Is President Trump's plan for a $15 billion steel mill in Iowa good for the U.S.?
President Trump on September 28, 2026, announced a planned $15 billion steel mill in Iowa alongside company officials.
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A major steel mill sounds great. But a cursory look at the Essar Group, the Indian company behind the plan, its shaky finances and the 2016 bankruptcy of Essar Steel Minnesota in 2016 and the recent layoffs and curtailed operations due to "unforeseen business circumstances" suggests caution. The US currently only imports about 25% of its steel; domestically produced steel is far more expensive than steel on the international market (tariffs not included) because of labor costs, energy costs, and environmental regulations. In terms of classical economics, other countries have significant competitive advantages over the US. Domestic steel makes American products for the export market more expensive. So ... more questions than answers at this point in time.
Domestic steel may make sense in a few high-value / strategic areas, but trying to compete in commodity steel feels like swimming upstream.
The countries that are "winning" right now are, surprise surprise, the countries that can make their own shit; what we're seeing is the epic, epochal, apocalyptic (in the classical meaning) failure of the "Neoliberal" super-experiment embarked upon circa the 1970s, which I started partly with a nice idea about how free markets could end war by making a single, interdependent world economy ("the only way to achieve a practical, livable peace in a world of competing nations is to take the profit out of war" - Richard Nixon), but was hideously sabotaged by the cult of Profit-Incentive Infallibility (See Also: Boeing in the 21st Century) and those who just flipped it back into standard colonialism of the sort America was founded in rejection of.
Winning what? Color me a globalist.
I've always been one too; my point, however (and this is something I saw coming even in the '000s) is that GLOBALIZATION has betrayed and sabotaged globalism. As for "winning what", that would be the future. Who makes the money. Who sets the standards. Whose plans work instead of blowing up. Who governs with legitimate consent. Who the rest of the world looks up to. The NeoCon "Project for the New American Century", perhaps more than anything else, has guaranteed precisely what it sought to prevent.