The city that receives Donald Trump this week has been waiting for him with the patience of a civilization that measures strategic time in dynasties rather than news cycles, and the welcome it has prepared is one part ceremony, one part negotiation, and one part trap — though which part is which depends entirely on what the American president says in the hours between the banquets.
At the center of everything, unspoken at the first summit but now impossible to avoid, sits Taiwan.
It has always sat there. For seventy years, the island of twenty-three million people has occupied the precise intersection of American commitment and American ambiguity, of Chinese sovereignty claims and democratic self-determination, of the kind of promise that great powers make to smaller ones and the kind of promise they quietly reassess when the cost of keeping it begins to feel real.
What is different in May 2026 is that the reassessment is no longer quiet. It is happening in public, at the highest levels, in a week of summit talks whose outcome will be studied in Taipei, Tokyo, Seoul, and every other capital in the Pacific with a stake in whether the United States means what it has said for five decades.
Xi Jinping has been unambiguous about what he wants. In a February phone call, he urged Trump to handle the question of arms sales to Taiwan with what Chinese diplomats translated as “extreme caution” — a phrase that, in the diplomatic register Beijing employs for its most serious demands, sits somewhere between a stern request and a warning.
He called Taiwan “the most important issue” in the bilateral relationship. His foreign minister, Wang Yi, made certain that American reporters understood the same point would be pressed again in Beijing.
A spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry said last week that “the Taiwan question is at the very core of China’s core interests” — language so precisely calibrated, so deliberately non-improvisational, that it signals the entire apparatus of the Chinese state has determined this is the moment to push.
The question is whether Trump, who has described the art of the deal as the highest form of human intelligence and has shown throughout his political career that abstract commitments feel less binding to him than concrete transactions, will conclude that Taiwan is a chip he can afford to play.
The evidence available to anyone paying attention is not reassuring.
Trump has a transactional history that cannot make Taiwan comfortable.
In his first term, Trump reportedly told aides that Taiwan was “like two feet from China” and that if China invaded, “there isn’t a thing we can do about it.”
He said it with the flat practicality of a real estate developer assessing an unfavorable location, not the cold calculation of a strategist evaluating a military problem.
The observation was wrong — the United States Navy has spent seventy years ensuring that geography does not determine the outcome of a Western Pacific conflict — but it was revealing. It suggested that for Trump, the defense of Taiwan had always been more a negotiating position than a conviction.
The problem is that Trump is often wrong but rarely admits to his ignorance and naïveté.
That impression has not dissolved in his second term. His administration approved an $11 billion arms package for Taiwan late last year, drawing an immediate two-day Chinese military exercise near the island in response.
A second package, worth roughly $14 billion and already approved by Taiwan’s legislature, awaits his signature. It has been waiting for months. Taiwan’s lawmakers, aware of the stakes, last week passed a special defense budget of $25 billion to cover both packages.
A bipartisan group of eight U.S. senators sent Trump a letter Friday urging him to approve the second package. He has not.
The silence around that decision is itself a kind of signal.
“By aiding Taiwan’s independence through arms sales,” China’s Foreign Ministry said in December, “the U.S. will only end up harming itself.”
This is not a legal argument. It is not even primarily a diplomatic one. It is an economic threat dressed in the language of principle, and its meaning becomes clearer when you hear it alongside what Fudan University’s Xin Qiang, director of that institution’s Center for Taiwan Studies, said about China’s leverage: if the United States sells more weapons to Taiwan, he explained, China “certainly won’t be as enthusiastic about purchasing goods from the United States like agricultural products or Boeing aircraft.”
Trump understands that language. He was conducting trade negotiations before he was conducting foreign policy, and the structure of this offer — buy less of what we want, sell less of what you want — is one he has navigated many times. What is less certain is whether he understands, or cares, what accepting it would mean for the thing the arms sales are supposed to protect.
Taiwan’s president, Lai Ching-te, has said he has no plans to declare independence. Successive American presidents, from both parties, have said the United States “does not support” Taiwanese independence.
The distinction between “does not support” and “opposes” is one that most people outside the world of diplomatic formulation would consider trivially semantic. Inside that world, it is seismic. To say that the United States “opposes” Taiwanese independence would align American policy with Beijing’s characterization of Lai’s government as the provocateur in the relationship — a gift to China that costs America almost nothing to give and costs Taiwan an enormous amount to receive.
“It could be easily used by China to claim that the U.S. is taking Beijing’s side,” said Chen Kuan-ting, a lawmaker from Lai’s Democratic Progressive Party, “and even create new diplomatic pressure on Taiwan.”
Ryan Hass, who served as director for China at the National Security Council and now works at the Brookings Institution, has said plainly that he has “low expectations that Trump will approve another tranche of arms sales to Taiwan between now and this fall.” The summit’s setting in Beijing, Hass noted, gives Xi more time and more opportunity to make his case than any previous meeting has afforded. And Xi, who does not improvise, will use every minute of it.
