Levies don’t go far enough to eliminate reliance on foreign steel and aluminum, suggesting what’s really at work is plain old trade protectionism
.. You can’t make aluminum without bauxite, yet the U.S. is completely dependent on imports for bauxite; the last domestic mine closed nearly 30 years ago.
the U.S. has less than half the iron ore reserves of Russia and China “since we have been using up our iron ore at a substantial rate for more than 100 years” and U.S. ore has a much lower iron content than theirs. Stimulating domestic production via import tariffs, he said, will speed up the depletion of those reserves.
.. In fact, punishing trading partners can increase national security risk, which Mr. Horlick considers another lesson of the oil saga. After Eisenhower exempted Canada and Mexico from the quotas, Venezuela asked for the same, noting it had been a reliable supplier during World War II and hadn’t nationalized its industry, as Mexico had.
.. Venezuela’s oil minister went to Washington to propose a Western Hemisphere system under which Venezuela would be guaranteed a share of the U.S. market.
When he got nowhere, he traveled to the Middle East and helped found OPEC, which embargoed the U.S. in 1973.