KEY POINTS
- Before Lithuania, President Joe Biden makes a stop in the U.K.
- The visit reinforces the so-called special relationship
- Meetings with King Charles III and PM Rishi Sunak on tap
Before President Joe Biden attends the 74th NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, he’ll make a stop in the United Kingdom to meet with King Charles III and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.
Biden’s schedule indicates engagements are planned to take place with the king and Sunak. These meetings will “further strengthen the close relationship between our nations,” according to a White House statement.
The president is scheduled to travel to the U.K., Lithuania, and Finland from July 9-13 with his first stop in London. After the NATO summit, the President will make a stop in Finland for a summit with leaders of Nordic nations.
In October 2022, Biden and Sunak announced a new economic partnership they called the Atlantic Declaration. Biden said the plan “outlines how we can enhance our cooperation to accelerate the clean energy transition that must take place and is taking place, lead the development of emerging technologies that are going to shape so much of our future and protect technologies critical to our national security.”
Rishi Sunak became Britain’s third prime minister in a seven week period last fall, and is the U.K.’s first PM of color, the first Hindu, and at age 42 the youngest leader in more than 200 years. One of Sunak’s top priorities was to set out plans to come up with £40 million to fill a fiscal hole created by soaring inflation and a sluggish economy.
Sunak described the U.S.-U.K. relationship as “a new economic partnership for a new age of a kind that has never been agreed before” and “a test case for the kind of re-imagined alliances President Biden has spoken so eloquently about.”
