Having won on tanks, Sunak hopes promising Ukraine phantom F-16s will prompt Biden to give it real ones

(Originally published May 18 in “What in the World“) As he prepares to meet U.S. President Joe Biden in Hiroshima this week for the latest summit of the Group of Seven, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is spearheading what has emerged as a pressure campaign by Britain and Washington’s other allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to force U.S. President Joe Biden to relent and give Kyiv the fighter jets it has been requesting.

Sunak and his Dutch counterpart Mark Rutte this week discussed forming an international consortium that will provide F-16s to Ukraine, apparently in defiance of Washington’s refusal to do so. While London had initially said an agreement to form the consortium had been reached, the Dutch quickly denied any agreement had been settled.

While no nation can hand over its own F-16s to Ukraine without U.S. approval, the U.K. and Belgium raised the ante by saying they would begin training Ukrainian pilots how to fly F-16s. Where London will get F-16s to train them on is a mystery: while Belgium does fly F-16s, the RAF does not.

The consortium would in theory seem to be like the one that this month supplied Ukraine with long-range Storm Shadow missiles, which can hit targets more than 100km away. The Storm Shadows circumvented Washington’s refusal to give Ukraine long-range Atacms, which it fears Ukraine would use to launch attacks across the border inside Russia and risk provoking Russia and perhaps even China into open conflict with NATO.

But how much of the pressure campaign is real and how much is diplomatic pantomime remains unclear. In some ways, it resembles how London’s January decision to provide Challenger tanks to Ukraine overcame U.S. reservations to providing its own Abrams M-1 tanks, which in turn convinced Germany to remove its own objections to NATO members handing Kyiv their used Leopard tanks. That entire episode seemed carefully scripted to moot each government’s prior reservations. Similar tactics have swayed the Biden before. It was after Ukraine launched its own drones inside Russia that Biden last December approved delivery of Patriot anti-missile batteries to Ukraine.

If Biden does finally relent on F-16s, it would leave only Atacms and attack drones as the only weapons he has still refused Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. This month last year, Biden caved on allowing shipments of M177 howitzers to Ukraine. By the end of May, Biden had also reversed his refusal to supply Ukraine with M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or Himars, a reversal so significant that Biden took the trouble of explaining his decision to The New York Times.

Much of this reluctance has been blunted by the continued failure of Russian President Vladimir Putin to respond with escalations in kind. Most particularly, he hasn’t made good on threats to deploy nuclear weapons. That and increasing signs that Russia is running out of ammo and facing rising dissension among both top brass and in the ranks have touched off a seeming race among NATO allies to be seen giving Ukraine the weapons it needs to win.

But provoking Russian escalation isn’t the only thing Washington is worried about. Like the Abrams tanks, the Pentagon says training up Ukrainian pilots to use F-16s would take so long they might not be ready until the war is already over. While Ukrainians are training on Abrams tanks in Germany, the first tanks won’t arrive in Ukraine until at least this fall, by which time we may already know the fateful outcome of Kyiv’s Big Spring (now likely Summer) Counteroffensive.

There’s also the risk that Russians capture one of the F-16s, which contains secret technology the Pentagon doesn’t want them to obtain.