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What gets me is the hypocrisy of the US. If it's a US industry/company under threat then it's a national security issue. If a foreign country has any protectionist policies, then they're communists and subject to sanctions and/or invasion and/or having their government toppled.

I guess it's pretty straightforwardly self-serving, but surely all the other countries' economy's who get carelessly trashed constitute a bigger national security issue!

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I think the mistake you're making is that the protectionist policies of (say) the US and China are not remotely comparable. In particular, the whole reason the US needs steel and aluminium tariffs is that China has used protectionism and state subsidies to build a steel and aluminium industry so far in excess of what the country consumes that the surplus has tanked global prices. This is pretty much unprecidented. The US is not the only country that objects to this; the EU wanted to put tariffs on China a few years earlier but they couldn't agree on which goods the tariffs should apply to.

They do it because the people who vote for them eat it up. Politics is basically the "science" of hypocrisy. All you need is an easily impressionable audience, ideally with plenty of preconceived notions.

https://i.redd.it/gye28fevde011.jpg

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