A worker feeds a steel rod into machinery at a metal fabrication plant in Seoul on Feb. 12. (Anthony Wallace/AFP/Getty Images)
SEOUL — Washington’s closest security allies in the Asia-Pacific region are still holding out hope for exemptions to President Donald Trump’s tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, which went into effect Wednesday.
The tariffs kicked in as Seoul, Tokyo and Canberra — three of the allied governments friendliest to the United States — grapple with Trump’s more combative second-term approach to trade and his shifting positions on alliances.
“Friends need to act in a way that reinforces, to our respective populations, the fact that we are friends,” Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said Wednesday. “This is not a friendly act.”
The United States imposed 25 percent tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, with Trump saying the duties are critical for promoting greater domestic steel industry production and employment, and “making America rich again.”
Trump’s anger has so far been aimed at Canada, the biggest supplier of steel and aluminum to the United States. Trump even threatened to hike the tariffs on Canada to 50 percent — although he backtracked on that Tuesday, keeping them at 25 percent.
But his approach has also alarmed policymakers and industry leaders in South Korea, Japan and Australia, all of whom had been granted carve-outs from the tariffs in 2018, during Trump’s first term in office. Trump has vowed that this time around, there will be no exclusions or exemptions for any country, no matter how friendly.
“The arrow of the Trump’s ‘America First’ policy has begun to zero in on South Korea,” Choi Sang-mok, the nation’s acting president, said on Tuesday.
South Korea is among the top five importers of steel and aluminum to the United States, selling it $4.8 billion in steel and steel products in 2024, according to the Korea International Trade Association. It also exported $1 billion in aluminum products to the United States last year, according to the association.
During his address to Congress last week, Trump claimed that Seoul levies tariffs four times higher than those of the United States. But under a free-trade agreement, South Korea’s effective tariff rate for goods imported from the United States was 0.79 percent in 2024, the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy said last week.
Still, the United States’ trade deficit with South Korea has ballooned since the free-trade agreement went into effect in 2012, hitting $66 billion in 2024, according to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, and attracting repeated criticism from Trump.
Choi said he had directed officials to “actively explain” to Washington “misunderstandings” about the trade imbalance, adding this week that he hoped to work out a deal with the Trump administration.
But the nation’s deep political crisis is hampering its ability to make a strong case, analysts say. South Korea’s president and prime minister have both been impeached and suspended, and there may not be a permanent head of state until sometime in the summer.
“Because of the leadership vacuum, South Korea is not really in a position to move fast and try to get some sort of exemption,” said Yeo Han-koo, former trade minister who negotiated tariff carve-outs in the first Trump term.
While the tariffs pose a challenge to the domestic steel industry, it could also create opportunities for companies to become more nimble because South Korea’s steel exports were previously capped under a quota system in exchange for the exemption, Yeo said.
Japan’s efforts to secure a carve-out have also been unsuccessful.
Japanese Trade Minister Yoji Muto on Monday met with Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer and White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett in Washington to press Tokyo’s case.
Muto told reporters after the meeting that he touted the fact that Japanese companies have invested heavily into the United States, and that these investments have helped create American jobs.
But in the end, he failed to win any assurances from the U.S. officials. “We agreed to continue close consultations with the U.S. government and to hold discussions at the working level as soon as possible,” Muto said Monday.
Japan exported $2 billion in steel products to the United States in 2024, according to its Finance Ministry. Its aluminum exports were far lower, at about $178 million.
Last week, Trump questioned the economic and security relationship between the two allies, calling the decades-old defense pact nonreciprocal and saying Japan makes “a fortune with us economically.”
Top Japanese officials, including Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, immediately rejected Trump’s characterizations that Washington unilaterally protects Japan. Japan hosts U.S. bases and has ramped up its defense spending in recent years, which are both important to U.S. efforts to counter China and North Korea, officials said.
In Australia, which secured an exemption to similar levies in 2018, Albanese vowed to continue pressing his country’s case, even as he expressed disappointment and almost befuddlement over the “entirely unjustified” tariffs.
“This is against the spirit of our two nations’ enduring friendship, and fundamentally at odds with the benefits that our economic partnership has delivered over more than 70 years,” he said during a news conference in Sydney.
Australia sent about $500 million of aluminum and steel to the United States last year, according to its Department of Resources. That amounted to roughly 6 percent of its aluminum exports and 35 percent of its steel exports.
Albanese ruled out reciprocal tariffs, which he said would only hurt Australian consumers.
The two countries have had a free-trade agreement since 2005, and the United States has long had a trade surplus with Australia — something Australian officials have repeated in their quest for an exemption.
Albanese said he does not consider the tariffs decision final, noting that it took months for Australia to secure an exemption to similar tariffs during Trump’s first term.
“We will continue to engage constructively with the United States and to make the case for Australian trade and the benefits that it gives to people in the United States of America,” he said,
The tariffs nonetheless have ruffled feathers in Australia, which has deepened defense ties with the United States in recent years in response to China’s growing military assertiveness. Just last month, Canberra made its first $500 million payment to Washington under the AUKUS nuclear submarine deal.
“The special friendship is over,” ran a headline in the Sydney Morning Herald. “Trump doesn’t care about Australia.”
Former Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, who secured the tariff exemption from Trump in 2018, said the tariffs are part of a bigger U.S. shift that should ring alarm bells in Canberra.
“We can no longer say that our ally shares our values,” he said in an interview. “How do we pursue our national interests in an age where our principal ally believes that might is right and is no longer committed to the international rules based order?”
Hayley Channer from the United States Studies Centre, a Sydney think tank, cautioned against reading too much into the tariffs, but agreed Trump’s actions were sparking broader fears.
“U. S. reliability and credibility is under question,” she said. “And the biggest fear in Australia is that Trump could seek to renegotiate Australia’s financial contribution to AUKUS.”
Miller reported from Sydney.