President Trump’s plan to approve the $10 billion sale of F-35 stealth fighter jets to the United Arab Emirates is expected to proceed, regardless of the outcome of the 2020 election and despite questions from Democrats in the Senate.
That approval process hasn’t yet concluded, but the administration has made its intentions known through an informal notification to Congress at the end of October. The informal step, by custom, is delivered up to 20 days prior to issuing a formal notification, thus initiating a countdown for approval that would end in December — opening the door to the sale of as many as 50 of the warplanes, for roughly $10 billion.
“If the formal notification expires, whenever that expiry occurs, it is then approved,” UAE Ambassador Yousef al Otaiba told the Washington Examiner in an interview this week. “As far as I know, there is no mechanism to unapprove it or reverse it.”
Emirati officials, who agreed to normalize diplomatic relations with Israel earlier this year as cooperation between the two countries improved due to their shared perception of Iranian threats, regard the F-35 deal as a natural progression of the U.S.-UAE relationship.
“We have an operational requirement for F-35s for exactly the same reason that Israel has an operational requirement for F35s,” the ambassador said.
Still, the proposed sale has met with objections on Capitol Hill. Congressional Democrats have raised misgivings about the sale. These doubts center largely on how the deal would comply with a federal law requiring officials to support Israel’s Qualitative Military Edge in the region, but it is also shadowed by outrage over civilian casualties in Yemen, where Saudi Arabia and the UAE have been fighting Iran-backed militants who overthrew a friendly government.
“The American public has a right to insist that the sales of U.S. weapons to foreign governments, especially those of this magnitude and lethality, are consistent with U.S. values, our national security objectives, and the safety of our closest allies,” New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said last week.
The lack of clarity about how the administration plans to preserve Israel’s military advantage in the region could cause those doubts to spread among Republicans as well.
“Israel knows what they need,” said Bradley Bowman, a former Senate Republican aide who now directs the Center on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “The failure to identify specific additional capabilities to keep the balance addressed is going to make the sledding a little bit more tough on Capitol Hill.”
Lawmakers and analysts also worry that a transfer of F-35s in Abu Dhabi could someday expose the cutting-edge technology to China.
“I have serious reservations about transferring our most complex stealth technology, which the Chinese have for years sought to steal, to the UAE, which has increasingly close cooperation with both the Chinese and Russian militaries,” said Sen. Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat who also sits on the Foreign Relations panel. “We know the Emiratis have violated past end-use agreements and allowed the weapons we’ve sold them to end up in the wrong hands, including violent terrorist-affiliated militias.”
Otaiba brushed off the reservation about end-user agreements, pointing to the extreme impracticality of an illicit transfer — “I’m pretty sure there’s going to be nobody able to fly an F-35,” he said — and implied that the intensifying U.S.-China competition augurs in favor of the approval of the sale.
“If the U.S. is indeed interested in doing less in the region, don’t you want your partners doing more?” the ambassador said. “Don’t you want your partners buying equipment with their own money as opposed to the U.S. taxpayer money?”
The looming presence of China may also weigh on the minds of the officials who approved the deal. Beijing has a record of using missile sales to attempt to seduce American allies, as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo acknowledged in September, and China reportedly has begun “mass production” of a stealth fighter jet designed to rival the F-35.
“Our preference has always been and always will be to come and work with the United States and purchase and cooperate with the United States because of our partnership, but also because of interoperability,” Otaiba said, before declining to “speculate” about whether the UAE would consider dealing with China if the F-35 deal fell through. “It’s always been our preference and our priority to come and work with the United States first before everyone else.”
Murphy suggested that “Congress should not approve” of the sale if Trump proceeds without allaying legislative concerns, but any skeptical lawmakers have an uphill fight. To block the approval of the deal within the standard foreign military sales process, a veto-proof majority of legislators would have to back a resolution of disapproval in December. Failing that, they would need to include a prohibition in the pending defense authorization bill, Bowman said, but Trump could veto that as well if he chose.
“There’s basically two ways that Congress can try to stop this, and they’re both hard,” Bowman said.
