But in general, my argument isn’t about some specific countries, but instead about specific products. A company in Mongolia selling to EU could either not give their employees medical insurance and sell widgets to EU for €50 + 100% tariffs, or treat their employees by EU standards and sell widgets for €100 and no tariffs. The ideal tariffs would exactly balance that (while still allowing Mongolian widgets to be cheaper because of lower wages because of lower cost of living.)
there are ways to mitigate the growing pains of economic development but to prevent it completely is not a solution. nearly all industrial nations have, at some point in their history, gone through the whole process - discovering necessary safety standards, methods to encourage cooperation and where it fails, enforcement and legal repercussions remedies and punishment, etc... that really ought to be hyper-local and community-specific in their implementation. first world governments are fully complicit in preventing emerging nations from developing this themselves.
Consider Mongolia, perhaps they want to match EU employment standards but can't afford do. What are they suppose to do?
Suppose a democracy decided on different employment standards, should EU ban imports from US due to EU having higher standards of employee and environmental protection? How big does the difference have to be?
Does your free trade "fairness" account for the advantages US gets from being a global center of finance?
For disadvantages Vietnam has from being a recent colony and having a devastating war?
Does a country with loads of natural resources, or elderly population, or struck by natural disaster change the calculus?
Is this a robust rule you would like to see implemented, or is it just justifying current politics?