Monday, December 12, 2016

Boeing, Iran, and Trump

Here's a challenge for the incoming president:
Boeing announced a $16.6 billion deal on Sunday to sell planes to Iran, which for decades had been economically blacklisted by the United States. The company instead chose to emphasize how many jobs the sale would support.

“Today’s agreement will support tens of thousands of U.S. jobs” associated with the production and delivery of the planes, Boeing said in its news release.
So does Trump care more about the jobs at Boeing or the tough line he wants to take with Iran?

As with most subjects, Trump has said contradictory things about his attitude toward the nuclear agreement with Iran. On the one hand he has promised to tear it up on day one, and some of his advisers are on record as saying the same thing. But at other times he has said that the right approach is not to shred the agreement but to enforce it, and he has mentioned his own experience at buying into existing contracts and finding ways to get more out of the other parties from the fine print.

This is one of the areas where I have absolutely no idea what Trump actually intends, and that makes me nervous. But it also allows room for hope that he will tone down the saber-rattling if that allows him to pose as the savior of thousands of jobs.


Shadow Flutter said...

The real crisis will come when Erdogan and Trump start slinging insults at one another, and then do something about it. There is not enough room on this planet for both their egos.

Then, again, I have no idea what will happen the next time Iran sights a U.S. ship with a missile or machine gun?

G. Verloren said...

So it occured to me that nowhere did you specify what kind of planes were being sold, so I checked out the article proper.

I had been assuming we were talking about military planes here, and was thinking the whole issue would ultimately be resolved by whether the Pentagon was okay with the idea or not. But we're talking passenger jets for airlines: 737s and 777s, specifically. How is this an issue?

What's the harm in making money off the Iranians selling them harmless civilian vehicles? It's not like Iran somehow is prevented from buying American made planes second hand from other sources - what's the problem with cutting out the middleman and selling to them directly? If they want to put money into the pockets of American companies and simultaneously decrease the import/export gap that people fret about so much, what is there to complain about?