Το Κογκρέσο πρέπει να ενεργήσει για να τερματίσει τον απερίσκεπτο προστατευτισμό του Trump

Besides being bad policy, the most grotesque aspect of the steel and aluminum tariffs imposed on Canada, Mexico, and the European Union is their justification on national security grounds, under Section 232 of the 1962 Trade Expansion Act. Congress should not turn a blind eye to the administration’s flimsy reasoning and its possible consequences, bound to be detrimental to national security.

True, the law confers on the president fairly broad powers to restrict trade while taking into account primarily the “domestic production needed for projected national defense requirements, the capacity of domestic industries to meet such requirements,” as well as the economic health of industries that are being threatened by “excessive imports.” But US presidents have not used those powers in decades. And as the Section 232 reports prepared by the Department of Commerce admit, US military production relies on only a small fraction of the domestic supply of steel and aluminum — around 3% in the case of steel.

What the two reports conveniently omit is the assessment of the impact of the two tariffs on industries that use steel and aluminum as inputs, which now face higher production costs. Some of those might also be important to national security — take the production of machinery, motor vehicles, fabricated metals, and so on. Trade Partnership, an economic consultancy, estimated that the tariffs could destroy 179,300 jobs across the US economy — or five per each job saved in the aluminum and steel industries.

Yesterday’s announcement from the White House did not even try to make any allusions to national security and instead noted in a self-congratulatory fashion that the existing tariffs already had “major, positive effects on steel and aluminum workers and jobs,” without providing details.

By adopting an overly generous view of the powers of his office, President Trump is following in the footsteps of his predecessor, who also had “a pen and a phone” — and who famously used “that pen to sign executive orders and take executive actions.” Congressional Republicans would make a fatal mistake if they became cheerleaders in that process in the same way as Democrats a few years before them.

Imposing steel and aluminum tariffs on America’s closest allies and friends is bad economic policy, it has already invited retaliation from the nation’s most important trading partners, and it will damage US partnerships around the world for years to come. Justifying it on national security grounds is shoddy and disingenuous. Don’t take it from me: Over one hundred House Republicans already saidso in March. If they have a modicum of self-respect, they will start working now on a bipartisan, veto-proof resolution that will put an end to the president’s reckless protectionist adventure.

Dalibor Rohac is a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he studies European political and economic trends. Specifically, he is working on Central and Eastern Europe, the European Union (EU) and the eurozone, US-EU relations, and the post-Communist transitions and backsliding of countries in the former Soviet bloc. He is concurrently a visiting junior fellow at the Max Beloff Centre for the Study of Liberty at the University of Buckingham in the UK and a fellow at the Institute of Economic Affairs in London.