
The benefit of a tarrif on Tesla vs opening the market to China is that we can easily undo it if there is a US coup, Trump gets medicated, gets burned, whatever. There’s still the potential that this is a temporary situation, not the new reality. If we open up to a third party, we can’t put the genie back in the bottle.
Under the hypothesis that Russia influences Trump, the point is to drive a wedge between the USA and all other Western democracies, the same way it attempts to create conflict between factions within the USA and other democratic nations.