Biden and Sunak set to discuss economy, A.I. and Ukraine

British Prime Minister is under pressure to make post-Brexit Britain a reliable global player and seeks to strengthen economic ties.

President Biden was due to meet British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak at the White House on Thursday to discuss economic cooperation, the rise of artificial intelligence and the war in Ukraine.

Mr. Biden and Mr. Sunak have met several times at diplomatic events in recent months, but the prime minister's two-day visit to Washington is a high-profile engagement, including a bilateral meeting and a press conference scheduled for April. afternoon.

Mr. Sunak, who is 43 and has been in the job since October, is under pressure to make post-Brexit Britain a capable and reliable global player. He seeks to strengthen economic ties in the West in part to counter common enemies, such as China, as he noted before the meeting.

"Just like the interoperability between our militaries has given us a battlefield advantage over our adversaries,” he said, “greater economic interoperability will give us a crucial advantage in the decades to come. »

Mr. Sunak is concerned about issues raised by AI, an area in which developments are happening faster than efforts to regulate them. He is also likely to discuss other trade issues with Mr Biden, including the possibility of reaching a modest agreement on critical minerals for electric vehicles, similar to the one the United States reached with Japan in March. .

Although economic concerns are at the top of Mr. Sunak's agenda, the upsurge in fighting between Ukrainian and Russian forces in recent days, as well as the Tuesday's destruction of a major dam on the Dnipro River in southern Ukraine are likely to consume much of the conversation among leaders.

M . Sunak, like Mr. Biden, has been a strong Kyiv supporter. He told reporters on his flight to Washington that if Moscow was behind the attack, it would be "the largest attack on civilian infrastructure in Ukraine since the start of the war, and would simply demonstrate the new lows that we would have seen from Russian aggression". ."

U.S. military officials watched with resignation as fighting intensified in Europe, and Mr. Biden, who had no public events on his schedule Wednesday, reaffirmed its continued support for Kiev.

"We are not leaving," he told reporters at the White House on Tuesday. Ukraine."

Despite their political differences - Mr. Biden is a moderate liberal and Mr. Sunak is a conservative - Thursday's meeting will be an opportunity for the two men to display a shared leadership style that emphasizes balanced diplomacy.

Mr Biden has spent much of his time in office seeking to stabilize relations of the United States with their allies around the world following the Trump presidency.And Mr Sunak, who came to power after the explosive tenure of Boris Johnson and the very short one of Liz Truss, sought to establish himself as a more reliable occupant of 10 Downing Street. Both have low approval ratings, and the two leading countries that have so far managed to avoid economic recession but whose voters feel financially constrained by inflation.

"The economy will be part of this conversation," White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters on Wednesday. "They have one of the strongest bilateral investment relationships solid and the most important in the world."