Trade wars

The Making of a Trade Warrior

At his confirmation hearings for the position of U.S. trade representative, Robert Lighthizer, the nation’s chief trade negotiator, promised to fight for all of America’s great industries. Yes, he acknowledged, he had built his three-decade career by lobbying for the steel industry. But he was ready, he said, to make the world safe again for good old-fashioned American capitalism, in all its forms. He recalled a caution he’d received from a senator: “As you go through doing your job, remember that you do not eat steel.”

The senator wanted Lighthizer to concede that, despite its hold on the national imagination, steel’s contribution to the American economy has waned. Even back in 2003, when Lighthizer made his first major bid to control the rules of global trade, neither of the two leading American steel companies was worth more in the stock market than the nascent Amazon, despite employing a dozen times as many employees. Today, the two shiny new headquarters Amazon plans to build could house the majority of the 81,000-odd workers who work in America’s remaining iron and steel mills, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

As America’s steel workforce has shrunk, the industry has maintained and even tightened its hold on Washington. Lighthizer has played no small part in steel’s political endurance; he has been working for years to yoke steel’s interests with the nation’s.