Trade Wars

The book explores the causes and instruments of 500 years of armed and non-armed international trade conflicts. The authors draw on decades of experience to examine trade wars, economic sanctions, and different types of economic warfare, investigating their history, ethics, economic driving forces, and legality under current rules.

Nils Ole Oermann is Full Professor of Ethics at the University of Lüneburg, specializing in sustainability and sustainable economics. He is also Visiting Professor for Business Ethics at the University of St Gallen and an Associate Faculty Member at the University of Oxford. He has served as personal advisor to the German Federal President and former head of the IMF, as well as to the Minister of Finance and Minister of the Interior of the Federal Republic of Germany. He is the author of Albert Schweitzer: A Biography (OUP, 2016).
Hans-Jürgen Wolff works as a political advisor in Berlin, having retired from his former position in the Office of the German Federal President in 2010. Before that, he worked in the Department of Constitutional Law at the German Federal Ministry of the Interior (1989-1991) and from 1991 to 1995 he was responsible for issues of European economic and monetary policy at the German Federal Chancellor's Office.

- Preface
- Introduction: War, trade, and piracy
- 1: Economics, competition, trade war, and its modern causes
- 2: The terms economic sanction, trade war, and economic warfare
- 3: Trade wars and economic warfare in history
- 4: The ethics of economic warfare
- 5: Trade wars, economic sanctions and warfare, and the law
- 6: The economics of trade, effectiveness of economic sanctions, and winnability of trade wars
- 7: What characterizes economic warfare today? Developments since 1989
- 8: The Chinese challenge and the disunited West
- 9: What is to be done? Eight recommendations