President Trump’s trade agenda treats domestic manufacturing as a pillar of national strength. This is an overdue step and should be only the beginning, especially for American cement, because few materials matter more to American security than this one.
Cement becomes our runways and our hardened aircraft shelters. It becomes our missile silos, our fuel depots, and the barracks where our troops sleep. Having spent a career responsible for military installations that depended on the concrete beneath them, I can say plainly that our foundations deserve the same seriousness we give the aircraft and armor they support.
The trouble is that American cement production is being stifled by imports from foreign countries operating under anti-competitive practices. China alone now pours nearly half the world’s cement, some 1.7 billion of the 4 billion tons made in 2025, much of it propped up by state subsidies and overproduction that warp prices everywhere. Turkey, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates run similar playbooks, flooding export markets with cement their governments help underwrite, and Turkey has quietly become one of the largest suppliers reaching American ports.
When a fifth of a strategic material rides in on long ocean supply chains shaped by rivals, we hand them quiet leverage over how fast, and how well, we can build what our defense requires. In a Pacific fight, the ability to repair a cratered runway or build a remote airfield within days could decide the outcome, and none of it happens without readily available cement.
To its credit, the administration has already begun to respond. Its Section 301 enforcement against China’s trade abuses shows that American workers no longer have to face a rigged market unarmed. The recent tariffs on imported cement extend that principle to the ground beneath our feet, and domestic producers who spent years being undercut by subsidized supply finally have room to invest and grow.
But tariffs alone will not rebuild an industry. The administration should go further and expand its Section 301 investigations into the foreign cement industries doing the most damage, especially China, Turkey, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates. It should pair that enforcement with the permitting and regulatory reforms that domestic producers say they need, since a new cement plant takes years to build and will not rise without a clear path of its own. The American cement industry has said as much, telling Washington it stands ready to expand if given the tax, permitting, and regulatory footing to justify the investment. Enforcement buys time. American capacity buys security.
There is already a precedent for treating a building block as a strategic asset. We shield steel and aluminum under Section 232’s national-security authority, and this year we extended a 50 percent tariff to copper after the government found that import dependence threatened to impair our defense. Copper runs the wire and steel frames the building, yet both rest on a cement foundation we have been slower to protect. If those inputs warrant the nation’s strongest trade tool, the material that anchors every one of them warrants it too.
The administration has taken the first real steps to rebuild American cement, and that deserves recognition. Now it should finish the job. The men and women who serve this country deserve airfields and shelters poured from a supply chain we control, not one a rival can throttle.
United States Air Force Brig. Gen. John Teichert (ret.) is an expert on foreign affairs and military strategy. He served as commander of Joint Base Andrews and Edwards Air Force Base, was the senior U.S. defense official to Iraq, and retired as the assistant deputy under secretary of the Air Force for international affairs.