Biden's Rebuff of Nippon Steel a Plus for China

The rejection of a deal with a close US ally—and the manner of it—is an insult to Japan that won't be easily forgotten.

- Gearoid Reidy

The most telling moment in the Biden administration's decision to block Nippon Steel's attempted takeover of United States Steel was unintentional.

In the executive order preventing the deal on spurious national security grounds, staffers for President Joe Biden appeared to accidentally copy-and-paste the title of a previous presidential order—one ordering a Chinese crypto mining company to vacate property near an Air Force base.

The words in the Nippon Steel directive stated: "Regarding the acquisition of certain real property of Cheyenne leads by MineOne Cloud Computing Investment."

It sums up what many in Japan will be thinking of the administration's baffling rejection of the deal—that as far as the US is concerned, Japan and China might be one and the same, with policy merely copied from one to the other. There's certainly little else to justify the Biden's administration treating not just a supposed friend, but perhaps its most vital ally the same as it would a stated adversary.

This rejection was expected: President Joe Biden had made no secret of his opposition to the deal. With the presidential election lost and no more votes to be courted, there was still some hope that he might have a change of heart, just as he did with the presidential pardon of his son Hunter. But that was always a long shot.