In a bid to sink Nippon Steel's acquisition of US Steel, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) recently used a report from a pair of think tankers to urge the White House to investigate Nippon's ties to China.
Brown reportedly raised those concerns based on a report by consultancy Horizon Advisory. Brown sent Horizon's report to President Biden.
Horizon Advisory was co-founded by two senior fellows at the hawkish think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD): Nathan Picarsic and Emily de La Bruyere.
FDD was founded in 2001 by Clifford May, who writes a weekly "Foreign Desk" column for The Washington Times. Its sister lobbying arm, FDD Action, was founded in 2019. FDD has close ties to Israel and Gulf Arab states.
In 2022, Horizon published a report on forced labor risks in China's aluminum sector. In 2021 it published a pair of reports on China's industrial policy for the automotive sector as well as steel sector. In 2020 it published a report on the so-called "China Standards 2035" strategy.
This year it published a report on China's dominance in the global solar market, which received praise from a number of anti-China groups, including the Coalition for a Prosperous America (CPA).
