United States President Donald Trump has slapped 25 percent tariffs on all steel and aluminium imports in his latest push to reshape an international trading order that he claims is unfairly stacked against US manufacturers and workers.
Signing a series of executive orders to impose the tariffs on Monday, Trump said that US industry has been “pummelled by both friend and foe alike”.
“Our nation requires steel and aluminium to be made in America, not in foreign lands. We need to create in order to protect our country’s future,” Trump said as he signed the orders.
“It’s time for our great industries to come back to America. We want them back to America. This is the first of many.”
Trump said the tariffs, which he had floated on Sunday, would apply to all countries with “no exemptions, no exceptions”.
“This is a big deal,” Trump said. “This is the beginning of making America rich again.”
Trump’s latest tariffs, which are due to take effect on March 4, are all but certain to prompt retaliatory moves from affected countries, which include some of Washington’s closest allies, raising the likelihood of new trade skirmishes on multiple fronts.
“Trump’s latest tariffs on steel and aluminium are not enough by themselves to ignite a full-blown trade war, but it’s definitely an incremental move in that direction,” Gabriel Wildau, senior vice president at the global business advisory firm Teneo, told Al Jazeera.
“US trading partners in Europe and Asia are virtually certain to retaliate, but this retaliation is likely to take the form of comparably narrow sectoral tariffs.”
The US imported about $49bn worth of steel and aluminium in 2024, according to government data.
Canada was the biggest supplier of steel, followed by Mexico, Brazil, South Korea, Germany and Japan, according to the US International Trade Administration.
Canada was also the largest exporter of aluminium, with other major suppliers including the United Arab Emirates, South Korea and China.
Trump’s announcement prompted an almost immediate backlash in Canada.
“Trump wants us to lose our cool. But we need to stay united, with the right response,” Mark Carney, the frontrunner to replace outgoing Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as leader of the Liberal Party, said in a post on X.
“In the short term, Canada needs to manage foreign trade threats with dollar-for-dollar tariffs and support for our critical steel and aluminium workers.”
Trump has signalled that he will this week also announce reciprocal tariffs on countries that impose levies on US goods, without specifying which countries will be affected.
Those would come on top of Trump’s announcement of a 10 percent tariff on all Chinese goods, which came into effect last week, and 25 percent tariffs on Canadian and Mexican imports, which the US president agreed to suspend until March 1 after reaching a temporary deal to improve security on the US border.
Economists have warned that Trump’s broad-based tariffs will lead to higher prices for US consumers and risk setting off an escalating spiral of trade disputes that would dampen global economic growth, though the US president and his allies have argued that the levies will help revive domestic manufacturing and boost state coffers.
The Tax Foundation, a think tank based in Washington, DC, has estimated that Trump’s tariffs in 2018 and 2019 led to a 0.2 percent reduction in the gross domestic product (GDP).
Michael Stanaitis, a trade expert at the American University in Washington, DC, said the impact of Trump’s tariffs would be “very serious”.
“Unless the Trump administration offers numerous exemptions to US importers of steel and aluminium, US consumers can expect increased prices and production shortages, particularly in areas like the US auto industry, which routinely uses foreign inputs for domestic production,” Stanaitis told Al Jazeera.
“Assuming that US producers and consumers are unwilling to absorb the cost of tariffs, we will witness a challenging transition in the global economy as foreign producers determine how best to allocate resources in an attempt to absorb the excess global supply of steel and aluminium brought on by reduced US demand.”
Trump previously announced a 25 tariff on steel and a 10 percent aluminium imports from most countries during his first administration in 2018.
After initially exempting a host of US allies and friendly countries, Trump later that year extended the tariffs to the European Union, Canada and Mexico.
In 2019, the US president reached agreements with Canada, Mexico, Australia and Argentina to exempt their exports from the tariffs.
“Looking back to the first Trump administration, similar Section 232 tariffs on steel and aluminium tariffs, ostensibly justified by national security, were a prelude to broader Section 301 tariffs justified by complaints about intellectual property,” Wildau said.
“This time around, it remains to be seen if these relatively narrow tariffs are also a harbinger of things to come or just a self-contained skirmish. The outcome of the Trump administration’s interagency review assessing the causes of the US trade deficit, due by April 1, will be the key signpost to signal whether broader tariffs are coming.”
Despite insisting there would be no exemptions from the tariffs on Monday, Trump said he would give “great consideration” to excluding Australia from the measures after Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said earlier that the sides were in discussion about an exemption.
“We have a surplus with Australia, one of the few,” Trump said. “And the reason is they buy a lot of aeroplanes.”
Stanaitis, the American University professor, said Trump’s latest tariffs would cause “a lot of angst and tension” among the US’s trade partners.
“It will be similar to the tensions that arose from Trump’s threat to impose 25 percent tariffs on Canada and Mexico, but with a broader impact,” Stanaitis said.
“While countries like Canada and Mexico attempted to appease Trump in response to the narrower tariffs applied specifically to those countries, I would imagine broad tariffs like these could propel a movement toward trade liberalisation among US trade partners but without the US.”
