Corcoran,

While all the world’s trading nations, by deploying a freetrade ideological war machine that reaches back to Adam Smith, gang up on Donald Trump over his plans to impose steel and aluminum tariffs, here’s a question: Where have all these nations been over the past decade as the world’s steel industry spiralled into a massive overcapacity crisis?

President Trump and his mercantilist economic advisers may be spouting economic heresies in their threat to use tariff walls to stop the flow of steel and aluminum imports into the United States. As we have been incessantly reminded by international economic, legal and political commentators over the past few days, Trump’s tariffs would produce higher prices for American consumers and the risk of a global trade war. Trump may also be flouting World Trade Organization rules.

All that may be true, but that’s not much help in understanding that, when it comes to steel, Trump and the United States are on the right side of the trade war. A trade war is bad, but Trump is not the villain. He may, in fact, become the hero of the global economy if his actions can get the world’s steel-producing nations to do what they have so far refused to do: Find a way to reduce global steel-production capacity.

From the G20 to the OECD and the EU, from Canada’s House of Commons to United States trade officials and on to Communist Party leaders in Beijing, steel has been the subject of constant bureaucratic and political hand-wringing, consultations, conventions, forums and other talk-and-report fests for most of the last decade.

Steel has also been a nationalist, subsidized and protected industry in many countries for most of the last 100 years, a status that’s been hard to shake. The recent crisis was triggered by the 2008 economic collapse, which saw steel demand plunge. As demand recovered after 2008, the global capacity to produce steel soared, most of it in China. The usual snapshot statistic shows 2016 steelmaking capacity of 2,369 million metric tonnes (mmt) compared with demand of 1,628 mmt. The gap implies more 700 million metric