Comment by rdsubhas

It would help if people answer than downvote. Both these kind of questions and economic answers are getting buried.

My understanding so far based on buried comments is: other countries have tariffs on individual products they're historically good at manufacturing and they want to retain it. e.g. Milk in the Nordics, Cars in Japan and EU, Bikes in India, etc.

keyword: "selective to retain"

US is applying it across the board blindly, not to retain something that's existing, but what appears to be a blind hope of starting everything from scratch.

Buried comments say "strategy" is lacking, because these tariffs also apply on the very raw materials needed to start from scratch. The policy does not intelligently select and separate items by their current or future use to the US industry.

There is a prediction that this blunt hammer will not yield to a more productive situation, in couple of years it would only have to be quietly rolled back and strategic thinking would have to be re-applied.

The counter-counter argument is, maybe a real strategy is being worked upon, and this blunt hammer is just a leverage tool. But so far there are no concrete signals of strategic thinking, so it's currently perceived as "let's keep turning one knob after another". The lack of accompanying software updates, calculations, projections, personnel planning, etc all contribute to the notion that there is no strategy.

And at this point, it devolves into emotion and personality, which is better to stay away from.