Today is Super Bowl Monday, which really ought to be a holiday or at least a half-day. Also, Valentine’s Day is Friday, so you may want to think about your plans now. President Trump is announcing new tariffs on steel and aluminum, and these are a little easier to justify as an anti-China move, even though the forthcoming tariffs will hit every country exporting steel to the United States. Elsewhere, the consequences of a president who changes his mind a lot, the U.S. secretary of defense calls someone “dude,” and a little-noticed detail about the family of President Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine and Russia.
Steel Tariffs Look Like a Protectionist Move, but They’re an Anti-China Move
Before you chew over President Trump’s latest plan for 25 percent tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, you need to understand the background of the global steel market. And it all starts with a long-running Chinese housing and construction boom coming to an end.
Back in August, Hu Wangming, the chairman of the world’s biggest steel producer, China’s Baowu Steel Group declared conditions in China’s steel sector are like a “harsh winter” that will be “longer, colder and more difficult to endure than we expected.”
But China still has a steel production industry designed to fuel a housing boom, and a whole lot of jobs, money, and supply chains rely on that industry humming along at that level of capacity. After Wangming’s grim forecast, trade lawyers Adam Teslik and Alan Price wrote the harsh winter is “not the unexpected result of sudden market downturns. It is the inevitable consequence of decades of failed industrial policy and generous government financial support driving overcapacity that China’s planners are unwilling or unable to confront.”
Realigning the Chinese supply of steel with the level of domestic demand would require shutting down “around 30 percent of its steel industry, at least according to some of its own companies’ estimates,” Teslik and Price wrote. “But as long China’s policymakers have outlets to force those painful decisions onto other countries, we can expect that they will continue to do so, just like they have in the past.”
And forcing those painful decisions onto other countries is exactly what China is doing. To hear the American steel industry tell it, China is trying to put them out of business by producing way too much steel and selling it at price below the cost of production. But it’s not just U.S. steelmakers making that argument. Just about every steelmaker outside of China is complaining that they’re being forced to complete with Chinese exports that are being sold at a loss.
“It’s not that Chinese steel is more competitive. . . . They just are able to keep selling steel even at prices at which they lose money, which is obviously unfair competition,” T. V. Narendran, the CEO of Mumbai-India-based Tata Steel, told Reuters in November.
Japan and European steelmakers are seeing the same thing, according to The Economist:
Each year, China makes as much steel as the rest of the world combined. The vast scale of its output — around 1 billion tonnes a year — is obscured by the fact that most of it stays in the country. Lately, however, China’s exports of the metal have surged, reaching 90 million tonnes in 2023, up by 35 percent on the previous year. That may be a fraction of China’s total production, but it is more than what America or Japan make in a year. And it is enough to build a thousand Golden Gate bridges.
With China’s economy struggling, its steelmakers are selling abroad at bargain prices, to the distress of foreign competitors and politicians alike. Last month Nippon Steel, Japan’s biggest steelmaker, called on the government to impose anti-dumping duties on Chinese imports. In the quarter to June its net profit shrank by 11% year on year. ArcelorMittal, Europe’s steelmaking champion, has been hit even harder: its net profit for the same period was down by 73 percent. “We want fair competition, and we know that the competition against China is not fair,” says Genuino Christino, the company’s chief financial officer. Such complaints tend to carry weight with politicians.
Compared to Trump’s recent across-the-board tariffs on neighbors Canada and Mexico, a tariff on Chinese steel is comparably much easier to justify. But they’re already in place; In March 2018, Trump imposed a 25 percent tariff on steel and aluminum, and Joe Biden kept them in place, making Chinese steel expensive to import. As a result, the U.S. doesn’t really import much steel from China.
The U.S. is the world’s second largest steel importer, as of 2023; the U.S. imported 25.6 million metric tons of steel, an 8.7 percent decrease from 2022. A bit more than 6 million metric tons came from Canada, a little under 4 million metric tons came from Mexico, and 3.5 million metric tons came from Brazil. (Interestingly, the U.S. imports about the same amount of steel from China as it does from Taiwan, roughly a half-million metric tons.)
According to the American Iron and Steel Institute, the U.S. produced 1.6 million net tons of steel in the week leading up to February 1; according to the organization, the “capability utilization rate” was 74.4 percent. The amount of steel produced in the U.S. in 2024 declined slightly from 2023.
Protectionists argued the tariffs enacted on steel back in 2018 were a success, because the U.S. imported less steel than before. (Let’s also point out that stretch includes the highly unusual economic dislocation from the Covid pandemic.)
But as our Dominic Pino laid out, it was largely driven by companies using less steel than before:
The U.S. International Trade Commission found a brief increase in metal output in 2020 and 2021, but that increase of $2.2 billion was overwhelmed by a $3.5 billion decline in output by metal-consuming industries. “So overall, ITC’s estimate was that between 2017 and 2021, the tariffs had increased the metals production relative to a no-tariff scenario, but left the overall U.S. manufacturing sector a bit smaller,” Gresser writes.
