WASHINGTON — President Trump’s advisers insist that the economics profession

is solidly behind the administration’s threat to impose tariffs on hundreds of

billions of dollars of Chinese imports. Many top economists say, no, they’re not.

Across the ideological spectrum, trade experts and former top economic advisers to
presidents say Mr. Trump is right to highlight issues on which China is widely
viewed as an offender, such as intellectual-property theft and access to its domestic
market. But many of those experts say Mr. Trump’s planned tariffs would backfire
— by raising costs to American businesses and consumers, and by inviting
retaliation against American exporters. They say he would better serve his purposes
by enlisting international allies in a pressure campaign against Beijing.

“Many economists have said, yeah, there’s some legitimate issues here,” said Laura
D. Tyson, an economist at the Haas School of Business of the University of
California, Berkeley, who headed the Council of Economic Advisers under
President Bill Clinton. “I haven’t seen any who have said the appropriate response
is a series of tariffs on a bunch of goods, most of which don’t have any real link to
the underlying issue.”

Ms. Tyson and many other economists say it was mistake last year when Mr.
Trump pulled the United States out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Proponents of
that agreement say it would have unified a dozen countries against the Chinese on
trade issues.

“I don’t think the way the administration is going about it is a particularly strategic
one,” said David Autor, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist whose
research suggests that opening trade with China cost the United States two million
jobs in the late 1990s and early 2000s. “The first way to go about it should have
been to sign TPP, which was set up as a bulwark against China.”

Mr. Trump has long railed against Chinese trade practices, and he has long
criticized previous presidents for their approach to the issue. This year, he has
pushed aggressively on the issue. He levied tariffs on imported steel and aluminum
that were largely viewed as a shot at Chinese oversupply of those metals. Then he
proposed as much as $150 billion in tariffs on other imports from China.

His advisers have stressed that economists largely agree with Mr. Trump that the
Chinese are stealing American intellectual property and restricting access to their
market in ways that put American companies at a disadvantage.

“No free-market guy, no free-trade guy disagrees on this subject,” Larry Kudlow,
the new director of the National Economic Council, said on CNN’s “State of the
Union” on Sunday. “The guild, if you will, the brethren of the economic profession
have all agreed that something has to be done.”
Peter Navarro, the director of Mr. Trump’s Office of Trade and Manufacturing
Policy, told NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday that “what we have here is a
situation where every American understands that China is stealing our intellectual
property, they’re forcing the transfer of our technology when companies go to
China, and by doing that, they steal jobs from America, they steal factories from
America, and we run an unprecedented $370-billion-a-year trade deficit in goods.
This is an unsustainable situation.”

Many economists agree that China needs to be confronted on several trade issues,
though very few share Mr. Trump’s fixation on the United States’ trade deficit with
China. Most say bilateral trade deficits are not a good measure of market access or
the fairness of trade agreements.

“I think the basic issue that the Trump administration is pointing to — the lack of
intellectual-property protection — is a serious one, particularly for the United
States,” said N. Gregory Mankiw, a Harvard economist who headed President
George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers. “It’s a completely serious and
appropriate issue for the administration to be concerned with.”

What worries Mr. Mankiw and others is Mr. Trump’s threat of tariffs, which
administration officials have portrayed both as a bargaining chip and as a policy
Mr. Trump would certainly carry through on.

Because tariffs would raise prices for American businesses and consumers that buy
imported goods, “you’re hurting yourself if you follow through with it,” Mr. Mankiw
said. “It just seems to me to be a not very smart threat to be making, given that it
would not be rational to follow through with it.”

Economists who don’t like tariffs but favor action against China largely say the
United States should be forming a multinational coalition to confront the Chinese.

“Any good strategy has to include getting other countries on your side,” said Jason
Furman, an economist at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government who headed
the Council of Economic Advisers under President Barack Obama. “If it’s the
United States versus China, we’re similar-sized economies. If it’s the United States
and the world versus China, that’s not something China can win.”

Mr. Furman, Mr. Mankiw and others said the United States should continue to
press its case against China before the World Trade Organization — a strategy that
Mr. Navarro and other advisers to Mr. Trump say has not produced favorable
results in the past. The economists who disagree with the administration’s
approach also stress, frequently, that joining the Trans-Pacific Partnership would
have given the United States leverage in this dispute.

Since Mr. Trump quit the pact, 11 other countries have forged ahead on it. He said
this year that he would reconsider joining the agreement if it was renegotiated to
benefit the United States more substantially.
“It’s obviously a terrible mistake” to have quit the agreement, said Austan
Goolsbee, an economist at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business and
another past chairman of Mr. Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers. “This was a
coalition of the vast majority of the economies of Asia outside of China, agreeing to
principles exactly of the form that we’re now saying that we want. We would be in a
lot better situation if we had all of those people on our side.”

Mr. Trump’s unilateral approach, including his tariff threats, has drawn qualified
support from at least one unlikely high-profile economist: Martin Feldstein, of
Harvard, a chairman of President Ronald Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers.

Mr. Feldstein began a syndicated op-ed column last month, on the subject of Mr.
Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs, by declaring, “Like almost all economists and
most policy analysts, I prefer low trade tariffs or no tariffs at all.” But he went on to
criticize China’s intellectual-property policies and predict that the United States
“cannot use traditional remedies for trade disputes or World Trade Organization
procedures to stop China’s behavior.”

American negotiators, Mr. Feldstein wrote, would use tariff threats “as a way to
persuade China’s government to abandon the policy of ‘voluntary’ technology
transfers.”

“If that happens, and U.S. firms can do business in China without being compelled
to pay such a steep competitive price,” he continued, “the threat of tariffs will have
been a very successful tool of trade policy.”