You are arguing that a country is a closed system and that prosperity comes from overseas trade. This sounds essentially like the Marxist Zero-Sum theories of economics whereby my wealth inherently entails your beggarment, and the wealthy Western countries "owe" their prosperity to impoverishing the Third World.
But wealth is not from transactions, a false view encouraged by viewing the economy as equivalent to the GDP and the increase of consumption as entailing an increase in wealth (thus increasing defense spending makes us "wealthier" by this view, although it is little more than wasting capital and labor and essentially flushing their finished product down the drain). Nor is wealth an increase in money, since a country could simply inflate its way to wealth by running the printing presses were this so. Wealth is from the use of labor to transform resources and knowledge into fixed capital.
In other words, wealth is investment and an increase in fixed investments means an increase in wealth.
The role of Protectionism in this is to encourage inestment by capitalists in the home market so as to provide opportunities for gainful employment and an increase of investment at home, thus increasing the wealth and happiness of the Nation. The men who developed the American System, such as Hamilton and Webster said as much.
Viewed thusly, Protectionism is not opposed to trade. Trade is vitally important to secure things that country does not have, to exchange excess product in one field for tht which is scarce in another.
What Protectionism does aim at is the provision of gainful opportunities for the development of the Nation, the temporal goal of politics.
This can be seen quite simply in the modern American economy. The elimination of Protectionism has meant the mass transference of labor and capital from industrial occupations to service ones, especially retail sales and government. Are we really a "wealthier" country because we have 10 times the number of shoe stores that we might possibly need (just go look at your local mall and count them up), but we don't produce any shoes? Couldn't those excess shoe retailers be more gainfully employed for us as a nation making shoes? A shoe factory is essentially a mint - the more it is run, the more money it can get for its owners. A shoe store is just a middleman taking a cut of the final sale.
The argument of Free Trade is that we can ultimately be prosperous by not producing anything but simply by buying things back and forth from each other and importing our needs using either our stockpiled cash or by convincing foreigners to leave their cash with us by buying fixed assets. There is a limit to such nonesense.
Germany with all its education and culture failed to become rich in the 19th century because it did not trade like Britain.
This is a howler. Obviously Germany was extremely wealthy by 1900 since she produced more than Britain. Germany was also deeply involved in world trade, selling products abroad to be able to buy food and raw materials. In fact, Germany's new found wealth was a major cause of friction with Britain, a formerly friendly country. Britain's vendetta against Germany began once she woke up in 1890 and realized that the pastoral land of universities and poets had suddenly become the industrial dynamo of the Ruhr and Silesia, whose productive populace was gradually displacing British products from their markets around the world. "Germany is getting to strong, and we shall have to smash her."
Britain was able to have a semblance of a free trade system because of her colonies, which provided her access to all the raw materials she lacked herself, unlike Germany. This is what was meant by saying Britain had derived "all her wealth" from the colonies. America is similarly skating by today on the natural wealth of this continent.
Japan went from a nuked and conventional bombed out wreck at the end of World War II to an high standard of living by doing lots of foreign trade.
Are you and I on the same planet? Japan is a higly protectionist country, just as America, Germany, and Britain were leading up to their modern development. The development of Japan was driven by bringing in lots of overseas capital in the form of trade balance surplus earnings.