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.