Plane clash

摘要

Most museum exhibits are beautiful—or at least old. But an exhibition in 2015 at the World Trade Organisation (wto) included 60 cardboard boxes of documents. The point was to give a sense of the scale of two of the body's longest and largest legal disputes, over American and European subsidies for aircraft manufacturers. Now the fight is moving out of the paperwork phase. That means tariffs are coming. On October 2nd the wto published its decision to allow the Trump administration to put tariffs on $7.5bn-worth of imports from the European Union. That is intended to match the harm done to Boeing, an American manufacturer, by the eu's subsidies for Airbus, Boeing's European rival. It is the largest retaliation the wto has ever approved. Senior officials at the United States Trade Representative (ustr) called the victory "historic".