These Are Some of Trump’s Weapons in His Trade Fight With China

President Donald Trump says he’s on a mission to save American industrial jobs, cut China’s trade surplus with the U.S. and strike back at what he says have been decades of theft of intellectual property by Chinese businesses. Under past U.S. presidents, the preferred trade tool was filing cases at the World Trade Organization’s Dispute Settlement Body, where they can take three to five years to fully resolve. Trump has dipped into a different, much more immediate arsenal of weapons, most of them under the rationale that trade affects national security.

This allows the president to adjust imports without a vote by Congress should the Department of Commerce find evidence of a national-security threat from foreign shipments. After Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, a former steel tycoon, declared that such a threat exists in the metals industry, Trump levied tariffs of 25 percent on imported steel and 10 percent on imported aluminum. The U.S. law doesn’t define “national security,” so the president has wide latitude to determine a threat. Advocates of the Section 232 action on steel, for instance, said a weakened U.S. steel industry would be less ready to build tanks and other weaponry should a military crisis arise. The U.S. has said it’s also investigating national-security implications of importing automobiles.