Are Trump’s tariffs a good idea?

Yes

Supporters of the global free-trade regime that has been built up over the past 25 years like to think of themselves as capitalists. Benevolent capitalists, perhaps — ones who have only the interests of the world’s poorest workers and their own nations’ least wealthy consumers at heart — but capitalists nonetheless. So why is the biggest beneficiary of their world order in fact the last of the great, deadly serious Communist states — the People’s Republic of China?

Trump’s tariffs, far from being the end of the liberal economic order, may be the one thing that can save it. That order, after all, to an embarrassing degree depends upon America’s dominant position in the world. After the second world war, America helped to rebuild the industrial economies of friends and former foes alike. Even as American goods flooded Europe — or at least those corners of the Continent that could afford them — Washington dedicated extraordinary quantities of taxpayers’ dollars to other countries’ needs.