The rise of multinational corporations has dramatically restructured production and weakened labor’s bargaining power, necessitating a corresponding “scaling up” of national labor movements and a strategic increase in transnational union activity. However, maintaining worker unity in one country is difficult enough on its own, maintaining solidarity between countries is an even more complex task. There are strong incentives for workers in industrialized and developing countries to see each other as competitors for jobs; global coordination and comprehensive campaigns require resources, funding, and long-term trust between unions; and multinational corporations are able to use the specter of offshoring and outsourcing to intimidate and coerce workers. This tension between nationalism and internationalism is an instance of a core dilemma inherent to the labor movement—whether unions should act narrowly in the interests of their membership or more broadly as a social class. The way in which these approaches are balanced varies widely and is a fundamental strategic tradeoff for labor unions. Similarly, the climate crisis has produced another strategic tradeoff within the labor movement between addressing environmental issues and protecting workers in environmentally destructive industries from job losses. Tony Mazzocchi, the progressive president of the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers Union (now merged with USW) was the first to articulate the concept of “Just Transition” in the 1990s as a political project aiming to resolve this contradiction. Just Transition has come to take on multiple meanings and formulations since then, ranging from frameworks that mostly preserve the status quo to those that aim for a radical transformation of capitalist social relations. Existing scholarship theorizes Just Transition frameworks as internally consistent ideal types. A case study of the United Steelworkers (USW), the largest mining and industrial union in North America, and a content analysis of coded USW press releases relating to industrial, trade, and environmental policy, reveals a more complex picture. I show that in light of my empirical analysis, Just Transition frameworks need to be refined to capture the nuanced internal contradictions of real-world union framings, particularly those that arise from the interaction between Just Transition framing and what Thea Riofrancos calls “Green Dominance”. The climate crisis, vulnerabilities in today’s spatially dispersed global supply chains, and state competition are leading governments to adopt a strategy that fuses industrial, trade, and environmental policy with national security. This study demonstrates how the Steelworkers frame the green transition in nationalist terms, playing into the already dominant framing of Green Dominance, whereby states prioritize competing in the global arms race for national control over EV, solar panel, and semiconductor supply chains. The result is an oscillating, contradictory discourse that fuses Green Dominance and Just Transition and, in the process, undercuts the union’s expressions of international solidarity. Tensions between nationalism and internationalism, the environment and jobs, Just Transition and Green Dominance—it is unsurprising that these often result in the development of contradictory frames given that labor unions must simultaneously balance mobilizing members, influencing state action, and navigating global competitive pressures. There are no easy answers to the difficult strategic decisions that unions must make under so many constraints. History sets broad parameters within which contemporary unions operate, while political opportunities, global inequalities, and differing audiences push the union to emphasize some frames over others. As such, I argue that USW’s contradictory framing strategy is shaped by the historical legacy of the American labor movement’s economic nationalism and anticommunism, the resurgence of economic nationalism following decades of neoliberal consensus, increased geopolitical conflict between the US and China, and USW’s target audiences when discussing national policy.