How to Win a Trade War: An Optimistic Guide to an Anxious Global Economy

Keynes and Bown, with backgrounds in journalism and trade policy, respectively, have written an accessible and breezy explainer on international trade and commercial conflict. The case for trade rests, fundamentally, on the concept of comparative advantage—that countries should specialize in producing goods that they can make relatively efficiently, and trade for the rest—although the authors lean more on twenty-first-century examples than on the economist David Ricardo’s classic nineteenth-century case of England and Portugal exchanging cloth for wine. The authors are careful to note instances in which states may want to rein in free trade, such as when trade involves goods related to national security. They liken trade war games to nuclear war games: the best way to win a trade war, they observe, is to avoid one. And the best way to avoid one is to steer clear of the mistaken idea that international trade is a zero-sum game. But to sustain political support for trade, countries with trade surpluses and trade deficits alike should take measures to narrow trade imbalances and to strengthen emergency trade protections for workers. The world needs a new international competition authority to monitor concentrations of economic power, including control over access to rare-earth elements, and to call for corrective action.

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