A better one would be "the largest ys trading partners all had higher tariffs on the US goods than vice versa"

also ambiguous as had in this case suggests that might no longer be the case

Agreed. The character limit prevented 'impose' from fitting.

"Had" would have worked and provided better sense of tense. "Put" is a pain in the ass when it comes to setting tense by itself.

"make things fair" is a strange way to put "other countries hurt their consumers more, so we should too"

If tariffs were simply a matter of "whether or not we hurt our own consumers", there would be no debate about them anywhere; nobody would have any particular motivation to impose them, whereas in the real world it's clear there's some motivation that causes at least some imposition of tariffs to be nearly universal. Without implying any particular position is right, that's beyond an oversimplification that leaves you completely unable to look out into the world and even propose a theory that explains the current behavior of all the players, let alone validate one as correct.

The current narrative is that Trump is starting a trade war. But I have a hard time working out a way to define "trade war" in a way that does not have "trade war" occurring since long before Trump even began his campaign, unless your definition of "trade war" has a special pleading clause that just excludes the US for some reason and imposes a special, non-symmetric obligation on it for some reason that presumably contradicts the idea that the US isn't that special.

People just didn't know about the tariffs that already existed because the media didn't report on them, so politically, they didn't exist. (The idea that the media has this power but that it has not corrupted them is one I have a hard time understanding.)