Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am very much on the fence on this one. I can tell you, without a shadow of a doubt, based on having been in manufacturing across various industries for over thirty years, that the US and Europe have been on a path to loose nearly all manufacturing capacity within ten years, maybe twenty at best. How do we compare the pain (and yes, some destruction) that we have to endure today against the devastation that is clear…
Whatever your hopes and dreams around domestic manufacturing, blanket tariffs capriciously imposed at random are unlikely to get any dream closer to reality, except perhaps the dream of total devastation of all manufacturing. Let's look at what an actual domestic manufacturer has to say about tariffs[1]? Oh, looks bad! Turns out, manufacturers import stuff, add value to it, and sell it for more money! Hopefully we'll…
Long term, manufacturers will come back or be created to grab all those customers. But for the rest of the world, it's much harder for suppliers who lost a massive chunk of their customers to suddenly find new customers beyond what's already existing. Creating demand is notoriously harder than increasing supply. And it dosen't help that the majority of other major economies are also export-based, so unless if some are willing to run deficits (and they won't), there's literally nowhere else to go other than a global recession. Developing countries are far too poor and would essentially be turned into captive markets bereft of industrialization.
I don't agree with the implementation of Trump's policies, but this is going right back to Keynes' concerns about limitations of global trade balancing, it's a long time coming, and much of the blame does come back to the surplus economies that doubled down on manufacturing rather than transitioning to consumer based economies.