After the fact justification? I don't see that going on.

Sure it is. There's no way that specific tariff policy was formulated with the idea of isolating China. You don't impose the massive tariffs on the other east Asian manufacturing centers if that's what the purpose of the tariffs is.

Only if somebody over there is very, very, short sighted. Go ask the Italians what they think about the allure of Chinese capital and the hidden costs it brings.

Yes, I know - there is an example of a country backing away from Belt and Road. But there's many, many, many other examples of countries not backing out of Belt and Road. And new examples of poorer countries turning to China for help after we torched all of our soft-power international programs.

But I wasn't talking about capital investment. If China's blocked from the U.S. market, they're going to have to make up for those lost customers by increasing their market share in other Western economies. Similarly, if they're blocking our exports from their markets, that creates an opportunity for other Western countries to export to China to fill that gap. Especially since we just dislocated a major one of their export markets by levying massive tariffs against our putative allies. So the most likely result of this tariff is to increase bilateral trade between China and all the other Western economies, as all of their surplus export capacity that can no longer land in the U.S. has to land somewhere.

A smart tariff policy against China would have involved tariffing only them, and working in close cooperation with our economic allies in the rest of the OECD and with the manufacturing centers of east Asia to also increase tariff barriers against China in coordination. Instead, we're doing the opposite of that - blowing up our economic relationships with most other developed countries and creating massive incentives for everyone other than the U.S. (including China) to work together to overcome what the U.S. has done to global markets.