One thing that hasn’t been made clear enough about President Trump’s imposition of tariffs on steel and aluminum imports is that those imports don’t threaten national security, as Trump claims. It’s obvious that he used the national security argument as a pretense for something he wanted to do, but for which he had no other legal justification. The national security argument is a sham and everyone knows it. A foreign government could reasonably argue in a WTO tribunal that the tariffs are purely protectionist measures disguised as an effort to protect national security. They could argue that Trump would not have let Canada and Mexico off the hook if he were really worried about national security.

Source: Forbes March 12, 2018 15:33 UTC