Steel again. It’s always steel. The proximate cause of Donald Trump’s decision to double steel and aluminium tariffs on Wednesday morning to 50 per cent — one of the few recent duty increases he hasn’t pulled out of — was most likely fury at last week’s federal court ruling against the broader (and wrongly named) “reciprocal” tariffs.
But it’s so familiar for the US — indeed for many governments — to be protecting the sector from imports that steel tariffs are a natural weapon to reach for to signal trade defiance. With some justification, successive US administrations have argued that the long-standing global steel overproduction has worsened and will worsen further because of the impact of Chinese state subsidies. But the US has also displayed so much protectionist bad faith over the industry that, Trump or no, America isn’t the country to fix it.
