B-1B bombers from a U.K. airbase, citing terror threats, may embolden Iran and Russia’s use of proxies to carry out sabotage attacks, according to current and former British officials. While stressing any decision about American military hardware is for Washington to make, the U.K. is concerned that hostile states will take confidence that they can force changes to Western defense arrangements and destabilize their enemies for the relatively small cost of hiring local criminal proxies, the people said, speaking on condition of anonymity about sensitive matters. Those concerns hint at nascent tensions between Burnham’s weeks-old U.K. government and Trump’s administration after the president said the aircraft “didn’t fly out by accident” from RAF Fairford in western England, and suggested they had been moved away rather than “tempt the enemy.”
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