The writer is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and advises the technology company Disruptive Industries.
European countries are ratcheting up their defence spending at extraordinary speed; they have no choice. As Washington hints that America may stop delivering weapons to its allies, European governments are taking pains to manufacture as many as they can on the continent. But to manufacture arms and all manner of other crucial goods, one needs a steel industry. If cheap steel keeps flooding Europe and displacing domestic companies, we risk disastrous dependency.
This March, US President Donald Trump imposed 25 per cent tariffs on steel from the EU, a repeat of the first Trump administration’s tariffs seven years ago. And that’s not the only trouble facing steelmaking on the European continent. “We’ve never had this many challenges at the same time,” said Adolfo Aiello, a deputy director-general at Eurofer, the European steel industry association. “It begins with global overcapacity of steel. Last year, it was 600mn tonnes globally. In Europe we produce 127mn tonnes of steel per year, so the overcapacity alone is four to five times larger.”