The backdrop to all of this is a war that was not supposed to happen and has not gone the way anyone planned.
Since the United States and Israel initiated military action against Iran on February 28, a confidential intelligence assessment produced for the Joint Chiefs of Staff — details of which were disclosed this week by officials who read it — has circulated through the upper reaches of the Pentagon with findings that have, in the careful language of people who read these documents for a living, raised alarm.
The assessment uses a framework that measures national power across diplomatic, informational, military, and economic dimensions. In each of them, it finds that China has used the Iran war to improve its strategic position relative to the United States.
Beijing has sold weapons to Persian Gulf nations struggling to defend themselves from Iranian missile and drone attacks. It has helped countries around the world manage the energy disruption that followed Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a corridor through which one-fifth of the world’s oil and gas normally flows. It has positioned itself as, in Ryan Hass’s phrase, “a solutions provider” — distributing jet fuel, offering access to green energy technology, dispatching officials to capitals that Washington has not bothered to visit.
“This is not altruism,” Hass said. “It is Beijing seizing on an opportunity to drive wedges between America and its traditional partners.”
And it has watched. In the professional vocabulary of military intelligence, China has used the Iran conflict to observe “how the U.S. fights wars and learn how to plan its own future operations.”
The report notes the particular depletion of Patriot air defense interceptors, THAAD systems, and Tomahawk cruise missiles — precisely the weapons that would matter most in a conflict over Taiwan. Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan itself have noticed. So has Beijing.
The Pentagon’s chief spokesman said that assertions claiming the global balance of power has shifted toward any nation other than the United States are “fundamentally false.” The White House said the U.S. had “decimated the Iranian regime’s military capabilities in 38 short days.”
Jacob Stokes, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, said something different: “On balance, the war in Iran is massively improving China’s geopolitical position.”
Trump, for his part, said before leaving for Beijing that he does not need China’s help with Iran. “We’ll win it one way or the other, peacefully or otherwise,” he told reporters — the kind of statement that functions simultaneously as reassurance and threat and means something different depending on which part of the world you’re reading it from.
In Taipei, people are reading it very carefully.
Taiwan’s relationship with the United States has never been without complexity or anxiety, but the anxiety of November 2024, when NPR surveyed the island and found that 56 percent of Taiwanese adults would have preferred Kamala Harris and only 16 percent supported Trump, has not diminished. It has concentrated. A presidential adviser named Michael Shao put the situation as plainly as diplomatic courtesy allowed: “One thing is predictable — is that President Trump is unpredictable. He’s a businessman turned politician, and therefore, his style is negotiation. Make a deal.”
Taiwan, Shao said, is trying to figure out what to offer Trump in order to get the security commitments it craves. “Taiwan is not an exception. It’s trying to make a deal with Trump.”
This is the position into which seventy years of strategic ambiguity has delivered the island: it now must negotiate for its own protection with the power that has promised that protection, in a currency that power will accept, before the power conducts its own negotiations with the country that has promised to take Taiwan by force if necessary. The geometry of this situation is not flattering to American credibility, and it is not an accident. It is the product of a decade of signals, of Trump’s first-term commentary about Taiwan’s geographical proximity to China and inconvenient distance from the United States, of his open statement that whether Xi invades is “up to him,” of the months-long delay on the pending arms package.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who will accompany Trump to Beijing, said last week that the Chinese “understand our position on that topic. We understand theirs.” Taiwanese officials have taken reassurance from this. Bonnie Glaser, managing director of the Indo-Pacific program at the German Marshall Fund, has not. “A tacit or explicit bargain in which Washington appears to concede a sphere of influence to Beijing over Taiwan,” she said, “could embolden China to take more assertive steps to erode Taiwan’s autonomy.”
She called any rhetorical softening from Trump, even an ambiguous one, “the most destabilizing outcome” of the summit.
China’s position is stated simply by its Taiwan Affairs Office: Beijing’s opposition to the island’s independence is “as firm as a rock,” and reunification with the mainland would free Taiwanese people from “confrontation and division.” This is the language of a government that has decided it is winning, that time is on its side, that the American president sitting across the table from Xi Jinping this week is a man who has demonstrated throughout his career that he will exchange tomorrow’s commitment for today’s deal.
Whether Xi is right about that is, at this moment, the most consequential open question in the world. Twenty-three million people on an island one hundred miles from the Chinese coast are waiting for the answer, and they have learned not to expect that it will come directly, or clearly, or in time for them to do anything about it.
The summit began Thursday. The banquets will be elaborate. The communiqués will be parsed for weeks. And in the specific, measurable space between what Trump says about Taiwan and what he said about it before he landed, an entire region will be reading the margin — trying to determine whether the long American commitment to the island’s democratic autonomy survives the particular combination of transactional instinct and geopolitical pressure that has brought the American president to Beijing at this particular moment in history.
Some commitments outlast the presidents who inherit them. Some do not. The difference is sometimes a sentence. It is sometimes a word.
In Beijing this week, the word is Taiwan.
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