AIRBUS-BOEING DEAL EASES US EU TENSIONS BUT CONFLICTS REMAIN

The deal the United States and the European Union reached this week to end their long-running rift over subsidies to Boeing and Airbus will suspend billions in punitive tariffs.

It will ease trans-Atlantic tensions. And it will let the two sides focus on a common economic threat: China.

But the breakthrough still leaves some trade friction between the U.S. and the EU unresolved. Most prominently, President Biden kept in place import taxes that President Donald Trump imposed on European steel and aluminum, a move that infuriated some of America’s closet allies three years ago.

For now, the truce in the Boeing-Airbus dispute goes a long way toward repairing a huge commercial relationship — $933 billion in two-way trade last year despite the pandemic — that came under enormous strain during the Trump years. Among other things, the former president angrily charged the Europeans with using unfair trade practices to sell more products to the United States than they bought and of shirking their responsibility to pay for their own national defense.

No trade dispute between the two sides has raged longer than their aviation conflict. Since 2004, the U.S. and the EU have accused each other of unfairly subsidizing their aircraft building giants — America’s Boeing and Europe’s Airbus. Over the past two years, the World Trade Organization, which adjudicates such disputes, declared both sides guilty. It allowed the United States to impose up to $7.5 billion in tariffs and the EU up to $4 billion’ worth.