On April 21, near the end of a first 100 days that saw the Trump administration curiously preoccupied with annexing Canada and Greenland, a caller joined the Charlie Kirk Show to offer a suggestion. “Is the best solution to the Taiwan issue simply having Taiwan join America?” she asked.
Kirk, the Turning Point USA co-founder whose lib-triggering tours of American universities won him a legion of Gen Z followers and the ear of Donald Trump, has not gained a reputation as Rush Limbaugh’s successor by appealing to nuance. But on the question of Taiwan, he demurred.
“There’s a lot of people in the administration that are talking about Taiwan, are thinking about it,” Kirk said. “I just want to caution some of what you are saying. The Chinese Communist Party believes it’s theirs. And so, any actions that America will do towards Taiwan could be seen as a direct invasion or military threat against the Chinese Communist Party.”
His tone is of a piece with much of the American right, which, despite spending some of the first six months of Trump’s second term airing disagreements over everything from Ukraine funding to the Epstein files, has remained largely noncommittal on the question of Taiwan and China.
When asked in February whether the U.S. would defend Taiwan in the case of a Chinese invasion, Trump declined to answer. Dodging that question has been central to U.S. foreign policy since 1979. But the broader orbit of influencers and pundits who surround the administration need pay no heed to strategic ambiguity. And yet they, too, have appeared reluctant to hash things out.
“A lot of the debates about China really haven’t even happened yet,” said the deputy director of the Council on Foreign Relations China Open Source Observatory, Tanner Greer, who published a report in April outlining the worldviews that inform Trump’s foreign policy.
On June 19, three days before the U.S. launched strikes against three of Iran’s nuclear facilities, Texas Senator Ted Cruz went on Tucker Carlson’s YouTube show to advocate for regime change. It was Cruz the interventionist against Carlson the isolationist, and Carlson didn’t hold back, lambasting his guest for lacking basic knowledge of the country whose government he hoped would be overthrown.
One could imagine a similar conversation between Vivek Ramaswamy, who argued on Carlson’s show in 2023 that the U.S. should commit to supporting Taiwan only until it is able to manufacture its own semiconductors, and Steve Bannon, who has made resisting the CCP central to his identity in recent years. But that sort of showdown has yet to materialize.
Arta Moeini, who serves as managing director of the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy, a think tank that advocates for military restraint, said that the central conflict of Trumpian foreign policy — realist focus on spheres of influence versus values-based internationalism — has continued to play out, even if it has not yet focused on the question of China. It is figures like Cruz, Moeini said, that make it difficult for Trump to fully embrace the type of populist foreign policy that got him elected.
“It’s a question of whether or not Trump has the audacity, the courage, the boldness and the statesmanship to be able to actually conquer what he called, originally, the swamp, right?” he said. “So this is the swamp. There’s a foreign policy swamp.”
Moeini is slated to give a talk at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington next month, where he hopes to make a strong case for realism. Joining him in the lineup for that event will be Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard as well as Bannon, both of whom have consistently advocated an anti-interventionist line. Still, Moeini isn’t expecting an entirely friendly crowd.
That is in part because many American conservatives, who comprise a crucial segment of Trump’s coalition, still view the world as a theater of competition between liberal democracies and revisionist authoritarian regimes.
“I’m a firm believer that this is where the history of the world gets written,” said Gordon Chang, a frequent Fox News contributor and author of several books on China, “and that if the Western democracies fail, we’re gonna be involved in wars everywhere.”
In 2019, Chang wrote in The Wall Street Journal that, “Trump is the only thing that stands between us and a world dominated by China.” Trump’s approach to China has been a necessary corrective to the posture of engagement that preceded it, Chang says. But he remains skeptical that when Trump and his followers do turn their attention to China, they will be able to strike the sort of deal they are looking for.
“Every new president always thinks that they can improve on the China policies of their predecessor,” Chang said. “And they always believe that they can achieve some sort of accommodation with China. And it takes some period of time for the Chinese to disabuse them of that. And I think we’re going through the same process with Trump.”
President of the Jamestown Foundation Peter Mattis, who previously served under then-Senator Marco Rubio on the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, shares that pessimism. “I’m not sure that anyone is entirely clear in the administration where exactly they’re headed,” Mattis said.
The first Trump administration’s more confrontational stance toward China came mostly in the form of trade policy, when it imposed tariffs as high as 21% on Chinese exports. Those efforts culminated in China’s January 2020 commitment to buy an additional $200 billion in U.S. goods over the following two years. But a 2022 analysis by the Peterson Institute for International Economics found that China did not end up buying any of the U.S. exports that they had committed to.
“If the Phase One agreement was never really executed, then why should we expect something similar to work better this time around?” Mattis said.
In the meantime, while Trump continues to extend the deadline for negotiations with China, he has put a 20% tariff on goods from Taiwan, notably higher than the 15% number reached in agreements with Japan and South Korea. Christian Whiton, who served in the State Department during Trump’s first term, argued in this magazine last week that the 20% rate is the result of a series of missteps by a Taiwanese government unwilling, or unable, to come to terms with what they are dealing with in Trump.
The reaction in Taipei to Whiton’s article has been equal parts defensive, equal parts panic. But few have argued that the failure to reach a better deal with Trump is good news for the island.
If there is one prominent member of Trump’s orbit that Taiwan can cling to as a source of hope, it is undersecretary for defense Elbridge Colby, who has become an increasingly influential figure in the Trump’s administration’s security policymaking. In a 2023 paper, he argued that, in order to prevent China from achieving dominance in Asia, “Washington needs to ensure an effective denial defense along the first island chain, one that includes Taiwan within its perimeter.”
Colby’s commitment to Taiwan is part of a broader foreign policy project commonly referred to as prioritization. It calls for the U.S. to remove its resources and attention from Europe and the Middle East so that it can focus almost entirely on China. But even if that is the direction the Trump administration would like to be headed, it doesn’t appear to be coming any time soon.
At a meeting of the U.N. Security Council on Sunday, the U.S. and Israel alone among member states in refusing to condemn Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu’s intention to expand military operations into Gaza City. And in advance of his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin this Friday, Trump told reporters that if he doesn’t like what he hears at the meeting, he is perfectly willing to let Russia and Ukraine keep fighting it out.
Trump’s decision to allow Nvidia to sell its H20 A.I. chip into China has also sparked fears that he may be wavering in his commitment to staying tough on China.
“If you’re trying to prioritize American industry, American tech, then making it easier for the PRC to get their hands on scarce supplies of high-end computing chips to support AI modelling and compute, that’s also something that it’s hard to see as a very clean, America First, or MAGA-type initiative,” said Mattis.
If the resolution of conflicts elsewhere in the world is a necessary condition for the Trump administration, and all those who surround it, to reveal how they really feel about China and Taiwan, then Taiwan will have to wait.
Greer, for his part, thinks the U.S. has an incentive to postpone the China question while it attends to other priorities. “The question, of course, is gonna be like, okay, how far in the future?” he said. “And is this other stuff gonna take so long that that future never comes?”
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