"It's not going to create or take away a single job": Why Trump's excuse on the Saudis doesn't hold

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https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/10/21/18003696/trump-saudi-arabia-jamal-khashoggi-weapons-jobs

“It’s not going to create or take away a single job”: Why Trump’s excuse on the Saudis doesn’t hold up
There are a lot of reasons for Trump to avoid punishing the Saudis. Jobs aren’t one of them.
By Emily Stewart
Oct 21, 2018, 1:00pm EDT


When President Donald Trump explained over the past two weeks why he was reluctant to damage the relationship between the US and Saudi Arabia over the the disappearance and murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi, he kept coming back to one reason: jobs.

“I don’t want to hurt jobs,” Trump said in an interview with 60 Minutes aired last weekend, explaining that there are “other ways of punishing.”

“Who are we hurting? It’s 500,000 jobs,” he told Fox Business on Wednesday.

“I’d rather keep the million jobs, and I’d find another solution,” he said at a defense roundtable in Arizona on Friday.

But while there are a multitude of reasons Trump might be hesitant to condemn the Saudi Arabian government, tens or hundreds of thousands of jobs from an arms deal with the Saudi government isn’t one of them — at least a legitimate one.

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Vox’s Alexia Fernández Campbell recently dove in on Trump’s jobs claims to try to figure out what’s actually going on. Her findings:

Overall, the private US defense industry does directly employ a lot of US workers — about 355,500 in 2016, according to the most the recent estimates from the Aerospace Industries Association. But private-sector defense workers make up less than 0.5 percent of the total US labor force, and that includes every person whose job depends directly on the sale or production of airplanes, tanks, bombs, and services for the entire US military. It’s unlikely that many of them, if any, depend directly on weapons sales to Saudi Arabia, and its also unlikely that those jobs would vanish if Saudi money disappeared.

“It’s not going to create or take away a single job I don’t think,” Jim Corridore, directors of industrials research at research and investment firm CFRA Research, told me. “There are other homes for these products should these deals fall through.”

Companies have been distancing themselves from Saudi Arabia in the wake of Khashoggi’s disappearance, but as the New York Times notes, plenty of money is still flowing.

Corridore said even if the US or defense companies slow down contract agreements for a bit, it will likely only be until the dust settles around the current controversy. “The most likely scenario is a short-term delay in these deals where we say we’re not going to do them, time goes by, reforms are made, and the deals are made,” he said.

The Saudis could potentially go to Russia and China to try to make other weapons deals, and that could potentially be problematic later down the line for future sales, because equipment from those countries can’t communicate with equipment made by companies in the US — sort of how Macs and PCs used to work. But the experts I spoke with said that risk is limited and still not much leverage for the Saudis.

Even so, again, the jobs estimates Trump is putting out are “tremendously overblown,” said Andrew Miller, deputy director for policy at the Project on Middle East Democracy who served on the National Security Council under Obama. And it’s not just Trump who is likely overstating the importance of the deals to jobs — it’s likely the companies, too.

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https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/10/21/18003696/trump-saudi-arabia-jamal-khashoggi-weapons-jobs