UK’s Sunak in Washington to talk tech with Biden
Seeks to keep Britain a leader in AI issues
LONDON — Prime Minister Rishi Sunak of Britain began a two-day visit to Washington on Wednesday with a goal of aligning two allies on the challenges of artificial intelligence. But his meeting with President Biden is more likely to be consumed by the here-and-now threat of Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Sunak, a self-described techie who has an MBA from Stanford University, will host a summit meeting in the fall on the regulatory issues raised by AI, part of a plan to make Britain a leader in controlling this fast-developing technology. But because Britain left the European Union in 2020, it is not part of the dialogue between the United States and the EU on how to deal with it.
“If the US and EU agree, the rest of the world follows, and Brexit Britain is in danger of being squeezed out,” said Kim Darroch, a former British ambassador to the United States. As sensible as it is to confront the challenge of AI, he added, Britain had more promising avenues to pursue with Washington.
For example, Britain’s robust military support for the Ukrainian army has kept it a central player in the Western response to Russia’s invasion. As it has in previous phases of the war, Britain’s readiness to train Ukrainian pilots on combat jets was a catalyst for Biden’s recent shift in favor of training Ukrainians on F-16 fighter jets and eventually supplying planes.
Those decisions took on new urgency after the breach this week of the Kakhovka dam, on the front line, which Ukrainian officials blamed on Russian troops, and which Moscow blamed on Ukrainian saboteurs.
If Russian forces were demonstrated to be behind the attack, Sunak told reporters on his flight to Washington, it would constitute “the largest attack on civilian infrastructure in Ukraine since the start of the war, and just would demonstrate the new lows that we would have seen from Russian aggression.”
Britain has stayed in lockstep with the United States since the start of the war, with Sunak showing the same vigorous support for President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine as his former boss and predecessor, Boris Johnson.
While at the White House, Sunak will also have a chance to lobby Biden to support Ben Wallace, Britain’s defense minister, to replace Jens Stoltenberg as secretary general of NATO. Wallace routinely wins the highest approval ratings of any Cabinet minister, but France prefers an EU candidate.
For Sunak, who faces economic clouds at home, the optics of the visit are as important as any policy outcomes. He is making his first trip to Washington as prime minister, with a chance to deepen his rapport with Biden. The two last met one-onone for coffee in April in Belfast, Northern Ireland, during a brief visit by the president to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement.
Still, Biden has at times kept Britain at arm’s length, particularly on issues like the post-Brexit trade status of Northern Ireland. He raised eyebrows in London last month when he told a fund-raiser in New York City that he had gone to Belfast to make sure “the Brits didn’t screw around” with Northern Ireland, after Sunak negotiated a deal with the EU to resolve trade frictions in the territory.
Biden had urged him to strike that deal in time for the anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, which ended decades of sectarian violence in the North. So, when Sunak did just that, diplomats on both sides expressed surprise that the White House did not give him more credit in its statement.
Yet, there are signs that Biden, 80, and Sunak, 43, are getting comfortable with each other, at least to the extent that the president is becoming more informal with him. When Sunak traveled to San Diego in March to inaugurate a submarine alliance among Britain, the United States, and Australia, Biden noted that Sunak was a Stanford graduate and owned a house up the coast.
“That’s why I’m being very nice to you,” Biden said. “Maybe you can invite me to your home in California.”
For all the emphasis on Ukraine, British officials said Sunak would make trans-Atlantic economic ties the centerpiece of his visit. He announced American companies had made $17.5 billion of investments in Britain, including a new Mars center outside London.
Sunak casts economic cooperation among Western nations as a bulwark against China, much as security cooperation has been against Russian aggression.
“Just as interoperability between our militaries has given us a battlefield advantage over our adversaries,” he said, “greater economic interoperability will give us a crucial edge in the decades ahead.”
But that message is complicated by the passage of the Biden administration’s health, climate, and tax bill, which critics in Britain and elsewhere in Europe faulted for its subsidies to green manufacturers.
It is also limited by Britain’s departure from the EU. Neither side is talking about a bilateral trade deal, which Brexiteers once promoted as a key dividend of leaving the bloc but which does not interest Biden.
Even on AI, Britain is constrained by its go-it-alone status: It is no longer a member of the Trade and Technology Council, where Washington and Brussels hash out AI-related policies.