> Some people don't like protectionism because in the long term it's worse for both countries. You have a short term benefit of protecting a handful of jobs in exchange for vastly more expensive goods for everyone as well as more expensive inputs to your other products undercutting other local industries

Expensive goods only result from half-assed protectionism. When governments go the whole nine yards, such as with China's PV and EV industries, or the US with agricultural subsidies, it results in very cheap products and inputs to other products. Corn syrup is an ingredient to a lot of American food items because it's a cheap sweetener due to all the subsidies as the government decided, many decades ago, that American farmers should be shielded from competition. Some decisions make sense in the realm of national strategy and geopolitics, and not pure economics. The US would be very different if it had started to import the bulk of it's corn from Ukraine in the late 1990s