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One topic that I was thinking about lately is regarding tariffs and some sort of hidden cognitive dissonance behind the whole policy. It seems to be a clash of different type of worldviews, one being the so called industrial policy, which is a policy where a nation creates favorable environment to grow domestic behemoths and grow their domestic economy. There are multiple examples of countries employing this type of policy such as South Korea, China or even Japan back in the day.
On the other side of the spectrum you have standard economic theory in favor of free trade. It has formidable range of theories for why this is ultimately the best policy, the most important one being the concept of comparative advantage.
Now to get back to the cognitive dissonance stuff, there is one huge question. If you are in the latter camp where you oppose tariffs and trade regulations - why are these people not against retaliatory tariffs? From this standpoint it seems as if you are shooting yourselves in the foot. If USA imposes tariffs on some goods like steel, then you can actually take advantage of that in free trade framework: buy state subsidized steel from USA to build your own infrastructure and factories for cheap, and then use this advantage to sell things you produce back. And even if USA decides for some broad tariff regime, it still enables you to use this advantage to sell goods to other countries. Under this framework the only country punished should be USA and the rest of the free trade world should be winners.
The other side of the cognitive dissonance is that in fact at least during last few decades a lot of economists are actually pro industrial policy. You can easily find articles like these where protective measures are praised. The same goes for EU, which explicitly aims to subsidize certain industries.
I think that the most interesting example here is China, which especially subsidies the basic production capacities: energy, steel, concrete, basic chemicals etc. These basic commodities tend to "supercharge" the rest of the economy, mostly as they are hard to transport and thus create at least local monopolies. It also benefits and/or suffers from so called double marginalization problem, as costs of goods at the bottom of supply chain propagate positively/negatively throughout the rest of the economy. Moreover creating complete supply chain in certain place increases intangible "know how". You can then have experts on the whole supply chain working collaboratively with each other to produce superior goods cheaper. Think of Detroit being the old car hub or Silicon Valley as a hub for software or Hollywood for entertainment industry.
To be frank I am leaning more into industrial policy side now, especially since COVID-19. Noah Smith has an article defending such a policy for national security reasons. But in the end with how complicated the supply chains are, this becomes almost an impossible conundrum. Just take chip production issue: you have to have mining facilities for pure silicon and other valuable minerals. Then you have to have companies designing new chips in research labs. Then you have companies capable of producing highly sophisticated lithographs capable of producing high-end chips, such as ASML in Netherlands. Then you have to have companies capable of producing said chips such as TSMC in Taiwan. The whole system is very fragile and even one of the chains in the links proves security risk. The same goes for pharmaceutics or other technologies.
If states were a single economic entity, then one would really need game theory to explain why harming yourself plus the party that defected from free trade would be a good idea. But states are generally not a single economic entity.
For consumer goods, a simplified model would be that a state contains both industry which builds consumer goods -- cars, smartphones, TVs and the like -- and people which buy such things.
The consumer side -- which will bear the impact of import tariffs -- has a coordination problem. If everyone has to pay 50$ more for a smartphone, that is not worth anyone's time to really get upset about. This is especially true because the consumer might not even know what fraction of the prices they are paying is tariffs. And of course, they also will not see the international competition which decided not to compete in their domestic market in the first place. Even for major investments like cars, it is hard to get upset if you don't know what offers you might be missing.
The supply side -- both the workers and the owners of the factories -- has no such coordination problem. If a small minority in a country is losing their jobs due to tariffs imposed by another country, that is very likely to result in political action.
In net, import tariffs hurt your own consumers and foreign producers, but because nobody cares about the trivial pain of a lot of consumers, they can be treated as mostly hurting the foreign producers.
In other areas, things work differently and a state is closer to a single economic entity. For example, for military hardware or critical means of production (such as the lithography machines you mentioned), things are reversed. China does not go: "Europe, if you impose a tariff on our electric cars, we will retaliate by placing high tariffs on ASML", as that would hurt their semiconductor industry far more than it would hurt a niche European company. Instead, strategic concerns dominate here. If you buy weapon systems, you want to be reasonable certain that you will still get ammo for them in conflicts which you anticipate. If you sell weapons, the strategic impact of them will likely be a more important consideration than just making a quick buck. I guess on the buyers side, strategic considerations might work kind of like a tariff -- if country A would be indifferent between buying a 50M$ fighter jet from country B or a 100M$ jet from country C, this could be seen as a 100% tariff on fighter jets from country B (imposed by and paid for by country A, so no money is changing hands). Of course, on the supply side of things, often it is "we will not sell the AI chips / ICBMs to you for any price you would care to pay" instead.
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