On a flight back from Beijing, US President Donald Trump handed China a gift wrapped in plain language. Asked about Taiwan, he said: “You know we’re supposed to travel 9,500 miles to fight a war. I’m not looking for that. I want them to cool down. I want China to cool down.”
That alone would have been enough to unsettle Taipei. Then, in a Fox News interview aired the same day, Trump described a stalled US$14 billion arms package for Taiwan as “a very good negotiating chip for us, frankly.” Asked whether he would approve it, he answered: “I’m holding that in abeyance and it depends on China.”
The president of the US just put Taiwan’s weapons on the table in a deal with the country threatening to take it by force.
The “six assurances,” conveyed to Taiwan by the administration of then-US president Ronald Reagan in 1982 and reaffirmed by the US Congress in 2020, are not a treaty. They are a set of firm commitments, including: the US will not set a date for ending arms sales to Taiwan, will not consult Beijing before making those sales, will not pressure Taipei into negotiations with China, and will not alter its position regarding sovereignty over Taiwan.
The assurances were designed to hold the line against exactly the kind of pressure that produces capitulation dressed up as diplomacy. They function only as long as they are treated as non-negotiable. Trump has now publicly conditioned two of them on Chinese behavior, in the same week, in the same interview.
Trump has always approached foreign policy as a dealmaker, and that instinct has occasionally produced results, but deterrence does not work like a trade negotiation. It depends entirely on an adversary believing that the cost of aggression outweighs any potential gain, regardless of how inconvenient enforcement might be for Washington.
When Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) reportedly asked Trump whether the US would defend Taiwan, Trump told him: “I don’t talk about that.” Chinese strategic planners will not read that as strategic ambiguity carefully maintained; they will read it as a threshold that could be tested.
The administration’s broader posture frames US-China relations as “managed competition,” a concept that sounds like strategic discipline, but functions in practice as a license for deliberate ambiguity.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio offered the reassurance that “US policy on Taiwan remains unchanged as of today.” The phrase “as of today” is bearing a lot of weight there.
For Taipei, conditional-sounding guarantees erode the deterrent value of US support. For regional allies such as Japan and the Philippines, they raise questions about whether US commitments hold under sustained pressure. For Beijing, they confirm that coercion produces US accommodation.
Chinese state media have already seized on Trump’s arms-as-bargaining-chip framing, and analysts at the International Crisis Group warned that Taiwan risks ending up not at the negotiating table, but on the menu.
The “six assurances” were built on a straightforward premise: US support for Taiwan would not bend under Chinese pressure. Trump has now said he does not want a war over Taiwan, conditioned its arms supply on Beijing’s approval and declined to answer whether the US would defend it at all. The question is no longer whether this changes the assurances on paper. The question is whether they still function as a credible deterrent.
Credibility, once eroded, is difficult to rebuild. Taiwan deserves a straight answer. What it has gotten instead is a president counting the miles and calling the weapons a chip.
Aadil Brar is a Taipei-based journalist and geopolitical analyst.
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