Taiwan took quite a bruising in the hours after President Donald Trump’s visit to China two weeks ago. But now the dust has settled, things aren’t so gloomy.
Trump was relatively disciplined in his messaging when addressing the media flying home on Air Force One, saying China’s president, Xi Jinping (習近平), “does not want to see a fight for independence” but that “I didn’t make a comment on it. I heard him out.”
But then an interview prerecorded in Beijing with Fox News’s Bret Baier dropped, where Trump said he wasn’t “looking to have somebody go independent,” and that the delayed $14 billion arms sale was “a very good negotiating chip for us, frankly.”
Rather predictably, this has sent the “Trump Will Abandon Taiwan” doomers into overdrive. And it looks like they have a point. Much of what Trump told Baier appeared on lists of things that analysts hoped he wouldn’t say.
However, there are still reasons to be cheerful.
Trump said that the defense sales are a bargaining chip. That doesn’t necessarily mean that he isn’t going to approve them. After all, he still loves to make deals and to make sales. He’s hardly going to be short of moments where China seems to slight the U.S., and he needs a way to punish Beijing.
There also should be real concerns about the contents of that sale. The acting secretary of the navy, Hung Cao, said that sales were being delayed because the U.S. might need the weapons for Iran. This magazine had already reported on how the U.S. and its allies have run down the Patriot air defense stocks, and the risk that Taiwan could be at the back of a long queue.
Taiwan went through a deeply unpleasant domestic political dispute to pass a reduced special budget for this $14 billion sale. Opponents of cuts to that budget said that the domestic drone programs which weren’t funded were vital for Taiwanese security. While no one would suggest that it would be easy to reopen a debate about how to spend that $14 billion, that is exactly what will take place if the sale does get officially canceled.
And if that happens, then the domestic politics in the U.S. around supporting Taiwan are also going to intensify. Even in the last two weeks, we have seen strong Democrat criticism of Trump’s statements about Taiwan, and modest Republican pushback as well.
Trump is not going to be around forever, so it doesn’t hurt that he is currently bedding in pro-Taiwan vibes among his opponents. Of course, the risk for Taiwan is that not supporting Taiwan could also get bedded in on the MAGA side.
In the meantime, Taiwan does need to get by with a President Trump who may well have drunk Xi’s kool-aid. But there’s a wrinkle here.
Trump clearly believes that he has some sort of understanding with Xi that China won’t make any moves on Taiwan while Trump is president. There’s no way to know if there is any concrete basis for this belief. But it sets up a dynamic where aggressive moves by China are more likely to be seen by Trump as a personal betrayal, and thus more likely to provoke a response.
It’s entirely possible that Trump’s second term will deliver a secure Taiwan to an incoming Democratic president more predisposed than ever to defend it.
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