U.S. Steel was once the world’s most valuable company, which may explain why it remains a political icon even as its economic clout has waned.

President Joe Biden reportedly plans to block the company’s $15 billion sale to Japanese competitor Nippon Steel, citing national security concerns even though the Pentagon buys only a negligible amount of U.S. Steel’s output.

Opposition to the deal is bipartisan: Both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris have vowed to keep the steelmaker in American hands.

The political storm is creating uncertainty for U.S. Steel’s 21,000 employees, including about 850 at the 129-year-old Granite City (Illinois) Works. Chief Executive David Burritt has threatened to close plants, lay off thousands of workers and move the company’s headquarters out of Pittsburgh if the Nippon deal is blocked.

Analysts say other buyers may emerge for U.S. Steel’s assets, including the aging blast furnaces that Burritt says are in need of a $3 billion investment promised by Nippon Steel.

Cleveland-Cliffs, the largest U.S. producer of flat-rolled steel, tried to buy U.S. Steel last year and says it’s still interested in its rival, especially in the blast furnaces. There’s an antitrust issue, though: A combination would give Cleveland-Cliffs a near-monopoly on certain grades of steel used by the auto industry.

Philip Gibbs, an analyst at KeyBanc Capital Markets, thinks U.S. Steel could be split up among several bidders, with Cleveland-Cliffs a logical buyer for the Mon Valley works near Pittsburgh. “I don’t think there’s any concern about them getting one asset,” he said. “Where the automakers get concerned is if they buy the entirety of the blast furnaces,” including the massive Gary Works in Indiana.

U.S. Steel’s most valuable asset may be its brand-new Big River mill in Arkansas. Gordon Johnson, an analyst at GLJ Research in New York, doesn’t see Big River being sold separately, but thinks it could be the centerpiece of a smaller company making steel in non-union plants using newer electric-arc technology.

“If they were able to offload those union assets and then just operate Big River, that’s a different company entirely,” Johnson said. He calculates that the various parts of U.S. Steel should be worth $10.5 billion, 15% above its market value but well below Nippon’s offer.

For Granite City Works, whose two blast furnaces are currently idle, Gibbs sees pig iron production as the most likely future. U.S. Steel announced a preliminary agreement in 2022 to sell the blast furnaces to SunCoke Energy, which would refit them to produce granulated pig iron for Big River and other plants.

The company has provided no updates on that deal, but Gibbs believes it still makes sense. “There will definitely be a need for more domestically produced pig iron,” he said.

The SunCoke deal would cause some layoffs in Granite City, and job losses are likely elsewhere if U.S. Steel goes through with its threat to shrink dramatically.

Nippon Steel didn’t make any job guarantees, but it did promise to invest billions in the plants it wants to acquire. “It wouldn’t make a lot of sense, given the amount of money they’re paying, to come in and shut down stuff,” said Scott Lincicome, a trade analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute.

The Japanese company, he explained, is willing to pay a premium to get access to an American market that’s protected by steep tariffs. As a business strategy, it’s a sensible response to the protectionist measures the U.S. has imposed in recent years.

Politics, however, apparently matters more than business sense — even when blocking the deal is likely to anger Japan, one of our closest allies, and may endanger jobs rather than saving them.

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