History tells us that Trump shouldn’t look his Qatari gift horse in the mouth
Qatar’s reported offer of a Boeing 747 to US president Donald Trump is not the first such gratuity in the history of US-Middle East relations. The same gift was presented in the opposite direction in February 1945, when US president Franklin D Roosevelt gave Saudi Arabia’s founding king, Ibn Saud, a Dakota DC-3.
The Dakota was a less exclusive aircraft than the Qatari 747 coveted by Trump. The military variant of the Douglas DC-3, the Dakota was a basic twin-propeller workhorse – but it was, at the time, pretty much the state of the art. After taking his first flights on it, Ibn Saud was sufficiently dazzled to purchase two more.
The history of national leaders being impressed by aircraft is almost as long as the history of powered flight. In 1910, just seven years after the Wright brothers took off from Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Tsar Ferdinand I of Bulgaria became the first airborne head of state during a visit to an aerodrome in Belgium. According to a contemporary newspaper report, he was “highly enthusiastic”.
The feeling has been widely shared among subsequent heads of state and government, and intermittently exploited. Circa 1963, US president John F Kennedy followed Roosevelt’s lead and gave a DC-3 to loopy despot Mobutu Sese Seko, then-president of then-Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo). This might have inaugurated Mobutu’s taste for aviation: he later installed a special runway near his palace at Gbadolite so that he could go shopping in Paris via Concorde.
The Soviet Union also sought the favour of various leaders during the Cold War by distributing airborne largesse, including an Ilyushin Il-14P to Josip Broz Tito in Yugoslavia, an Ilyushin Il-62 to Kim Il Sung in North Korea and a Tupolev Tu-134 to Samora Machel in Mozambique. The latter proved an extremely mixed blessing: it crashed in 1986, killing president Machel and 33 others.
There are other hazards attached to accepting such gifts. As more than a few national security experts have attempted to caution Trump, there is be a fine line between an executive aircraft and Trojan horse. In 2002, China took delivery of a Boeing 767 for use as a presidential transport – built by Boeing in Seattle and fitted out by private companies in Texas. President Jiang Zemin’s staff, perplexed by a whining sound on test flights, eventually found 27 listening devices, including bugs located in the bathrooms and in the headboard of the presidential bed.
Mueller is the host of ‘The Foreign Desk’ on Monocle Radio. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle today.
