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I am against retaliatory tariffs. They are in fact shooting yourself in the foot.
1930s was the last time everyone went all in all retaliatory tariffs and it basically wrecked the world economy.
There are always economists in favor of bad ideas. They still can't even agree on the minimum wage.
What you'll find with economists that support bad economic policies is that they'll point to a paper or theory that justifies it in a very convoluted way. There are papers out there that justify minimum wage and tariffs, but they require a perfect set of market conditions and a government run exactly to the specifications of these same economists.
The most famous example of protective industrial policy in the US is the Jones act. It is stronger than a tariff because it represents an absolute ban on foreign products in certain categories. It has been a total failure. The US has instead just crippled its domestic shipping, impoverished its own people, and all it has to show for it is a sclerotic ship building industry.
Other countries like Brazil and India have also been trying to industrial policy themselves into success for a few decades. They've also only managed to further impoverish their people.
There is no cognitive dissonance. Just bad economic policy that we will trick ourselves into every few decades.
The problem with the Jones act is that many goods shipped by boat are fungible, and international shipping is too cheap. Combined with free trade, it's cheaper to export the goods and simply import an equivalent product back. In the end the Jones act failed because domestic shipping isn't essential. If it were totally banned, people outside of a few tiny islands would scarcely know the difference.
Domestic shipping is no longer essential, we made it that way through the Jones act. While every other form of transportation has gotten cheaper, faster, and more plentiful domestic shipping has gotten worse in all those ways.
In a counterfactual world where the Jones act never existed I'd bet that domestic shipping would look incredibly important. There are some very useful navigable waterways in the US and for the century or two prior to the Jones act they were absolutely essential to commerce.
However, we live in clown world reality, where a transportation method that has served humanity for millenia is denied to the US because of bad economic thinking.
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At least in the case of India, we've emerged from crushing poverty largely due to late 80s and early 90s liberalization and movement away from mercantilist policies.
Recently, there's been an effort to reduce the attractiveness of cheap Chinese imports through tariffs and subsidies of domestic industry, and the jury is out on their effectiveness. We'd have congenial relationships with China if they weren't so myopically focused on Arunachal Pradesh and random mountains in the Himalayas. It makes me sigh when I realize how much of the international opprobrium China faces is entirely due to its own weight throwing, for very little potential gain in this particular case.
Chinese foreign policy is a bit of a throwback in that it's strongly driven by concrete strategic military goals, AIUI -- if they care about the random mountains, it's because they think that they are useful in an all-out war. Same with Tibet, same with Taiwan.
The issue is that there wouldn't be any need for an all out war, at least with India.
The Himalayan mountains mean a lot more to us than they do to the Chinese. They're literal high ground, covering the flat and very hard to defend Gangetic plain. In a shooting war, neither sides could actually make much territorial ingress, the logistics wouldn't work for moving the millions of troops necessary. Even aerial warfare and artillery duels wouldn't really change the picture, not when the largest mountain range in the world has had its say.
India recognizes Chinese control of Tibet, and our sheltering of the Dalai Lama is inconsequential. The Tibetan secessionist movement is just about dead. We never contested ownership of that godforsaken place, beyond a short lived backing of guerilla movements that ended in the 70s.
Arunachal Pradesh was never Chinese, at most it alternated between tenuous control between Indian kings and the Tibetans. Even when China seized control during a war with India, they voluntarily withdrew after a cease-fire.
If China didn't press these territorial claims, then it could easily exist as a neutral power that happened to have an overlapping border with India. We're not territorially expansionist, and we've had congenial ties with the rest of our neighbors, barring the obvious exception in Pakistan (and even then, they were the ones who instigated most conflict). It would be very easy to live and let live, and enjoy warm trade relationships. That is hard to do, at best, when one party considers over a million people to be their rightful citizens, for no good reason.
China doesn't see it this way, so none of what else you say matters -- if there's a possibility that a war might occur, they want to be in the best possible position for it.
Like I said it's a bit of a throwback to pre-WWI international relations, but you see it a bit in Russia's adventures in Ukraine. Happens when high-ranking military officials get a direct voice in diplomacy.
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