When Nippon Steel agreed on 18 June 2025 to pay $55 a share—about a 40 percent premium—for all of U.S. Steel, headlines hailed Japan’s biggest-ever American acquisition. The comprehensive national-security agreement that cleared the deal, however, shows Washington views it less as foreign direct investment than as a strategic joint venture it can veto at will.
Capacity first, politics second
Nippon Steel’s own “100 million-ton vision” charts global crude-steel capacity rising from today’s 86 Mt to the triple-digit range through brown-field buys in the United States and India. Folding in U.S. Steel brings the group decisively closer to that milestone while plugging an American supply hole: the United States imported 28.86 Mt of steel in 2024—almost all duty-free from Canada and Mexico under USMCA. Directing even a portion of Nippon’s added output to U.S. mills can narrow that gap without a single blast-furnace restart.
