President Trump recently initiated two separate investigations into whether the U.S. national security is threatened by artificially inflated global supplies of steel and aluminum, which he attributes to excessive Chinese production. Affirmative findings would give the president statutory authority to raise import barriers to protect domestic sources. But invoking national security to justify protectionism is an extreme measure—the “nuclear option” of international trade law—that would generate some undesirable consequences for U.S.-China relations, as well as for the rules-based trading system itself.
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