"There may well be a case (for tariffs) to be made, but the administration didn’t make it," said Phil Levy, a senior fellow with the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and former senior economist with President George Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers. 

Speaking Tuesday during the S&P Global Platts Steel Markets North America conference in Chicago, Levy said the case laid out by the Commerce Department fails in part because it doesn’t make any specific linkages between national security and steel. Instead, it relies on a broad definition of national security as economic security, he said. In that way, he said, any country could apply that argument to just about any product.

He also said the decision potentially undermines close allies.

"This will come back to bite the U.S.," he said.