Sen. Dave McCormick Says U.S. Will Beat China, Points to $14 Billion Steel Investment in Pennsylvania

Sen. Dave McCormick (R-PA) said the United States will beat China in the race for global supremacy, pointing to a new wave of steel and defense investment in Pennsylvania as evidence the tide is turning. He made the comments in an interview with Breitbart News at the Pennsylvania Defense and Innovation Summit on Tuesday.

"If I could pick our hand or China's hand in terms of winning the war for global supremacy, global superpower, I pick our hand," McCormick said. He added a caveat: "It depends on what we do."

McCormick didn't pretend the U.S. is starting from a position of strength. He said past trade policy decisions, made under both parties over decades, gutted American industrial capacity. "We've made a bunch of really bad decisions through globalization and our trade policies," he told Breitbart News, calling them "stupid decisions which destroyed domestic steel production, which destroyed shipbuilding, which really left us in a position of vulnerability."

U.S. steel production capacity and shipbuilding output have both declined for decades as manufacturing shifted overseas, a pattern documented across administrations of both parties going back to the 1980s and 1990s. McCormick isn't wrong that globalization hollowed out parts of American heavy industry. Where his framing gets more contestable is in crediting a single deal for reversing it.

The Nippon Steel Deal

McCormick pointed to the Nippon Steel acquisition of U.S. Steel as a turning point, saying he personally lobbied President Trump on it. "This was something the president, I talked to the president about. A number of us did. He agreed to that Nippon U.S. Steel deal," McCormick said.

The deal was controversial. President Biden had moved to block the Japanese company's acquisition of U.S. Steel on national security grounds before leaving office, a decision that drew criticism from steelworkers' unions worried about job losses and from some lawmakers who wanted the iconic American company to stay domestically owned. Trump later reversed course and allowed the deal to proceed, tying his approval to commitments on U.S. investment and jobs.

McCormick says that reversal is now paying off: "What's happening now is that we've got 14 billion dollars of new investment going into domestic steelmaking. We have a new mill being built in the Monongahela Valley outside of Pittsburgh. First time in 50 years, there's been a new steel mill."

The $14 billion figure and the new mill are tied directly to commitments Nippon Steel made as part of securing approval for the acquisition. It's a concrete number attached to a specific deal, not a vague promise. Whether it fully offsets decades of capacity loss, or represents a genuine structural shift versus one company's investment commitment, is a separate question voters and industry analysts will be watching over the next several years as the mill gets built.

The Broader Defense Push

McCormick framed the steel investment as part of a larger buildout tied to what he described as Trump's "peace through strength" approach. He said Pennsylvania specifically has a role to play across both legacy and next-generation defense manufacturing.

"We need to build more artillery shells in Scranton. We need to build the next generation combat vehicle in York, but also we need to invest in drones and hypersonics and all of that, and Pennsylvania can be the lead of those as well," McCormick said.

Those are specific, named production sites. Scranton for artillery shells and York for combat vehicles both have existing defense manufacturing infrastructure. The drone and hypersonics ambitions are more aspirational and weren't accompanied by specific investment figures or contract announcements in his remarks.

What's Actually Being Measured

McCormick's "I pick our hand" framing is a confidence statement, not a data point. China maintains real structural advantages he didn't fully address in these remarks, including a manufacturing base several times the size of America's and dominant control over rare earth minerals critical to both defense systems and consumer electronics.

The steel mill and the $14 billion figure are the concrete parts of this story. The claim that America is now winning a broader "war for global supremacy" is a political judgment, and a reasonable one for a sitting senator to make in service of building support for his state's role in it. It's a claim about the future, not a report of a contest already decided.

The Monongahela Valley mill's construction timeline and job numbers will be the first real test of whether the Nippon Steel commitments translate into the industrial revival McCormick is describing.