The writer is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
If you want to understand the effects of tariffs on the economy, ask economic historians. Their views tend to be fairly nuanced, generally recognising that the history of tariffs is a varied one. Sometimes they are associated with higher economic growth and other times with lower.
For many economists, however, tariffs have become an ideological litmus test with little acknowledgment of these variations. Tariffs in advanced economies — and especially in the US — only matter, they argue, to the extent that they affect the prices of imported goods. For that reason, they are seen as always harmful to the economy because they always hurt consumers.