After 17 years, millions of dollars in legal fees and much bad blood between Boeing and Airbus, the world’s longest-running trade dispute is over at last. At least that is how the EU and US were heralding the agreement on Tuesday to suspend tariffs in the row over subsidies to the world’s two biggest aircraft makers.
But behind the ministerial backslapping and triumphant declarations of a shift from “litigation to collaboration”, the truth is that nothing has yet been concluded that will put a permanent end to the dispute.
The two sides have merely decided to put aside their tit-for-tat tariffs, leave unresolved for now the root causes of their disagreements, and give themselves five years to come up with a mutually acceptable framework for supporting their aerospace industries.