Free trade is free for whom?
Monopolies?
Capitalists?
If we had the same rules everywhere and effectively one global government then we could have free trade. But we have sovereign nations with their own national interests.
Therefore trade always has to be a deal. Either the deal is a good one or it is not. We have had problems before with Japan, for instance they like to grow their own rice rather than just ship in 'Uncle Ben's' rice from Uncle Sam. Rice grown in Japan by real Japanese people on real rice terraces is much more expensive than rice churned out by U.S. agri-business. But do the U.S. agri-businesses have a right to demand free trade, pushing the Japanese small farmers out of business?
What sense does it actually make to do that? The product - rice - can be locally sourced with a lot of human effort gone into the production of it. This keeps people in Japan gainfully employed in agriculture. Japanese consumers also prefer the local product, it is more to their tastes.
Should this protectionism go on forever? Well, yes, it is not as if the local rice farmers in Japan are going to be competing for global exports.
So we have something similar with China and every other nation. I think that China are doing very well in tech thanks to the Great Firewall of China, they have versions of Wikipedia, Facebook, Google and Amazon - the world is richer for this diversity.
What is wrong with the U.S. approach to protectionism? They could be honest about Huawei and state that they wish to have domestic companies do 5G just because they have national interest to do so. They could be honest about their own 'Great Firewall' which is what the NSA is and be up front that the government feels it needs to spy on the citizens lest any of them get revolutionary thoughts.
The rest of the world is fine about U.S. protection of the pickup truck market. We get it - the U.S. needs Detroit and Detroit needs pickup trucks as they can't make competitive cars.
If the U.S. was claiming that Toyota and VW trucks were unsafe that would be wrong, that is what is going on with the Huawei situation, there are these allegations that are not substantiated by facts.
It is ridiculous that the U.S. is struggling with trade given how rich the country is from a land/resources point of view, how the U.S. owns the world's reserve currency and how almost all oil/energy has to be traded in USD. No other countries have these perks.
China has no territorial ambitions beyond Taiwan. This is benign, a bit like Ireland wanting Ulster back rather than Britain wanting to enslave India. They may peg their currency and have this Great Firewall, however, who is to say that they are wrong in not wanting their great nation to be ravaged by global capitalism? We just need to strike actual trade deals with China in the West, affording the Chinese people and their leaders some respect.