heuvelen 36).

A third dimension, the authors note, is the proliferation of export restrictions as a tool of coercion. China’s 2025 restrictions on rare earths and permanent magnets—minerals essential to automobiles, wind turbines, and defense systems—are the most cited example, but the United States has been a pioneer too, in the form of the export controls on advanced semiconductors that now sit at the heart of the AI race (Bown and Keynes, “Daily Show”; Bown, “C-SPAN2”). For both sides, as the authors observe, “you’ve got these various instances of dominance…where actors have huge market power and they’re abusing that market power” (Bown, “LSE Book Launch”).

In keeping with the military metaphor that runs through the title, the book’s middle chapters lay out a “defensive” toolkit to be deployed before any tariff is set.

Subsidies receive extended treatment. Aiming to escape the stale pro- and anti-protectionism debate, the authors treat subsidies as a normal instrument of industrial policy whose success depends on calibration, much like baking a cake. “Mastering subsidies is like baking a cake,” the authors write, cautioning policymakers not to “over-cater” and warning that spillovers can “leave bystanders worse off” (qtd. in Van Heuvelen 37). The chapter leans heavily on China’s record in electric vehicles and batteries, where, as the Fortune profile notes, Beijing did not simply fund R&D; it “also created the domestic demand to absorb what it built through local content requirements and state-directed purchasing” (Bremner). The U.S. CHIPS Act, by contrast, subsidized capacity without guaranteeing offtake, a mirror-image mistake that the book documents in detail.

Stockpiling receives a more skeptical treatment, illustrated, as reviewers have gleefully noted, by an extended excursion into the Reddit subculture of “doomsday preppers” (Doherty; Van Heuvelen 36). The prepper analogy, the authors argue, exposes two questions that stockpiling must answer but rarely does: how to identify a real crisis, and when to draw down reserves. The lesson is that strategic reserves are a useful but blunt instrument, best deployed at the margin rather than as a substitute for diversified supply.

Vulnerability mapping is the third leg. Drawing on the work that Bown has done for nearly a decade at PIIE, the authors urge governments and companies to identify both the points at which they are exposed (rare earths, semiconductors, active pharmaceutical ingredients) and the points at which they retain leverage (Bown, “LSE Book Launch”; “Chad P. Bown”). The point is that defensive preparation is the prerequisite for offensive action. As Bown put it at LSE: “You’ve got to do the prep. To do your homework. You need to build your defenses, subsidize, stockpile, identify your vulnerabilities before you can … [attack]” (Bown, “LSE Book Launch”).

It is the offensive chapters that readers approaching the book as a trade-policy primer will most expect, and Bown and Keynes deliver them with a wary evenhandedness. Tariffs, the authors argue, are best thought of as a “drug of choice” that policymakers should “use responsibly” (qtd. in Van Heuvelen 37). They make the case that targeted tariffs can, in certain narrow circumstances, do useful work: forcing the diversification of supply chains, extracting concessions, signaling resolve. They candidly concede that “being mean can pay off” (qtd. in Van Heuvelen 37). But they also recount the now well-documented retaliation and pass-through costs of the 2018–19 Trump tariffs, which were, as Bown has previously shown, “paid almost entirely by U.S. importers and, ultimately, U.S. consumers” (Bown, “US-China Trade War”). The book’s overall posture is therefore not anti-tariff but pro-discipline: tariffs are one instrument among many, and their efficacy depends on the homework that has gone before.

Export controls receive parallel treatment. The authors describe the U.S. semiconductor export controls of 2022–23 as a genuinely novel instrument, neither classical tariff nor sanction, and they treat the Chinese response (a build-out of indigenous capacity combined with retaliatory rare-earth restrictions) as a case study in how quickly one-shot leverage can be exhausted (Bown, “LSE Book Launch”). The broader lesson is that market dominance, whether exercised by China in critical minerals or by the United States in advanced chips, is a wasting asset, and that any export-control strategy must reckon with the speed at which targets can substitute away.

The most provocative argument of the book, and the one that has drawn the most attention in reviews, is that the United States and its allies will have to learn from the Chinese industrial-policy playbook if they want to defend their economic position. The authors are explicit on this point. As Keynes told Fortune, “the West is going to have to do industrial policy better,” with an explicit acknowledgement that this is “a mirror-image mistake” of China’s own state-led build-out (Bremner). The book points, in particular, to the importance of demand-side instruments—local content rules, public procurement, and guaranteed offtake—on which Western industrial policy has historically been thin (Bremner; Bown, “LSE Book Launch”).

Yet the argument is more textured than the headlines suggest. Bown and Keynes are not calling for the U.S. to become China; they are calling for a more honest reckoning with what works. As the publisher’s description puts it, “a Western system that protects market-oriented democracies from China’s [system] will require the embrace of some uniquely Chinese tools” (Simon & Schuster). The book’s normative bottom line is that economic nationalism is a fact, not a choice, and that the policy question is therefore which version of it, not whether to have one.

Throughout, the book is anchored by an extended metaphor, one that reviewers have singled out for praise. The world’s major economies are cast as vessels at sea: the United States is a pirate ship, untrustworthy and dangerous; China is a warship “eagerly brandishing its big guns”; Europe is “a cobbled-together merchant ship with little muscle, trying its best to keep the pirates and warriors happy at a distance” (Doherty). Multinational corporations are the soldiers; ordinary citizens are the conscripts. The book is, on this view, “not really about winning at all,” Doherty concludes, but “per Sun Tzu, about understanding the cost of the fight.”

