Soumaya Keynes and Chad Bown How to Win a Trade War: An Optimistic Guide to an Anxious Global Economy Simon & Schuster, 2026.

There are two kinds of books: those that you should read, and those that you want to read.Keynes and Bown have written a book that is, remarkably, both.How to Win a Trade War makes a serious argument about the structural transformation of the global trading system with enough wit and irreverence that you might not notice how much -and how uncomfortably -you are being asked to update your priors.It manages to be genuinely funny about things that are genuinely alarming, which keeps you reading through arguments that would otherwise require a stiff drink.The book's deepest contribution is implicit but unwavering: we are not going back.The rules-based order that economists and trade-policy types of a certain vintage -and I count myself among themspent careers defending, extending, and occasionally romanticizing is not coming back in its prior form.Keynes and Bown do not belabor the point, but deliver the message with the brisk authority of a no-nonsense parent with young children, which Keynes, who is one, deploys freely throughout the book, sippy cups, and all.When it is time to leave the playground, you say goodbye to the swing set, say goodbye to your friends, take a deep breath, and move along -no tears.Fun time is over.Although Keynes and Bown have sugared it carefully in analogies and witticisms, acknowledging the demise of so much of the trading system that was is bitter medicine.Many readers may need a second pass to make sure they swallowed it.If you want to know how far the world has shifted, consider that Keynes and Bown -two of the rules-based order's most passionate advocates -open their book with an elegy for it.But these are empiricists, not ideologues, and they have been watching the world closely.What they have seen in the last decade -what we have all witnessed -is an era of mercantilist improvisation and unilateralist swagger, and it has changed them.What makes that evolution especially remarkable is that they could hardly be more different dispositionally: Bown is congenitally optimistic -he believes in institutions, in cooperation, in the possibility that states can be coaxed toward mutually beneficial arrangements.Keynes is constitutionally more skeptical -she also wants rules, but expects piracy on the open seas of international commerce.That two such temperamentally different observers arrive at the same grim conclusion -asking us to embrace new toolkits, stop waiting for the old normal, and get serious about economic statecraft -is itself a compelling damnation of the status quo.Beyond the verdict, the book offers a serious and wide-ranging guide to how economic statecraft actually works.Keynes and Bown describe the context, players, objectives, strategy, and tactics with remarkable clarity, somehow managing to skip the acronyms for which trade economists are rightly infamous and pilloried.This is no small feat, and should in true trade tradition earn the book its own canonization: HTWATW.When they describe overcapacity as something that 'smells fishy, ' they