More protectionism is not the answer. Restraints on global trade are probably the most harmful thing we do to ourselves as a species.
Now I understand that national defense is paramount. Some restrictions for national defense may be necessary (and neither China nor the US has helped promote trust in each other's products for defense uses lately), but trade restrictions should only be used as a last resort.
We often forget that we have been down this road before. The world on the eve of World War I looked far more like the world of today than the world of our parents.
The entire globe was experiencing massively interconnected rapid economic growth, not just from industrialization, but from the speed and ease of global trade which the new technologies enabled. American ice was sold in India, India tea in Russia, German farm implements in Britain, and British everything everywhere.
Then came first the Great War, and then the Great Depression. And with the Depression came every politician's favorite way to fight economic woes: keep out the foreigners. One restraint led to immediate retaliation by other nations, creating a frenetic negative feedback loop, until finally the open system collapsed in its entirety.
And in its place we created a hidebound monstrosity, an incomprehensible series of trade regulations that were nearly impossible to navigate.
Of course this protectionism only drove us deeper into the Depression, caused global output to plummet to historic lows, made the global economic engine seize like an un-oiled V8, and threw lit thermite into the already smoldering tinderbox of militant nationalism.
It took two World Wars, a global standoff that threatened to consume all of civilization in nuclear holocaust, and most of a century to get back to where we started. Let's not throw away those hard-won gains over international intrigue. Trillions of dollars, and the lives they support, are at stake here.
Free trade is good. Full stop. It builds massive wealth through compounding growth. It pulls people out of dire poverty. And it stops wars.
To step away from it now, just as we enter a truly globalized world, would be the single largest self-inflicted wound to the global economy since the collapse of Rome.