| Rishi Sunak in Washington |
| President Biden and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak of Britain met yesterday at the White House, where they asserted that the “special relationship” between their countries was strong enough to meet challenges posed by artificial intelligence, economic headwinds and an ongoing war in Ukraine. |
| I spoke to Mark Landler, our London bureau chief, about what to take away from the two-day summit. |
| Natasha: Was Sunak able to meet his aims in Washington this week? |
| Mark: The U.K. came into this visit with a fairly modest set of expectations — they weren’t going to get a full-blown trade deal with the U.S., but they wanted to get some public display of economic cooperation. And they did get this more modest agreement to protect supply chains, called the Atlantic Declaration. There was also talk of cooperating on regulating artificial intelligence. I would say they emerged with probably about the most they could hope for. |
| How would you describe the relationship between Biden and Sunak? |
| They are no longer extremely formal with one another, and they do have a personal rapport. But remember, one of them is an 80-year-old, and the other is a 42-year-old. They’re divided by age, by background and by interests. This is not going to be the kind of close relationship that Tony Blair had with Bill Clinton, or that Margaret Thatcher had with Ronald Reagan decades ago. |
| What could trans-Atlantic cooperation on A.I. regulation look like? |
| They didn’t really fill in the blanks, but they’re going to work jointly on researching the challenges that A.I. raises. |
| The U.K., under Sunak, would like to be a global leader in establishing rules for the development of A.I. technology. The problem the U.K. has is that, having left the European Union, they’re not part of the dialogue between the U.S. and the E.U. on what to do about artificial intelligence, and there’s a danger they could find themselves elbowed out. |
| What else did Sunak accomplish — or not accomplish — on this trip? |
| On the level of optics, Rishi Sunak has had more success overseas than at home, where he has a very, very, tough economic situation and his party is lagging in the polls. Overseas, he’s been able to carve out a fairly strong position for the U.K., based on its staunch support of Ukraine and the strong role it can take on some of these other economic issues. |
| For Sunak, this was all about looking good as a global statesman. The only potential missed opportunity was on the rather trivial level of baseball: At the Washington Nationals game the night before he met Biden, he was invited as a V.I.P. to throw out the first pitch. Sunak put on the jacket and walked out to the mound, but he handed the ball to someone else to pitch. I think that frustrated some British diplomats, who thought that Sunak would actually be pretty well equipped to pitch a baseball — because he does play cricket, and the skills are sort of similar. |
