This doesn't directly answer the question, but global free trade has been a calamity for the middle- and working-class. It needs to be razed to the ground, and salt sowed in the fields, etc. This is one way of ending it.
Consider the case of Phil Knight of Nike. Here's what someone posted on Twitter (I don't know the account so obviously don't endorse everything, or anything else, it says):
"Knight's big "innovation" in shoe manufacturing was figuring out how to be one of the first people to flood the American market with cheaply made plastic footwear from Asia. Knight didn't make better, more durable shoes; he made cheaper ones by blowing up the native American industry.
Access to slave labor is, in the short run, a competitive advantage over skilled free labor.
In 1990, 10 years after the Nike IPO, there were 85,000 Americans employed making shoes. Today there are only 10,000 and 99% of our shoes are made overseas. The only exception is footwear for the military.
Phil Knight, however, is worth $35 billion and Nike has a market cap of $90 billion.
In other words, the good middle class wages once generated by homegrown American shoe manufacturing have been transformed by outsourcing into equities owned by a small class of investors and one insanely wealthy oligarch.
Global free trade is a way for the powerful to screw over the middle class by forcing them to compete with third world slave labor.
Yes, with high tariffs, Americans would have to pay slightly more for shoes. In return, however, they would be subsidizing good paying jobs and a decentralized industrial base in their own communities.
Global free trade, on the other hand, subsidizes massive increases in asset valuation. If you are one of the first "in on the ground floor" then you can make insane amounts of money by blowing up middle class wages by outsourcing those jobs overseas.
Libertarians and Wall Street types love to call this "capitalism" and the "free market" at work, but in reality, they are defrauding their countrymen out of the opportunity to build products themselves.
Americans are no longer able to make shoes at home. That option is not available to you. How can we call this a "free market" when it constrains our choices?
Outsourcing is 100% a government subsidy. It is a privilege, allowed by the state, to a select few citizens who figure out how to manipulate the international market to their advantage.
Phil Knight discovered the much cheaper Asian shoe market in the early 1960s because he had the money to travel abroad. His middle class neighbors making an honest living making shoes did not have that opportunity."
The middle and working class are the ones who would be paying signficantly more for shoes in this scheme. A minute fraction of them having jobs making shoes instead of the jobs they would have otherwise wouldn't balance things out.
I also take issue with the trend of describing low paying jobs as "slave labor". Absolutely nobody in vietnam is heralding these tariffs, since they don't look forward to working even worse paying jobs as a result. Free trade benefits everyone except for abstruse dilettantes online.
Sure, pay more for shoes, and have a chance at going back to a world where small towns are prosperous and thriving, people can buy homes in their 20s, quality isn't constantly declining, people aren't constantly stressed over losing their jobs because the last quarter's results 'failed to meet expectations', and families can get by with one wage-earner. All this human happiness and thriving destroyed by globalization, so creatures like Phil Knight can get very very rich.
So again, I've no idea whether the tariffs will work, and on paper I'm quite a bit poorer than I was a week ago, but the current regime must be smashed.
I support putting tariffs on foreign nations (a) to the degree a nation 'undercuts' America by exploiting foreign workers, and (b) providing the tariffs be gradually introduced so as not to cause mayhem.
Those two stipulations would preserve America's reputation as a good global citizen, and would promote better conditions in the USA and the world.
The Trump tariffs meet neither of those stipulations.