Trump Banks Taiwan's Interceptors For Two More Summits
The Chip Trump Kept
Taiwan's defense ministry spent December 2025 celebrating an $11 billion arms package, the largest single Taiwan sale the United States has ever approved. Interceptors, munitions, and parts moved through Congress and onto Trump's desk, and he signed off. The celebration did not last. A second package, worth about $14 billion and built mostly around PAC-3 and NASAMS air defense interceptors, cleared Congress separately and then stalled on the same desk. Trump did not reject it. He also did not release it. He called it, in his own words, a 'very good negotiating chip,' and left it there, undecided, through the winter and into September. A chip has value only while it stays unplayed, and Trump has now held this one for the better part of a year, long enough for Taiwan's planners to stop treating the $14 billion as a sale in progress and start treating it as a number Washington can spend on something else entirely. This desk flagged the package on September 13 as the currency of Trump's summit with Xi. Two weeks later, it is still uncashed.
Xi Cites An Old Communique
Reuters reported on September 22 that Xi Jinping planned to invoke the 1982 US-China joint communique, the document in which Washington agreed to gradually reduce arms sales to Taiwan, when he sat down with Trump two days later. He did exactly that. At the White House on September 24, Xi pressed Trump to move past the decades-old formula that the United States 'does not support' Taiwan independence and adopt the harder standard of actively opposing it, a line administrations from Reagan through Biden declined to cross. He used the communique to press for a broader halt to Taiwan arms sales, the same shipments that include the $14 billion package still sitting on Trump's desk. Trump did not agree to the language shift, and he did not agree to freeze the package. He also did not say no. The summit produced no readout committing the United States to either course, which means Xi's pressure now sits exactly where the $14 billion has sat since December: on Trump's desk, available to be traded again the next time the two men meet.
Taipei Objects, Nothing Moves
Taiwan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs answered within a day. On September 25 it called Xi's framing 'a tactic ... to distort facts,' and said the island's future 'can only be decided by the people of Taiwan.' Deputy Foreign Minister Francois Wu went further, telling CNBC that continued arms sales serve American interests directly, because a Taiwan that can defend itself is a Taiwan whose semiconductor industry keeps shipping to everyone else. In Beijing, David Perdue, the US ambassador to China, said American Taiwan policy, including the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, has not changed. Both statements are true, and neither one ships an interceptor. The summit closed on September 25 with no US commitment to deliver the $14 billion package and no commitment to freeze it either. Trump and Xi are scheduled to meet twice more this year, at the APEC summit and the G20, and each meeting is now a fresh opportunity to put the same chip back on the table. The decision Taipei wanted from this week's summit did not happen. It was postponed, on purpose, to a calendar Trump controls.
The $14 billion package is not stuck in an approval process, it is parked in a negotiation Trump intends to keep running through APEC and the G20. Xi did not need Trump to freeze the interceptors. By December, either the PAC-3 batteries have shipped or the chip has been spent on something that has nothing to do with Taiwan.
Sources
- Bloomberg -- Xi urged Trump toward tougher 'oppose Taiwan independence' language (bloomberg.com)
- Reuters via US News -- Xi expected to press Trump on halting arms sales under the 1982 communique (usnews.com)
- Nikkei Asia -- Taiwan MOFA's 'distorted facts' rebuttal and analyst reaction (asia.nikkei.com)
- CNBC -- Taiwan Deputy FM Francois Wu and Ambassador Perdue on arms sales and policy continuity (cnbc.com)