The tariff issue is sadly a necessary one to deal with in order to avoid hollowing out the economy. A country cannot rely on an entirely intellectual property economy as during global economic turmoil, those aspects of an economy easily crash.
A leading cause of trade issues where the US is largely unable to effectively make things locally and export them, is due much of the rest of the world establishing various unions and trade blocks which allows them to effectively establish high tariffs with countries like the US, but low or no tariffs with their friends. With an international market environment like that, regardless of labor costs or with the current push to match corporate tax rates with many European countries, if a company wants to expand beyond the US market, then they will be strongly incentivized to move as much of their operation outside of the US as possible, especially if the US maintains low or no import tariffs, as that will allow them to still have cheap access to the US market, while having lower tariffs with many other nations. It is overall a convoluted web of loopholes where they can still technically comply with WTO rules while maintaining tariffs rated that those countries will find otherwise offensive if imposed on them. The loudest international voices opposing the move, are often the ones with very high base tariff rates and numerous regional agreements and international pacts. This leads to heated emotions as it means those nation cliques will end up experiencing their CET being imposed upon them by the world's largest importer.
If the US implements a policy if reciprocal tariffs, then those countries that like to export to the US, but want to discourage imports from the US that will compete with their local industries, they will be pressured to lower their tariffs in a way where they have no leg to stand on to complain, this is why the criticism of the policy avoids going into specifics, and is often just emotional expressions of anger, with no self awareness, as the nature of the policy, puts the US tariff rate entirely in the hands of the foreign country, since the foreign tariffs are simply being mirrored. Things get muddied though when the idea of it leads to retaliation, which leads to many new tariffs that are not reciprocal in nature.
Outside of situations like this, tariffs have one other protective function, which is to prevent nation state market manipulation. For example, there are actions that are hostile in nature but have a short term positive impact on the target. For example, suppose one nation sells a refined material to another nation at well below market value, e.g., refined material at almost the same cost as the unrefined material. In such a case, all of the buyers will jump at the opportunity to purchase cheap refined materials; often never passing those savings onto the consumer, and instead pocketing additional profits. In cases such as those, often the hostile foreign actor will subsidize the their local industry to allow it to sell items at below cost prices. Since governments have deep pockets, a dumping operation by a nation state can be maintained for quite a long time, while a private company in the target country will eventually go bankrupt. In situations like that, the hostile country then will switch to charging well above market rates and make back all of the subsidies and vastly profit.
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