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Notes -
I don't even think it's meant to be a special punitive measure. I mean, it's phrased that way since basically everything in the new US admin is phrased as someone getting punished, but really, Trump's mindset just seems to be that tariffs are a positive good in themselves and the normal status of how things are that US has tariffs against here, there and everywhere, to protect US industry and to collect money (in lieu of using income taxes), as he has said many times.
We're so used to a free trade world where tariffs are a punitive expection (not an infrequent expection to be sure, but still, something that by definition has to be conceived as an expection) that this sort of a mindset starts to seem quite alien to us, even though the world being riddled with tariffs and duties used to be the standard setting to be cleared away by the free trade revolution. The free trade revolution was mostly good and this is bad, but it's also not a special form of bad but rather a very traditional sort of bad.
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