Long before the first newly purchased Boeing airliner lands at Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport, Iran and the US will have had to come to terms with a new reality: US citizens would once again be taking up residence in Tehran, the first to do so since the Islamic Revolution and subsequent hostage crisis in 1979 and 1980.
When the US on Wednesday gave the green light for the direct sale of Western planes to Iran, much more than about four decades of sanctions on such deals came to an end. Not that the deals approved by the US Department of the Treasury are insignificant: 80 Boeing jets and an initial batch of 17 Airbus planes out of a potential total of 118.
However, the sale would have the important effect of ending an era of absolute isolation between the countries. Boeing would almost certainly have to open an administrative office in Tehran, and technicians would have to move here to train their Iranian counterparts in the care and maintenance of the planes. Among them, almost certainly, would be many Americans.
That seems to be exactly what the US had in mind in approving the deal, Iranian analysts say.
The deal not only allows Iranian President Hassan Rouhani to show a tangible gain from warming relations with the West, but also moves Iran that much closer to his ultimate goal of normalization of relations with the US.
“Once this deal is a fact it will be much harder for the hard-liners to try to prevent relations with the United States,” said Farshad Ghorbanpour, a political activist who supports Rouhani. “Nobody can deny that with the planes, people and know-how will enter Iran.”
Word of the Boeing and Airbus deals came as Rouhani was attending the UN General Assembly in New York.
Speaking at a news conference on Thursday, Rouhani said Iranian officials already had developed relationships with counterparts at both aviation companies through “many visits,” and that Iran welcomed foreign businesses and investments.
“I do not see any problems,” he told reporters.
It is the US government that is responsible for keeping US companies from the Iranian market, he said. “If Americans have problems, they need to resolve their own problems.”
Buying planes from the US, opening a Boeing office or having US representatives at an international airport might seem insignificant. However, it would represent a tectonic shift in relations.
In 1980, when ties between the countries were severed, all 140,000 Americans living in Iran were forced to leave. The US embassy was turned into an ideological museum and all US businesses left over the years, as sanctions made commerce increasingly difficult, and more recently, impossible.
The bureaus of the New York Times, Bloomberg and some other news media organizations were long the only official US entities allowed to operate in Iran, either by the Iranian authorities or under US sanctions.
When Conoco won an oil contract in Iran in 1995, it secretly opened an office in Tehran, only to close it when US Congress adopted tougher sanctions.
Many Iranians hope the January nuclear agreement, which led to the lifting of some sanctions, changed all of that, citing the jetliner deal as the start of a new era.
“We are getting to a point where the gap between economic relations and political normalization is gradually getting smaller,” said Saeed Laylaz, an economist close to the government.
However, hatred of the US was the ideological bedrock of the Islamic republic and there are strong forces dedicated to keeping it that way.
Police officers some months ago closed down a knockoff KFC restaurant after hard-liners protested, saying the chicken wings were a symbol of Westernization.
When someone tried to open a McDonald’s franchise there 20 years ago, it took just two days for the restaurant to be burned down.
And there are still many sources of tension, particularly the harassment of US Navy vessels by Iranian naval speedboats and the imprisonment of several Iranian-Americans with dual nationalities.
“No, we should not have relations,” conservative political analyst Hamidreza Taraghi said. “We hardliners also want safe planes. But we need to keep our independence and distance from the United States. That is one of the pillars of our ideology.”
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