This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, March 28th, 2018.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The Trump tariffs on steel and aluminum have gone into effect, but on a much smaller subset of countries that import steel into the U.S.

Eunumonik is a visiting scholar at the Cato Institute.

She describes what that means for trade for retaliation from countries like China,

and the strange means by which this president wants to shrink the so-called trade deficit.

So the steel and aluminum tariffs on all other countries that haven't been exempted so far have gone into effect.

So there have been exemptions granted to Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, the European Union, and South Korea. Four of those are the top four

importers of the US deal. So basically they're excluded, but there's still

others that are being negotiated. So the United States has basically said that

other countries have to now negotiate bilaterally exemptions and that they have to do by the end of April.

All right, so you said that the top four countries that are importers of steel to the United

States are exempted.

And I remember the discussions we had just a few weeks ago that if you're trying to target

China for these national security tariffs, what a terrible way to do it, but frankly it seems like it's

becoming a better way to do it the more countries that are exempted. Yeah, so at

this point the only shocking exclusions from the exemption have been Japan, but this may be done

on purpose in the way to get Japan to the table to start negotiating a bilateral trade deal

with them.

But yes, when it comes to the others,

like Russia, China, Taiwan, and Japan included,

they make up 24% of all the steel the US imports. So they're a smaller

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