> communicate very clearly what you were going to do
Probably not. At least, not until right before the ratchet up. You'd want to first subsidize then once industries are starting to build up, you'd want to start the ratchet up. You probably also wouldn't want to say "We are doing this because we want to be better competitors" or whatever. It'd be better if you said something like "We believe country x is doing terrible thing y and for the safety of our country and others we are going to apply a tariff on good z until x stops doing y".
But yeah, universal tariffs are the dumbest idea in the world. We've essentially sanctioned every single nation which is going to massively damage us and manufacturing. Going to be real hard to unwind this.
You might add a bit of "Country X" is bad spin in there as political justification for what you're doing, agreed.
But you would make damn sure you communicated when the tariffs would hit punitive levels so the rest of the value chain knew and had already had chances to find themselves domestic suppliers
Gotta be REAL careful about how you signal things if your intent is ultimately to take over a market. Telling manufacturers you intend to isolate could leak out and ultimately trigger pre-emptive tariffs.
Honestly, just subsidizing is a lot simpler to do and it doesn't run the risk of making the world mad at you or triggering retaliatory tariffs.
You're a lot less likely to get retaliatory tariffs when you're communicating to manufacturers that you intend to raise your $nicheproductclasses tariffs to support domestic manufacturing under industrial strategy and national security policy than when you announce blanket tariffs with threats. The US imposed 100% tariffs on EVs last year for example[1], which wasn't exactly a universally popular move but wasn't likely to provoke a trade war. Much easier to accept losing share of a market than every market, plus also less likely to accidentally punish the manufacturing industries you're trying to support.
[1]there's a certain irony in one of Biden's last actions being to impose tariffs in a way which massively helped Tesla, and one of Trump's first being to propose tariffs that could seriously hurt its supply chain if they don't get exemptions...
yup
> probably subsidise them
yup
> communicate very clearly what you were going to do
Probably not. At least, not until right before the ratchet up. You'd want to first subsidize then once industries are starting to build up, you'd want to start the ratchet up. You probably also wouldn't want to say "We are doing this because we want to be better competitors" or whatever. It'd be better if you said something like "We believe country x is doing terrible thing y and for the safety of our country and others we are going to apply a tariff on good z until x stops doing y".
But yeah, universal tariffs are the dumbest idea in the world. We've essentially sanctioned every single nation which is going to massively damage us and manufacturing. Going to be real hard to unwind this.