Canada, European Union pledge countermeasures against US steel, aluminum tariffs
"Trump Plans Tariffs on Steel and Aluminum and Markets Slump"
* President Donald Trump announced that the U.S. would soon impose new tariffs on imports of steel and aluminum.
* These tariffs would hit Canada particularly hard as it is the largest source of imports for both metals.
* Both the European Commission and Canadian officials pledge to draft retaliatory measures in the near future.
Christine Wang | @christiiineeee Published 1 Hour Ago Updated 43 Mins Ago CNBC.com
Kevin Lamarque | Reuters
President Donald Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau walk from the Oval Office to the Residence of the White House in Washington, U.S. February 13, 2017.
President Donald Trump's .. https://www.cnbc.com/donald-trump/ .. announcement of new tariffs was met with swift criticism overseas and promises of countermeasures.
Canadian officials pledged to respond to U.S. tariffs with their own measures. Canadian Trade Minister Francois-Phillippe Champagne said these tariffs would be "unacceptable." He pledged to defend Canadian workers in the steel and aluminum industry.
Chrystia Freeland, Canada's minister of foreign affairs, said these trade restrictions would hurt workers and manufacturers on both sides of the border. She said it is inappropriate for the U.S. to view any trade with Canada as a national security threat.
From 2013 to 2016, Canada was the largest source of of aluminum imports to the U.S., according to a U.S. Geological Survey report. Canada also accounts for the largest share of U.S. steel imports, according to the International Trade Administration.
Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission, said the European Union will "react firmly and commensurately" to defend its interests. He asserted that this move aggravates problems in the steel industry and isn't justified by national security interests.
"We will not sit idly while our industry is hit with unfair measures that put thousands of European jobs at risk," Juncker said in a statement.
He also said that in the coming days the European Commission will propose "countermeasures against the U.S. to rebalance the situation."
Tariffs on the metals mark another step in the ongoing push for protectionist policies that helped Trump win the White House. The president has repeatedly thrashed free-trade deals struck by his predecessors, arguing they hurt American workers, and has pledged to make trade more fair to the United States.
Gary Cohn to Resign as Trump’s Top Economic Adviser
"Trump Plans Tariffs on Steel and Aluminum and Markets Slump [...] Gary D. Cohn, the director of the National Economic Council, had been lobbying for months alongside others, including Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Rob Porter, the staff secretary who recently resigned under pressure from the White House, to kill, postpone or at least narrow the scope of the measures, people familiar with the discussions said."
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Gary D. Cohn, the president’s top economic adviser, last month at the White House. Officials insisted there was no single factor behind his departure. Credit Tom Brenner/The New York Times
"Trump Plans Tariffs on Steel and Aluminum and Markets Slump"
By Paul Krugman
Opinion Columnist
May 28, 2018
President Trump is using national security as a pretext for some tariffs while inexplicably ignoring it when it comes to a Chinese company. Doug Mills/The New York Times
Remember “The Manchurian Candidate .. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Manchurian_Candidate ”? The 1959 novel, made into a classic 1962 film (never mind the remake), involved a plot to install a Communist agent as president of the United States. One major irony was that the politician in question was modeled on Senator Joe McCarthy — that is, he posed as a superpatriot even while planning to betray America.
It all feels horribly relevant these days. But don’t worry: This isn’t going to be another piece on Donald Trump’s collusion with Russia, which is being ably covered by other people. What I want to talk about instead are Trump’s actions on international trade — which are starting to have a remarkably similar feel.
On one side, the “Make America Great Again” president is pursuing protectionist policies, supposedly in the name of national security, that will alienate many of our democratic allies. On the other side, he seems weirdly determined to prevent action against genuine national security threats posed by foreign dictatorships — in this case China. What’s going on?
Some background: International trade is governed by a system of multinational agreements .. http://guides.ll.georgetown.edu/c.php?g=363556&p=4108235 .. that countries are not supposed to break unilaterally. But when that system was created (under U.S. leadership) in 1947, its framers realized that it had to have a bit of flexibility, a few escape valves to let off political pressure. So nations were allowed to impose tariffs and other trade barriers under certain limited conditions, like sudden import surges.
Meanwhile, the U.S. created a domestic system of trade policy designed to be consistent with these international rules. Under that system, the White House can initiate investigations into possible adverse effects of imports and, if it chooses, impose tariffs or other measures on the basis of these investigations.
Historically, however, this national security exemption has been invoked very rarely, precisely because it’s so open-ended. If the U.S. or any other major player began promiscuously using dubious national security arguments to abrogate trade agreements, everyone else would follow suit, and the whole trading system would fall apart. That’s why there have been only a handful of Section 232 investigations over the past half century — and most of them ended .. https://www.bis.doc.gov/index.php/forms-documents/section-232-investigations/86-section-232-booklet/file .. with a presidential determination that no action was warranted.
The idea that imported cars pose a national security threat is absurd. We’re not about to refight World War II, converting auto plants over to the production of Sherman tanks. And almost all the cars we import come from U.S. allies. Clearly, Trump’s invocation of national security is a pretext, a way to bypass the rules that are supposed to limit arbitrary executive action.
And their economic side effects aside, the proposed auto tariffs would further undermine our allies’ rapidly eroding faith in U.S. trustworthiness.
Which is not to say that national security should never be a consideration in international trade. On the contrary, there’s a very clear-cut case right now: the Chinese company ZTE, which makes cheap phones and other electronic goods.
And if we do have a president who’s bribable, that’s going to give dictators a leg up over democracies, which can’t do that sort of thing because they operate under the rule of law.
Of course, there might be other explanations. Maybe President Xi Jinping told Trump that he needed to abase himself on this issue to get a trade deal he can call a “win.” Somehow this doesn’t sound much better.
Whatever the true explanation, what we’re getting is Manchurian trade policy: a president using obviously fake national security arguments to hurt democratic allies, while ignoring very real national security concerns to help a hostile dictatorship.
"Trump Plans Tariffs on Steel and Aluminum and Markets Slump " [...] "The Commerce Department investigation, which was started under an obscure measure of the trade law called Section 232, has focused on whether imports were compromising American national security by degrading the industrial base. In a report released to the public in February, the department concluded that imports were a national security threat.
Trade lawyers have been particularly concerned about the tariffs because they revolve around national security concerns, which legal experts describe as the “nuclear option” of trade. The United States has not used Section 232 to carry out a trade investigation since 2001, and those investigations have only resulted in trade barriers twice in the law’s nearly 40-year history .. https://piie.com/commentary/op-eds/trump-new-kind-protectionist-he-operates-stealth-mode"
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