Wait...whether or not the WTO rulings were made by elected officials or not has no bearing on whether the tarrifs were legal under WTO rules. That's the best my country could come up with in rebuttal? Take that weak sauce elsewhere and remove the tarrifs.

I wouldn't listen to this word salad from Katherine Tai, simply just trying to deflect from the issue. The U.S is at fault, just accept and move on.

The lack of adjudicators in the WTO that she is complaining about is also as a result of Trump blocking their appointment to cripple the WTO functioning.

> Washington has paralyzed the WTO’s Appellate Body, which acts as a supreme court for international trade, by blocking appointments for over two years. Two of the body’s three members came to the end of their terms last week, leaving it unable to issue rulings.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trade-wto-idUSKBN1YM1XB

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So after a thorough review the WTO sees the whole tariff thing exactly as was predicted by non US politicians and even US experts back when it was implemented, but now the US feels it's being treated unfair?

As a Canadian, the US has routinely ignores WTO rulings related to softwood lumber. Rules for thee but not for me. And yet of course the US complains when other large parties like China routinely ignore it too. I honestly think if the US had embraced rules-based order after the Cold War there would be less precedent available for today's despots to also think rules are for weak nations.

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You spent 3 paragrpahs to say "US Hypocrites." Why don't you articulate the reasoning you feel they're being hypocritical in this situation and provide some analysis that backs the idea that the US is wrong in this situation?

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I think it's more like your imagination/paranoia. The US and all the other countries in the world do roughly the same shit.

Rules are just shit people said one time, they aren't decrees of justice. Just like all nations have idiotic laws that maybe once made sense but don't anymore, rules are all dynamic, laws are all dynamic. You adjust them to get the outcomes you want, not because they are divine rule.

So the real question is what's the actual global and national consensus vs what does WTO think. WTO doesn't represent a global democracy so we can't just assume they represent all that much.

Rules need to be consensus based, not tradition based, so you really need to know the consensus domestically and globally on the issue not just whine about rules being broken sometimes and not others.

Always has been..

Yeeep

My Opinion is I feel the US is correct, the US steel industry has been decimated by low cost imports from other areas of the world. They can’t compete. Especially in wages and energy costs. The tariffs reverse this. So imagine if all or most of the steel becomes imported and therefore shutters the US steel industry. In case of War time how long would it take to restart and train the employees needed to supply domestically if imported steel becomes scarce or blocked. This is why I think this is a national security issue.

The US is in the right here, though I think the implementation was done poorly. It should have been a gradual increase in tariffs to allow industry time to adapt. We basically protected ourselves against shortages of critical materials by smashing the supply chain with a sledgehammer.

Well they could subsidize the industry directly instead of using tariffs.

Another reason it's worth having the production here is environmental. Less shipping, probably less pollution from our production then in cheaper countries, and hopefully we'll also end up toward the front of the pack in moving to green steel.

This winter should thicken the ice

The US is a rules based international order country only when the rules are in their favour

Yes I agree with your other reason but it wouldn’t be a National security reason.

Subsidizing the steel industry is the same as tariffs as far as the WTO is concerned. But instead of the tax payers paying for it, it would be by companies and end users of the steel and aluminum. You can say that the consumer ultimately pays the same but the main difference is that the consumer has a choice whether or not to use it without increasing national debt.

Insert astronaut-meme.jpg

What is this about?

ofc the fat orange struck his tiny fingers in that too.

All countries support "rule based international order" until it's their asses on the line.

Tankies don't ever justify their opinions, they just stir up shit and leave everyone else to argue about it.

Trump maybe kind of went overboard with the tariffs (maybe not-in-accordance-to-international-agreements) and we seem to be trying to not get in WTO hot water after the fact. We seem to be making crap arguments so there’s probably a reason we can’t just say ‘oops.’ Probability we don’t want to admit that democracy let in someone that was able to f things up so thoroughly. So we’re kind of stuck defending the mango.

It's not just hypocritical, it completely undermines the entire concept of international law. It sends a big fat signal to countries like China that the 'rules based order' rhetoric is simply propaganda. If other states don't trust the most powerful country in the world to follow international law in good faith they sure as shit aren't going to follow it either.

What's worse is that US officials genuinely can't understand this and don't grasp that as the dominant superpower the USA's actions define the incentives that every other state responds to.

Precisely. The USA is a global superpower and is capable of creating a situation where it would be rational for countries like Russia and China to abide by international law. But it needs to follow it's own rules to do that.

It amazes me how hostile people are to this. There seems to be this idea that peace achieved by coordinating rational self interest is somehow illegitimate and that unless Russia and China are to willing to unilaterally compromise themselves in pursuit of peace as a moral goal (which will never happen) we should just accept inevitable war.

No doubt the Chinese etc have a similar mentality but unlike China the USA is actually capable of creating a rational peace due to its massive power advantage.

This is not a 'tankie' opinion its an accurate criticism of US international political strategy.

The problem is that the USA is in a position to create a situation where it would be in the interests of other powers to follow international law/rules. No other country has that ability (or ever has)

It's a half assed take that ignores the facts or reality of the situation, just for a chance to criticize the US. Just like every single other moron tankie opinion. Join them if you want.

Some the best international relations specialists, who are far from anti-American, have been making this criticism of the USA for decades.

And tankies have been parroting their idiotic takes for just as long.

Feel free to provide some analysis the US is in the right

Why? I didn't make a statement alluding to that. Reading is fundamental, friend.