The most telling moment in the Biden Administration’s decision to block Nippon Steel’s attempted takeover of U.S. Steel was unintentional.
In the executive order preventing the deal on spurious national security grounds, staffers for U.S. 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 Nippon Steel directive was titled: “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 U.S. 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.
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