Pushkin

From Pushkin Industries, this is Deep Background, the show where we explore the stories behind the stories in the news.

I'm Noah Feldman.

Welcome to this week's show where we're going to take on the looming question of our time,

trade wars.

Almost no topic has been more prevalent in our public discourse since Donald Trump was elected in 2016.

We've seen trade wars threatened.

We've seen us pull back from trade wars.

And now we seem to be back in the game again.

To discuss this crucial and all-important topic, I decided to turn to the person whom I learned everything that I know about trade from, my trade guru, as it were.

And that's my colleague at Harvard Law School, Mark Wu.

Mark had an important job in the Office of the United States Trade Representative.

Then he decided that that wasn't enough.

He went to law school.

He became a law professor.

He got tenure at Harvard Law School. And all along, the drumbeat of Mark's pathbreaking scholarship has been the growing challenges in the U.S.-China trade

relationship and the way that those challenges would ultimately transform the nature of the

international trade regime. Of all of the scholars that I know, I can't think of anyone else

who started by saying something that left him way out on the dissenting cold side

of the field, kept on saying it, kept on saying it, and then turned out to be painfully,

accurately, and sadly, right.

Mark, thank you for being here.

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