How is it retaliation to destroy your own economy by making the same bad life choices? Isn't actual retaliation to just ignore the entire thing and thank the US for the extra percentage points in advantage you got for free?
Besides, this isn't at all the same. China isn't adding tariffs on the whole world like the US are.
So while tariffs will stop some importation of Chinese goods due to costs others are just going to cost more for consumers until the proposed US manufacturing capacity is build up.
Same with auto parts, even the US car makers rely on foreign made parts and have no real alternatives.
People assume there's going to be massive investments into what is essentially an uncertain market. A reversal of the capital outflows of the previous decades or something, dunno?
Why, exactly, would people from other countries chose to invest in the US when they could just keep their investments at home and/or engage with more reliable trading partners like the EU, South America or Asia?
This is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. The US can say it's tariff policy is whatever it wants but the administration is under constraints. If there was some extremely compelling data that the economic effects caused by the retaliatory tariffs would cause an overwhelming democratic victory at the midterms that would have a much bigger effect on policy than the formula for tariffs the administration wrote down. I am not predicting this definitely will happen but it is the kind of thing I am sure people are considering when they are imposing retaliatory tariffs.
When China applies tariffs against the US, the result is that China imports the goods it needs from other countries. For example, now that US soy is prohibitively expensive for Chinese importers, they can buy from Brazil (who China is not applying the same tariffs against).
In the case of the US, the US importers cannot switch to anyone else, since it decided to go full trade war against every single country.