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 measures 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 and are due to take effect on March 4, would apply to all countries and there would be “no exemptions, no exceptions”.
Trump’s latest tariffs 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 wars on multiple fronts.
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.
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 reachedb agreements with Canada, Mexico, Australia and Argentina to exempt their exports from the tariffs.
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.
“These tariffs will cause a lot of angst and tension among US trading partners,” Stanaitis, the American University professor, said.
“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. 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.”
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