Since then, U.S. steel and aluminum consumption has declined even though the economy has grown. “From 2012 to 2017, the U.S. economy used an average of 100 million tons of steel and 5.23 million tons of aluminum per year,” Gresser writes. “The 2023 U.S. economy, though about 10% bigger in constant, inflation-adjusted dollars than that of 2017, used only 93 million tons of steel and 4 million tons of aluminum — respectively 7% less and 20% less than before.”
The kicker from Gresser: “Though imports remain close to the levels the Commerce Department’s 2018 reports envisioned, U.S. metal production has fallen back to pre-tariff levels.”
The world has 193 countries, but only 64 produce steel in a significant way. Roughly 129 countries can import cheap Chinese steel with little downside, as there’s no domestic steel industry threatened by those cheap imports. But those 63 countries besides China face a tough choice: Allow China to sell dirt-cheap steel that will eventually drive their own domestic steel industry under, or enact tariffs that will make that Chinese steel cost a price comparable to that of domestic producers. As the New York Times notes, “Brazil, Canada, Indonesia and Turkey have all raised tariffs sharply in the past year on steel from China.”
Note that today’s tariffs are on all producers, not just those in China. But at least here Trump has identified an indisputable problem and a genuinely unfair Chinese trade practice that is disrupting the global steel markets.
The Problem with a President Who Changes His Mind a Lot
When Michael Brendan Dougherty was arguing with Charlie Cooke and Noah Rothman about Trump’s on-again-off-again tariffs on Canada and Mexico, he wrote:
I can hear the objection now. But Trump said! But Trump said!
Yeah, Trump said. Most of us have gotten canny on this. Even most of us here at National Review. You can tell that the dander is up because the particular issue is tariffs; we have long since stopped judging Trump and his rhetoric this way on other issues. Consider Panama breaking its deal with China and committing to cooperation with the United States. If we held Trump to the standard Charlie and Noah did on tariffs, then Trump’s inaugural address, promising that we would take back the canal, would have kicked off a “crisis” about the imminent invasion of Panama and repossession of the canal. So too his repeated vows not to rule out military options.
Yeah, we noticed; Trump says a lot of stuff, and then shortly thereafter insists he never meant anything of the sort. Back when Trump was announcing the big plans for “Mar-a-Gaza,” he had this exchange with a reporter (abbreviated for clarity, you can watch it here):
Q: Mr. President, given what you’ve said about Gaza, did/would the U.S. send troops to help secure uh the security vacuum?
Trump: [After talking about Saudi Arabia] As far as Gaza is concerned, we’ll do what is necessary. If it’s necessary, we’ll do that. We’re going to take over that piece.
The question of U.S. military force in Gaza was put to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who obviously refused to rule anything in or out:
As the man tasked with leading the Defense Department here, we’re prepared to look at all options. . . . The president in is involved in very complex and high-level negotiations of great consequence to both the United States and the state of Israel. And we look forward to working with our allies our counterparts both diplomatically and militarily to look at all options, but we certainly would not get ahead of the president or provide any details about what we may or may not doing. Dude, that’s just bad military mind[set].”
(Yes, in a milestone for X-lennials rising to positions of leadership, the U.S. Secretary of Defense called someone “dude” when speaking to the media.)
Then on Thursday on Truth Social, Trump wrote, “No soldiers by the U.S. would be needed! Stability for the region would reign!!!”
Trump’s description of “the plan” on any given issue can change from day to day.
I don’t think this is a good thing; while there’s a time and place for strategic ambiguity, it’s generally better for everyone if the president says what he means and means what he says. It’s fair to argue, “Watch what Trump does, and don’t get so wrapped up in what he says he’s going to do.” The problem is that when you’re the president, people are going to react to what you say — friends, allies, enemies, the markets, etc.
ADDENDA: Thanks to Howard Kurtz for having me on his MediaBuzz program on Fox News Channel yesterday, as well as NR’s Caroline Downey!
Over in that other Washington publication I write for, something that is not a secret, but I don’t think has been reported anywhere else: President Donald Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine and Russia, retired Lieutenant General Keith Kellogg, has a daughter, Meaghan Mobbs, president of the R.T. Weatherman Foundation and a graduate of West Point:
The Ukrainians might not have a better friend than Mobbs. The R.T. Weatherman Foundation has been present in Ukraine since the start of the war. Its efforts include establishing and running a logistics hub on the Romania-Ukraine border and delivering more than 10,000 pallets of medicines, medical supplies and other aid to over 70 aid organizations and hospitals in Ukraine.
Besides delivering aid, the foundation helps evacuate American volunteer soldiers fighting in Ukraine to the U.S. military’s Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, where they can receive specialized medical care. It also repatriates the bodies of American volunteers killed in combat.
Mobbs stands at the not-so-common confluence of pro-Trump and pro-Ukraine America.
Now, as I write in the column, Kellogg is his own man and Mobbs her own woman. There’s no guarantee that the father always agrees with the daughter, and vice versa. But this does not sound like a family interested in giving Putin a great deal.