After ignoring for months his campaign promise to impose tariffs, President Trump announced last week that he would slap an across-the-board, 25-percent duty on steel imports and a 10 percent levy on aluminum imports. The president claims that his decision was motivated by considerations of national security: a Commerce Department report suggests that domestic steel production might be inadequate for military needs. And some unfair trade practices are also at the root of this decision—Chinese dumping of cheap steel on the global market, especially. The report offered several options for addressing the problem; Trump chose the most severe and broad-based one.
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