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How to Win a Trade War: A Friendly Guide to an Unfriendly World
By Soumaya Keynes and Chad Bown
Pan Macmillan
Reviewed by Mike Houlahan
There is a great deal which is highly annoying about How to Win a Trade War — but you will be well rewarded if you persevere.
International trade is not the sort of subject most people sit down to read about of an evening, as the well-credentialled Soumaya Keynes (Financial Times columnist) and Chad Bown (former economics advisor to two United States presidents) fully understand.
Hence their explanation of what would normally be considered by many to be a dry and dull subject is bright, breezy and full of attempts at humour.
Sometimes this works; other times they are too cute for their own good and this approach becomes distracting.
It can feel like Econ 101 for preschoolers.
But get past that and there is much to commend How to Win a Trade War.
In the shadows of US President Donald Trump’s 2025 decision to unilaterally and illogically introduce seemingly randomly determined tariffs on almost every other country as part of his “Liberation Day” proclamation, Keynes and Bown were in demand to explain this to people who thus far had had little need to consider tariffs, let alone how the international trade system works.
Numerous expositions on podcasts later, the idea of writing How to Win a Trade War was born.
The authors are keen to emphasise they do not think trade wars are a good idea, and if you are so minded to start one you will probably lose.
Having said that, they carefully take the reader through the rationale for why you might wish to start one, how you might fight it and what ‘‘victory’’ — and defining winning one of these is problematic — might look like.
Figuring all that out requires some understanding of diplomacy, history and trading systems, and the authors step through all this nimbly, making sure no reader is left behind.
Get past the cloying attempts at forced humour and there is much here that is instructive and worthwhile.
Mike Houlahan is the ODT political editor.