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 them – spent 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 are not being fuzzily imprecise, but rightly exact – delivering not a loose characterization of a concrete concept, but a perfect distillation of a messy one. That same intellectual honesty runs through their treatment of innovation and technological competition. They raise the hard questions, including whether export restrictions close the very gaps they are meant to widen, and bring the same rigor to unglamorous practicalities such as stockpile adequacy – delivering critical context and summarizing nuanced bodies of research without disappearing into the literature. The book’s readability is deceptive, but a quick glance at the end notes dispels any doubt about the underlying rigor.

For all the book’s clarity, I wanted more sharp elbows. By the midpoint, Keynes and Bown have earned the right to pass judgment – and so has the reader. They are admirably clear, for instance, that fairness and security are distinct objectives demanding distinct remedies: whether a foreign competitor achieved market dominance through subsidies is a question for trade lawyers, but if the concern is genuine strategic vulnerability, it is beside the point. This conflation is not a minor quibble – it is everywhere in current policy debates and doing real damage. Why stop short of calling out the muddlers?

The same applies to their treatment of overcapacity. The concept is not without merit – supply unhinged from domestic demand can generate substantial spillovers, and the Chinese case is at least arguable – but it resists precise definition even in its most legitimate applications, and while they engage with it thoughtfully, I wanted more critical scrutiny. Having granted a concept that seems to be measured with a ‘you know it when you see it’ ruler, they have an even greater obligation to police its misuse. And today’s misuse is not subtle. The same logic being applied to Chinese steel production is now being stretched, without apparent embarrassment, by the current USTR to cover Norwegian salmon and Bangladeshi garments under its recent Section 301 investigations. Keynes and Bown understand better than almost anyone why that is problematic – which is what makes their reticence to name and shame so frustrating. To be sure, avoiding the Eye of Sauron is a reasonable instinct in the current environment – no one relishes the attention of an administration that takes disagreement personally. But at a moment when the analytical vocabulary of trade policy is being stretched to silly putty territory, economists have a responsibility to call out abuses of logic and language. I wanted the book to do more of that. Not subtly, but with force.

If I wanted a little more edge from Keynes and Bown, I want a lot more from the rest of us. This book arrives at exactly the right moment – and the era it describes demands better economics. Not just the economics of quantifying tradeoffs, but especially the economics of mechanisms that determine whether our economic tools will work in the field: how firms respond under geopolitical stress, how supply chains transmit shocks, how industrial policy spillovers ripple through global value chains. Today’s global battlefields are often economic – but foreign policy and national security communities have been too quick to dismiss economists as bean counters, boxing out the inconvenient truths and real tradeoffs that economic analysis brings. That has to stop. Where economists have been shut out, the vacuum has been filled by the sometimes-informed-never-in-doubt crowd. It has not worked out well.

But economists are not blameless. We have been too slow to engage with the questions that matter most, leaving government economists to sprint ahead alone – under-resourced, underappreciated, and often without the analytical tools they need. Where even they have not reached, the void is dangerous. The stakes of economic statecraft are simply too high to wing it. The issues Keynes and Bown raise – from stockpiles and industrial policy design to GVC resilience, distributional consequences, and the national security risks embedded in private market behavior – are first-order research questions. Economists should treat them as such, in active collaboration with the policymakers and industry leaders working these problems in real time, and with our colleagues in international relations, political economy, and international law. They can help us scope better questions and craft tools that are useful in practice, not just fancy mathematical curiosities destined to sit on a shelf. Editors, referees, and senior colleagues have a special responsibility to make room for creative, measurement-serious, policy-relevant scholarship. This is our moment to be useful. Let’s answer the call.

Who should read this book? Everyone. Economists just waking up to the trade and industrial policy reality, national security professionals who need to understand the economic landscape on which today’s strategic competition is unfolding, policymakers improvising in real time, beleaguered business leaders caught in the crosshairs, and students wondering how the world they are inheriting will work. And if none of those descriptions fit, read it for the sheer creative force of the analogies alone: global imbalances explained through video games, trade rules as a football match, economic statecraft as a flotilla of ships – from warships to merchant marines and the occasional party boat – and domestic politics as toddler antics. I will be assigning it to my students and giving it as a graduation gift. The next shock is not far off. (Heck, we’ll probably see a few before this is published.) This is your field guide.