As U.S. Regime Fights Three Wars, Obama Pushes F-18 Fighter Jets on Brazil
March 20th, 2011Hope.
Flashback: Obama Awarded 2009 Nobel Peace Prize
Via: Reuters:
President Barack Obama made a strong pitch for the Boeing F-18 jet fighter in a meeting with Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, but she did not indicate if her government had decided to buy the U.S.-made plane, the White House said on Sunday.
“The F-18 issue did come up. President Rousseff raised it,” White House aide Dan Restrepo told reporters in Rio de Janeiro, referring to the leaders’ bilateral meeting in Brasilia on Saturday that kicked off Obama’s five-day Latin American tour.
Brazil is weighing a multi-billion dollar bid to modernize its air force, and Obama has made promoting exports to boost U.S. jobs back home a central part of his trip to Brazil, Chile and El Salvador.
“President Obama underscored that the F-18 is the best plane on offer … in that the technology transfer package … is equivalent to the packages that are offered to partners and allies around the world,” said Restrepo, Obama’s top Latin American adviser.
Research Credit: anothernut
I’m skeptical that Brazil will want to buy F-18s. Granted, Brazil wants to project its burgeoning power, but Brazil’s Embraer (market cap of more than US $6 billion) has its own line of (far more modest) military aircraft — but more importantly, Embraer is also purported to have several projects already in discussion with Boeing (which produces the F-18).
If I were a Brazilian leader, rather than agree to just buy F-18s, I’d negotiate a joint development/ production program between Embraer and Boeing that splits jobs between the two companies/countries. (“OK, we’ll buy some F-18s, but 50% of the production has to be done in Brazil.”) This would follow in the spirit of the 2008 agreement Brazil signed with France, creating a joint venture between French naval design firm DCNS and Brazil’s Odebrecht to build five submarines *in Brazil*.
Even though Brazilian unemployment is only 6.1% (as of January 2011), there is significant underemployment there, and recent Brazilian regimes seem too accountable to just buy military technology “off the rack.” (Newsflash for the U.S. military-industrial complex: the Brazilian military junta quietly ceded power to the democratic system in the mid-80s.)
That said… really, who is Brazil going to use F-18s against? Paraguay? Other than some tension with Bolivia regarding nationalization of Petrobras’ natural gas holdings back in 2006, Brazil is generally congenial with South America’s “Bolivarian” countries (Bolivia, Venezuela, Ecuador), and using F-18’s to chase smugglers would be U.S. “hyper-power” style overkill…