Three months ago, it would have been inconceivable that the US and its allies would have contributed such heavy arms. Read more at straitstimes.com.
came after weeks of tense back-channel negotiations with the chancellor of Germany and other European leaders, who insisted that the only way to unlock a flow of heavy European arms was for the United States to send tanks of its own.German-made Leopard 2 tanks to be delivered to Ukraine
“Putin expected Europe and the United States to weaken our resolve,” Mr Biden said at the White House, flanked by Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin. He added, “These tanks are further evidence of our enduring, unflagging commitment to Ukraine and our confidence in the skill of Ukrainian forces.”
But Mr Biden was clearly sensitive to the suggestion that he had been forced into the decision by one of his closest allies. He cast the issue as one of preserving unity. “We wanted to make sure we were all together,” Mr Biden said. The Russians viewed it differently, to no one’s surprise. The Russian ambassador to the United States, Mr Anatoly Antonov, spent much of the day on social media suggesting a broader US plot, saying “it is all about US ‘proxy-war’ with our country.”Both Mr Biden and Mr Scholz were worried about the proxy-war imagery, though for different reasons.
In senior Biden administration meetings, Mr Austin and General Mark Milley, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, laid out the Pentagon position. In subsequent interviews, White House national security officials dutifully repeated the military talking points about why the Abrams did not make sense, while European tanks did.
At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last week, Mr Scholz was clear, according to several people who heard him, that he would not agree to send Leopard tanks until the United States agreed to send its Abrams. US officials at first thought he could be persuaded otherwise, and hoped that a commitment by Britain to send Challenger 2 tanks – which have different operational requirements – would move him to do the same.
But as often happens, the tanks – a weapon easy for anyone to understand, resonant of wars past – became a litmus test. And after a year of using Nato unity as one of the Biden administration’s key talking points about Russian failures in the war in Ukraine, senior administration officials realised that it was time for politics to trump the Pentagon’s objections.
Mr Austin himself arrived at that conclusion after the meeting in Germany ended without a decision on the German tanks, according to aides, telling associates that he did not see the sense of risking a “fracture” in Nato or a rift with Germany over the issue.
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