The shipping metaphor is more than decoration. It does real analytical work, signaling that the major economies are not interchangeable and that what counts as “winning” in the South China Sea, the North Sea, or the Caribbean is, in each case, different. It also reflects a deeper methodological choice: rather than abstracting the trading system into a general-equilibrium model, the authors keep the analysis relentlessly geopolitical.

The reviews published in 2025–26 are nearly unanimous in praising the book’s accessibility and timeliness. The IMF’s Finance & Development calls it “an essential guide” and praises the “rigorous, accessible map of the terrain” (Van Heuvelen 37). The Financial Times-linked Keen On podcast, hosted by Andrew Keen, makes the more provocative claim that the volume is “the most useful thing you can read to understand what just happened,” given its publication in the same spring as the Trump-Xi summit in Beijing (Keen, Keen On America). Tim Harford, writing on the cover, calls it “Timely, witty and wise—you could not ask for a better guide to the new economic order” (qtd. in Pan Macmillan).

The reviews are also consistent in their limitations. The book is not, and does not pretend to be, a piece of original empirical research. The PIIE trade-war data and the China Shock literature do much of the underlying heavy lifting (Bown, “Steel, Aluminum”; Autor et al.). The World Economy review by L. Alan Winters is more reserved, noting that the book reads as a “moment-in-time” reflection rather than a definitive analytical statement (Winters). The International Economic Law and Policy Blog review by Simon Lester goes further, suggesting that the book is best read “as a self-help/therapy book on the questions of ‘how to process a trade war’ or ‘how to stay sane in the midst of a trade war'” (Lester).

A second reservation concerns the book’s normative posture. The willingness to embrace industrial policy and to “learn from China” will sit uneasily with free-market readers, and the Reason review (libertarian in orientation) is gently skeptical of the authors’ enthusiasm for state intervention (Doherty). Conversely, trade-skeptic readers may feel that the book is too accommodating of the underlying assumption that trade wars are the new normal, when the alternative—rebuilding a working multilateral system—deserves more direct engagement. Keynes is alert to this critique; her Keen On interview notes that the U.S.-China “fights” of the 2020s are not a sudden departure from cooperation but the visible surface of a longer pattern of subsidy and non-tariff barrier use, including the 2010 rare-earth episode (Keynes, Keen On America). The book, in her framing, is not endorsing the new era so much as refusing to wish it away.

Third, the subtitle matters. “An Optimistic Guide to an Anxious Global Economy” is doing a lot of work, and some readers may find the optimism undercooked. The book is, in substance, a candid account of a deteriorating situation in which the available instruments are all second-best. The “optimism” is, as Bown said, that “we do have a lot of lessons from economic evidence, from history, about how to manage the challenges that we are facing right now, how to do things better” (“If Trade Wars Are the New Normal”). That is a kind of optimism, but it is the optimism of the emergency room, not of the morning run.

How to Win a Trade War enters a crowded field that includes Robert Lighthizer’s No Trade Is Free (2020), Oren Cass’s The Once and Future Worker (2018), Branko Milanovic’s Capitalism, Alone (2019), and a fast-growing body of PIIE, Brookings, and CFR policy papers. Where the book distinguishes itself is in its combination of three qualities: (1) genuine subject-matter authority, drawn from Bown’s two decades at the World Bank, the CEA, the State Department, and PIIE and Keynes’s parallel trajectory in trade journalism; (2) a willingness to engage with the political economy of industrial policy rather than treat it as a sideshow; and (3) a literary voice that treats the reader as an adult. The analogies may be quirky—trade as dancing, tariffs as marijuana, stockpiles as prepper Reddit—but they do their job.

The book also, deliberately, takes a position in a long-running intra-economics debate between those who view trade imbalances as a two-sided problem, à la Keynes’s great-great-uncle, and those who view them as primarily the responsibility of deficit countries (Keynes, Keen On America). The authors’ revival of the surplus-country critique, articulated most clearly in the chapter on the 2010 rare-earth dispute, is one of the book’s quieter but more durable contributions.

In the Reason review, Doherty quotes the same two epigraphs that frame the book: Sun Tzu’s injunction to “count the cost” and the WarGames conclusion that the only winning move is not to play. He then observes that the book sits in the tension between them. So it does. Bown and Keynes have written a WarGames-era sequel in which Joshua has been overruled, the missiles are already in the air, and the most useful question is no longer whether to fight but how to do so without making the rubble bounce.

That, in the end, is what How to Win a Trade War offers. It is not a victory plan; it is, as the IMF’s Elizabeth Van Heuvelen concludes, “an honest reckoning of policy trade-offs and a rigorous, accessible map of the terrain” (Van Heuvelen 37). For policymakers, business readers, students of trade policy, and citizens trying to make sense of a world in which the rules have been abandoned, it is the best single volume published in 2025–26. It deserves to be read with both the optimism of its subtitle and the seriousness of its argument firmly in view.

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[Written, Researched, and Edited by Pablo Markin. Some parts of the text have been produced with the aid of Agent, Minimax, tools (July 14, 2026). The featured image has been generated in Gemini, Google (July 14, 2026).]