Countries decided the extent to which they’d like to engage in free trade together. It is a knob that we’d hope our leaders would turn strategically. (Regardless of whether or not we think our leaders actually are doing a good job of it…).
Is the goal also to hurt South Korean businesses and all businesses in the world, just to "pwn China" basically?
There is always a ton of risk involved with protectionism. Primarily whether your taxpayer-subsidized domestic jobs and hypothetical national security risk significantly outweighs all the very real economic costs.
I'd love to hear your examples of this happening. For $22K you can get a BYD Dolphin Surf in Europe. And that's a pretty small car. What are you paying $60K for in the US that's the same size?
Maybe let's try a different match up. The BYD Atto 3 seems to start around 40K in Europe. It's smaller than a Model Y, and people say it is slightly lower in market position, but close enough. The Model Y starts at around 40K as well.
Are the comparisons between expensive US cars (remember the average is just above 50K, and plenty of perfectly good cars like a Honda Civic can be had for half that) and Chinese cars in China?
So it's really just tariffs and taxes making it that expensive elsewhere.
To be fair, @dmix explicitly mentioned the $20k price was for other countries
I'm not saying it justifies the price difference, but there are changes between the cars.
So no, they are the Euro spec car.
Trump's America First in practice relies on a near-sided and overly simplistic understanding of the world (Win-lose, whatever is benefitting others must be a hinderance to the USA). Hence fighting the tariff wars against allies (Canada, Eu). Hence destroying Nato' credibility that was carefully built for 70 years. Hence ceasing to be Ukraine's ally (but continuing to be a trade partner, that sells weapons as long as Europe is paying). Hence helping Putin. Hence instigating problems with Taiwan if that means that TSMC will move some manufacturing to the USA.
It's a really miopic view, but at least on their part the behavior is intentional (consequences, on the other hand, are surprise for them).