Post

It is an older story than the 1960s, and not exclusive to steel.
Japan started a war, because of its material vulnerability, once.
Post WWII, the US has a history of "recycling" more and more of its raw materials through an international process of, well, processing.
Starting with petroleum, Marxist political influence filtered through labor and environmental reformation has steadily priced the refining of domestic material into manufactured goods out of the hands of all but the most brainy and brassy balled entrepreneurs willing to try their luck.
Except for those concerns approved by ESG standards, of course.
Today, a politically connected corpse can captain those with guaranteed smooth sailing until the math, and social realities catch up to bite that kind of corporate fascism in the ass.
Hell, at this point, just pulling the raw elements out of the ground is almost prohibitively expensive, and it does not take much for a Hillary Clinton to push a US entity into selling out its uranium interests to a Russian consortium; and all of this is intentional, as part of an age old "mea culpa" policy to apologize and appease for the US rising out of WWII a superpower capable of producing and maintaining a military industrial complex that could protect the world from the international adventurism of Marxist-Leninism.
I put it that way, because you apparently cannot call Marxist imperialists, despite the KGB overpopulating the world with Kalashnikov rifles.
The most prolifically produced, distributed, and fired in anger small arm in the world with no close second.

Okay, back to US.

The apologetic paradigm is what inspired the unnecessary flip into a primarily consumerist society, turned US into a piggy bank for UN international wealth redistribution, and if it has ever appeared that our trade policy dynamic seems to mostly put US over a barrel, well, that is because it intentionally does.
Again, just to diplomatically salve the egos of lesser powers with an inferiority complex.
I hate, absolutely hate, the continuous pain, misery, and frustration of those handicapped unnecessarily by progressive socioeconomic policy that ultimately does what it does for the sake of control through that most ancient art of pro-scarcity despotism.
Prevent the people from prospering, and punish those who do, before they gain enough sense with their wealth to seek freer, and safer shores.
However, labor unions have helped make their own bed as the primary domestic coffer of Democrat politics, and must now sleep in it; and this is the case for every industry they have helped to greedily price beyond reason.

My concerns are not just for US, however, as we catch up to and combine with the EU, and other consortiums who have been advancing similarly dysfunctional policy models ahead of US, and continuing on after some of the most ridiculous inhuman, and anti-social pandemic mitigation yet fever dreamed by politically compromised technocrats to drive this century towards an apocalyptic global food deficit.
At least it would be, if the elder heavy populations of the world, most notably those of Asia, were not going to pay that particular piper through the latter half of the century.
People call me a pessimist, but I always look for the silver lining in things, however thin it might be.