Is Airbus Continuing to Fly Past Russian Sanctions?

While it’s happy news that McDonald’s was re-opening its restaurants in Ukraine earlier this week, the sad news is that the first casualty of Vladimir Putin’s war was the Golden Arches theory of conflict prevention.

On the cusp of the new millennium, Thomas Friedman wrote that: "No two countries that both have a McDonald’s have ever fought a war against each other."

The idea is that when a country’s economy becomes sophisticated enough to have a McDonald’s, traditional warfare with their neighbors offers them nothing.

This columnist even talked about it in his commencement address from Hult International Business School: the cure to war is capitalism.

Alas for the world, tyrants like Vladimir Putin reap the benefits of Western capitalism while flouting the institutions that make it successful: the Russian economy and the country’s oligarchs feed off the innovation of other countries while playing by their own rules.

Putin figures the West doesn’t have the iron to push back with military force — certainly not to call his bluff on deploying nuclear weapons — so he can get away with whatever he wants.

Fortunately, Western capitalism does have the tools to squeeze Putin back into his cage without escalating to violence.

Economic sanctions against Russia were swift in February and have been steady since then. A multitude of countries banned Russian craft from their airspace, blocked transactions with Russian banks and other institutions, and froze assets on the country’s oligarchs.

There’s only so much economic pressure the Russian bear can endure before he slinks back into his cave for the winter. While enormous, Russia is underpopulated, landlocked, and underdeveloped.

Its economy is smaller than that of Texas! Sanctions can work if, as the American Thinker said, we have "all hands on deck."

In recent weeks, the Department of Treasury Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) imposed new sanctions, targeting members of the Russian military-industrial complex, its suppliers, and almost 300 members of Russia’s legislature.

Moreover, OFAC warned of extending penalties to international actors outside of Russia that provide support during the country’s illegal war on Ukrainian territory.

And yet somehow Airbus continues to fly the friendly skies of both sides of the conflict.

As we discussed a few months ago, European aerospace company Airbus has fought to continue importing titanium from Russia.

Airbus has maintained economic relations with Russia when almost everyone else is severing ties because of human rights violations in Ukraine.

In April they opted out of the unilateral sanctions that even Switzerland had joined in on.

At the time Airbus CEO Guillaume Faury whined that sanctions on Russian titanium would only have "small impact on Russia, and would have large consequences on the rest of the countries and the industry. So we think the no-sanction policy actually is the most meaningful one."

This isn’t the first time Airbus has been complicit in Putin’s aggression. The company actually increased imports after the 2014 invasion of Crimea, as Russia provides about half of Airbus’s titanium needs.

Airbus is a nationless company with headquarters Netherlands and operations throughout the world. Company leadership’s behavior in light of Russian aggression, it may be argued, is the dark side of the Golden Arches: multinational companies whose economic influence fuels conflict rather than curtails it.

Is a company like Airbus playing Putin’s game?

So, the American government needs to exclude it from our game. We need end all contracts with Airbus, which produces refueling tanker aircraft for the Air Force.

It announced it had won a juicy new contract in January – right before the invasion – but cooperating with an adversary in a time of war seems like a reason to Crtl+Z the traditional bidding process.

The United States must not reward companies and nations who economically support countries who have violated international law and threaten nuclear war.

And if they don’t stop, we can have McDonald’s ban Airbus from its restaurants.

Jared Whitley is a longtime politico who has worked in the U.S. Congress, White House and defense industry. He is an award-winning writer, having won best blogger in the state from the Utah Society of Professional Journalists (2018) and best columnist from Best of the West (2016). He earned his MBA from Hult International Business School in Dubai. Read Jared Whitley's reports — More Here.