This one’s a must-view, folks. Not just because it’s smart and informative (it is), but because if you want to understand where this global trade war is headed, you need to understand where we’ve been.  We’ve been here before, same script, different century, shinier weapons.

Opium Wars & Fentanyl 

Today, the U.S. is hammering China over trade surpluses, supply chains, and fentanyl exports like it’s some 21st-century morality play. But let’s not kid ourselves, this ain’t new. Roll back the tape to the 1800s, when Britain was guzzling Chinese tea and bleeding silver to pay for it. The Empire didn’t sit down to rethink its consumption habits or embrace austerity. Nope. It pumped opium into China, grown in India by the ever-helpful East India Company.  When the Qing Dynasty pushed back, the Brits (and later the French) came with gunboats. Balance-of-payments problem solved… with cannon fire.

That little-remembered and mentioned kerfuffle was called the Opium Wars, and it ended with China coughing up Hong Kong and swallowing a bitter cocktail of treaties, humiliation, and foreign occupation. So when U.S. negotiators start waving fentanyl stats as leverage in trade talks, don’t be surprised if Beijing hears echoes of a century-long trauma. To China, this isn’t just trade. It’s history. It’s memory. It’s power.

And that’s the problem. Washington’s playing checkers while Beijing’s playing Go—with a 5,000-year memory and no term limits.

Watch This Video

Economic Warfare: When Trade Turns to War pulls back the curtain on this high-stakes chessboard and shows how trade, usually sold to the masses as the peaceful handshake of globalization, can become a blunt instrument of power. It’s a guided tour through the dark history of economic statecraft, from the silver flows and theft of Intellectual Property (IP) of the 19th century to the semiconductor sanctions and auto and steel tariffs of today.

Watch it. Learn something. Because the next chapter of this trade war isn’t going to be written in spreadsheets. It’s going to be written in strategy, scars, and steel.