ABSTRACT
The United States foreign trade policy for steel was shaped against a background of three conditions in U.S. politics: the Multilateral Trade Negotiations (MTN) in Geneva which formed the overall political climate effectively absorbing the steel issue; an ongoing debate over how to interpret the import relief provisions of domestic trade law, a process that largely determined the legal and administrative bounds in which the steel issue was set; and, the increased use of market-sharing arrangements by U.S. policymakers in other industrial sectors, an indicator of important changes in the ideological background of what was acceptable to do in industrial trade policy. Each of these conditions were hopelessly intertwined, though for analytic purposes will be treated separately in this chapter.
