Economic Security Is Weakened When Presidents Tilt At Steel Mills
(Originally published at Forbes .) On the third day of his first term in office, President Trump committed a monumental foreign policy error that undermines U.S. economic security to this day. By withdrawing the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a 12-nation agreement to strengthen trade and investment ties with countries around China’s periphery, Trump extinguished with the stroke of a pen important leverage that could have deterred Beijing’s coercive and subversive behavior of the past decade. In the waning days of his tenure, President Biden can mitigate the consequences of Trump’s geopolitical blunder and reinforce his own administration’s “latticework” of initiatives to strengthen alliances in the Indo-Pacific by simply not blocking Nippon Steel’s acquisition of the United States Steel Corporation. But recent leaks suggesting that Biden intends to block the deal call into question the sincerity of his administration’s commitments to U.S. allies and improvin...