So reports the WSJ this morning. I’m reminded of the aftermath of the Afghanistan withdrawal debacle and the reporting that Mr. Biden ignoring military general’s advice and stubbornly followed his own poor political calculus that he had to have the U.S. out of Afghanistan by his own arbitrary timeline of 9/11/2021. At that time we reflected on former Secretary of Defense’s Robert Gate’s opine that Mr. Biden had been wrong on every foreign policy decision of the last four decades. Mr. Biden’s decision on Nippon Steel, while not remotely falling in the calamitous scale of Afghanistan, is yet another one of those failures.

President Biden went against top national-security aides when deciding to tank a Japanese takeover of U.S. Steel and instead align with his domestic advisers to bolster his pro-union legacy. Staff presented Biden two broad options in recent days, administration officials said: block the $14.1 billion deal entirely, or delay an approval until Nippon Steel could allay concerns that its ownership would harm the American manufacturing supply chain. During closed-door discussions, national security adviser Jake Sullivan and Secretary of State Antony Blinken were among the foreign policy-minded aides pushing for options that could keep the deal alive, not wanting to damage a crucial relationship with an East Asia ally, according to the officials. Steve Ricchetti, counselor to the president, and other domestically focused staff said it was best to side with leaders of the United Steelworkers’ union, who had been vocal opponents of the deal since it was announced in December 2023, the officials said. Biden has called himself the most pro-union president in American history. Biden’s national-security advisers weren’t uniformly supportive of finding a path to approve the deal: U.S. trade representative Katherine Tai, for example, was a proponent of scuttling the takeover. But the officials said it became clear that the final arguments pitted Biden’s political instincts against global considerations. 

In this case, his decision was motivated by his obsequious support of union leadership, even when it’s pretty clear that many of the affected union workers are supportive of the deal*:

Jason Zugai, vice president of Irvin Local 2227, said he had an “uneasy feeling” when he first heard Nippon Steel won the bid to purchase U.S. Steel, but his feelings have changed. “This incredible deal will solidify all of our jobs for decades to come,” Zugai said.  While some of the steelworkers support the proposed deal, United Steelworkers union leadership opposes the sale. Some speakers on Thursday took aim at union boss David McCall. “These are the men and the women that the leaders in Washington, D.C. need to hear from,” said Kurt Barshick, vice president of U.S. Steel Mon Valley Works. “They don’t need to hear from the Cleveland Cliffs fan club on the 12th floor of the USW office.”

Exactly. This is all about bi-partisan political corruption, as I (and many others) have noted before. The speciousness of his concerns about national security are captured well over at National Review by Dominic Pino:

Today, an order signed by President Biden said, “There is credible evidence that leads me to believe that Nippon Steel Corporation . . . might take action that threatens to impair the national security of the United States.” That order prohibited Nippon Steel’s acquisition of U.S. Steel, thereby blocking about $15 billion of investment in the U.S.

Are you alarmed that this supposed national security threat is doing business in the U.S. right now? Nippon Steel has facilities in Alabama, Kentucky, Indiana, and West Virginia. The West Virginia operation began in 1988. We must have just gotten really lucky for the past 37 years that this national security threat from Nippon Steel hasn’t caused us problems.

Also today, the U.S. approved the sale of $3.6 billion worth of missiles to Japan. Are you alarmed that a country with steel companies that present national security threats will be receiving $3.6 billion worth of American missiles?

You probably aren’t because you still believe what Joe Biden said he believed in April, namely that the U.S. and Japan are “the closest of friends.” This is a country with which the U.S. cooperates on its most critical industries and in which the U.S. has stationed over 50,000 troops. To call one of its steel companies a national security threat without any evidence is a slander of one of America’s closest allies by a lame-duck president who is acting at the behest of the United Steelworkers union, which opposes this acquisition, and for the benefit of U.S. steel company Cleveland-Cliffs, which lost the bidding war for U.S. Steel in 2023.

I welcome your discussion in the comments, but I’m getting very weary of the whataboutism of certain posters who only want to blast Donald Trump. Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance are also guilty of supporting this (which I have repeatedly condemned), but this decision was Mr. Biden’s and his alone. Today, he gets all the blame (or credit, if you’d care to make that case).

* As is often the case, the union workers’ interests are not the same as union leadership. See this note from local mayors where US Steel is located: