While that’s true from a purely economic perspective, nations and their goals aren’t always geared towards that economic perspective. For instance the trade war is economically ignorant but geopolitically it makes sense. Another example is the US in the 1800s. They used a ton of tariffs to force American companies to build out infrastructure within the US instead of importing everything we needed. This worked to create the economic juggernaut we see from the Spanish-American war onward.

This wouldn’t have made economic sense to an economist because the goals here weren’t entirely economic. Yet it built a giant economy.