Trump gives OK for steel tariffs – but will Britain be spared?

DONALD Trump last night signed orders to impose controversial tariffs on foreign steel and aluminium, defying Us allies who warned it could spark a trade war.

Mr Trump says a 25 per cent tariff will be added to steel and a 10 per cent tariff will apply to aluminum.

The Us president was surrounded by steel and aluminum workers as he explained his decision at a White House ceremony.

He signed separate proclamations ordering the tariffs. He said the levies will take effect in about 15 days. He singled out Germany for criticism, while saying Australia, Canada and Mexico could be exempt.

He said: ‘We have a very close relationship with Australia, we have a trade surplus with Australia, great country, a long term partner.

‘We’ll be doing something with them,’ he said. ‘We’ll be doing something with some other countries.’ Downing street would like Britain, anxious to agree a post-Brexit trade deal with the Us, to be one of those ‘other countries’.

However, UK officials have been unable to find a legal means of achieving that while it remains inside the EU.

Mr Trump indicated his tariff order would give him the authority to raise or lower levies on a country-by-country basis, adding or removing countries from the list as he deems fit.

More than 100 Republicans had written to Mr Trump urging him to drop the tariff plan. Even the leaders of America’s aluminium industry were opposed to the idea. Just days after tearing into the union and its ‘horrible’ trade barriers, Mr Trump turned his ire on Germany, the EU’s biggest economy.

He accused them of behaving ‘unfairly’ by contributing much less than the Us towards the funding of Nato.

‘We have some friends and some enemies where we have been tremendously taken advantage of over the years on trade and on military,’ he added.

‘If you look at Nato, where Germany pays one percent and we are paying 4.2 percent of a much bigger GDP – that’s not fair,’ he said. ‘so we view trade and we view the military, and to a certain extent, they go hand in hand.’

The president has claimed that the EU has ‘made it almost impossible for us to do business with them’ by putting up trade barriers that unfairly handicap American products.

The union has hit back by threatening to put tariffs on Us products ranging from motorcycles to whisky.

Mr Trump, who was elected on a promise to put ‘America First’ in its foreign policy, says he could respond with tariffs on European cars, which would damage Germany particularly heavily.

Critics say it will spark an international trade war and say the Us would do better to concentrate its efforts on China, which is dumping huge amounts of cheap, heavily subsidised steel on the market.

some economists say Mr Trump, seeking to address America’s $800 billion trade deficit, is fighting the wrong battle.

They claim that the Us should be more concerned by China’s threat to dominate the technology industry by pirating American products.