"But, if the new tariff regime has been hyper-publicized, it has also been somewhat undertheorized."

"If the plan is to disrupt the existing regime, in the conviction that global free trade has undermined American interests and workers, what is meant to replace it?... Ever since Trump was first elected, in 2016, his main guru and interpreter on trade, the man largely charged with converting the President’s protectionist instincts into theory and practice, has been a voluble, savvy seventy-seven-year-old Washington lawyer named Robert Lighthizer.... The view Lighthizer has come to after nearly half a century working on the issue is that free trade is a fiction, believed only by Americans and economists (and, intermittently, by the British). 'Free trade doesn’t exist anywhere in the world,' he told me. 'It just doesn’t. And it doesn’t largely because of details.' Even in the absence of tariffs, countries do all sorts of things to protect domestic manufacturing.... What Lighthizer would like to see, as he explained to me, is 'a new trade system,' in which the U.S. walked away from the disadvantageous trade agreements of the nineties and negotiated a new series of agreements with other democracies, wealthy and not, that fixed those mistakes.... 'We have the momentum politically to do it,' Lighthizer said. 'We have the benefit of a trillion-dollar trade deficit, which gives us enormous leverage. We take unilateral action, we disrupt the system, we build over not too long a period toward what I suggest.'..."

From "Why Is the Mastermind of Trump’s Tariff Plan Still Sitting at Home in Florida? Robert Lighthizer, the former U.S. Trade Representative, lost his bid to rejoin the White House, but he still believes the President’s protectionist instincts can jump-start American manufacturing," by Benjamin Wallace-Wells" (The New Yorker).