How to Win a Trade War | Chad Bown

**Demetri Kofinas** (0:00)
What's up, everybody? My name is Demetri Kofinas, and you're listening to Hidden Forces, a podcast that inspires investors, entrepreneurs, and everyday citizens to challenge consensus narratives and learn how to think critically about the systems of power shaping our world. My guest in this episode of Hidden Forces is Chad Bown, a trade economist at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a former chief economist at the US. State Department, the host of the popular Trade Talks podcast, and the co-author of the recently published book, How to Win a Trade War. Chad and I spent the first hour of our conversation today laying the intellectual groundwork for understanding the modern trading system, or what remains of it, roughly 10 years into America's trade war with China and much of the rest of the world. An important question that arises from this episode is whether some trade wars are more about trade, while others are more about war, and how knowing which kind of trade war you are in should influence the nature of your country's policies and the support of its citizens. We examine the unique role played by the dollar and capital recycling in concentrating the gains from trade among the owners of capital and stress test the theory of weaponized interdependence as seen through the ongoing case studies of Russia's war against Ukraine and America's latest war with Iran.
The second hour turns from assessing the motivations behind the current trade war and what's at stake to a discussion about the players themselves, their incentives, and what it means to wage a trade war in the first place, the weapons at each nation's disposal, the defensive measures to be taken, the strategies to be deployed and the various time horizons and end games to be considered when fighting war. We close the episode with an assessment of American industrial policy, including the CHIPS Act and the Semiconductor Export Control Regime, Beijing's willingness to weaponize its dominance in rare earths and permanent magnets, and three scenarios for how this new and likely durable era of economic conflict could ultimately unfold. If you want access to all of this conversation, go to hiddenforces.io/subscribe and join our premium feed, which you can listen to on your mobile device using your favorite podcast app, just like you're listening to this episode right now. If you want to join in on the conversation, become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius community, which includes Q&A calls with guests, discounted access to third-party research and analysis, and in-person events like earned-to-mit dinners and weekend retreats. You can also do that on our subscriber page. And if you still have questions, feel free to send an email to info at hiddenforces.io.
And I or someone from our team will get right back to you. And with that, please enjoy this highly useful and imaginative conversation with my guest, Chad Bown.
Chad Bown, welcome to Hidden Forces.

**Chad Bown** (2:54)
Thanks for having me.

**Demetri Kofinas** (2:56)
It's great having you on, Chad. You and your co-author Sumeya have been on a bit of a tear lately in terms of doing media for your book, How to Win a Trade War, including a recent appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
Before we get into the book or your background, what was the origin of your collaboration and how long have you two known one another?

**Chad Bown** (3:16)
Yeah, Sumeya and I have known each other about 10 years. She was, at the time, this was 2016, she was the main trade correspondent at The Economist newspaper, working out of London. I was here at the Peterson Institute doing work on trade policy at the time. President Trump comes along, wins the 2016 election, and all of a sudden trade becomes part of the headlines every day in ways that had never been seen before in media history. So she was covering it every day from London. I was covering it every day from Washington, DC.
We decided to start a podcast together. We did a podcast together called Trade Talks, really nerdy niche podcast only about international trade. But for our little world, it kind of blew up and became quite popular in the first Trump administration. We did that together for about five years.
Then she went off and trade became a lot more boring when President Biden came along. Not in the news every day. She went off to cover other things. I started working on other things as well. But when President Trump came along again in 2025, we decided to rekindle our partnership and work on a book together that we had talked about doing back in the first Trump administration, but never got around to doing.