Intervening in one case for an iconic American company is protectionism, not free trade. That would have entailed reforming the patent system for everyone. This is ominous, what if this is remembered as the equivalent of Smoot-Hawley? Patents are a hell of a lot more complex than tariffs... and at least the ITC is trying to do international coordination here, and Obama has just blatantly undermined them.
Congress seems to have explicitly preferred this approach, however. They could've set up a system with uniform rules and a mandatory process that the president can't overrule, as is commonly done with other areas like environmental rules. The president does have some power over the EPA, but can't arbitrarily instruct the EPA to drop rules simply because he disagrees with the outcome of the rulemaking process. But here Congress said that if the President disagrees with any ruling of the IPC "for policy reasons", he need merely notify the ITC and the ruling will be voided. That seems to indicate Congress wanted case-by-case review of ITC determinations for policy conformance. Why would they write that into the law? My guess is precisely to allow national economic interests to take priority over the rules on a case-by-case basis.