President Donald Trump’s tariffs on steel have done something no Washington consensus would have predicted five years ago: they put American economic security back on the agenda and kept it there. That matters.

The conversation around trade has fundamentally shifted, and American workers and manufacturers are better positioned because of it.

But winning a strategic argument doesn’t mean every policy detail is perfectly calibrated from day one. There’s one corner of the food supply chain where a small fix would make the broader strategy work a lot harder, and ignoring it hands a quiet victory to exactly the foreign competitors the tariffs were designed to push back.

Tinplate steel is what food cans are made from. American producers can’t come close to meeting domestic demand; they cover less than a third of it. So American can makers have no choice but to import tinplate, and at current tariff levels, that raises their costs significantly.

The tariff is sending the right signal. But domestic tinplate capacity has actually declined since 2018 as producers shift to more profitable materials.

The gap isn’t closing. It’s growing.

The supply chain is not complicated, but it matters to follow it all the way through.

Tinplate becomes cans. Cans get filled by food processors. Finished goods move through distributors........

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