President Trump told Fox News in an interview that aired Friday afternoon that Taiwan and China should each "cool it" on the question of the island's independence, and said he has not decided whether to sign off on a pending U.S. arms sales package for Taipei that Beijing had opposed in the run-up to this week's summit with Xi Jinping.
The remarks, delivered aboard Air Force One and in the Fox interview, were Trump's first substantive words on Taiwan since Thursday's closed-door meeting with the Chinese leader and the clearest signal yet that the pending weapons package may not move on the timetable Taipei expected. Trump said long-standing U.S. policy is unchanged, but he left open the central question of whether Washington would defend the island against a Chinese attack.
What Trump said
Asked whether the U.S. would come to Taiwan's aid, Trump replied, "I don't want to say that," and added that Xi had put the same question to him in Beijing. On the arms package he was equally vague: "We discussed the whole thing with the arms sales in great detail actually, and I'll be making a decision," he told reporters, before adding, "I may do it, I may not do it."
Trump framed Taipei's pursuit of independence as the trigger. "I will say this: I'm not looking to have somebody go independent, and you know, we're supposed to travel 9,500 miles to fight a war," he said. "I'm not looking for that. I want them to cool down, I want China to cool down."
"Taiwan would be very smart to cool it a little bit. China would be very smart to cool it a little bit. They ought to both cool it," Trump said.
The Taipei response
Taiwan's presidential office pushed back on Saturday without naming Trump. President Lai Ching-te "has consistently advocated for continuing to contribute to regional peace and stability and remaining committed to maintaining the status quo across the Taiwan Strait," spokesperson Karen Kuo said in a statement. "China's escalating military threat is the sole destabilizing factor within the Indo-Pacific region, including the Taiwan Strait," Kuo added.
The statement frames the destabilizer as Beijing, a direct rebuttal of the symmetry in Trump's "both cool it" formulation.
The Beijing readout
China's official readout, published by Xinhua, quoted Xi telling Trump that mishandling Taiwan would put the relationship in "great jeopardy" and that it is "the most important" issue in bilateral relations. The closing readout Friday emphasized cooperation and did not mention Taiwan. Chinese state media, effusive about Trump's praise of Xi, did not relay Trump's Taiwan remarks at all, which analysts told CNBC likely signals Beijing was not pleased with what was said in private.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio told NBC News that Taiwan "did not feature primarily in today's discussion" on Thursday and that "U.S. policy on the issue of Taiwan is unchanged as of today."
The counterpoint
Today's wire coverage of Trump's remarks ran almost entirely through CNBC, and partisan congressional reaction from either side had not surfaced in that reporting by press time. Rush Doshi of the Council on Foreign Relations cautioned against reading the rhetorical shift as a policy break. "There's really no sign that there's been a significant change in [the U.S.] Taiwan policy, at least not yet from the summit," Doshi told CNBC's "Squawk Box Asia." Bonnie Glaser of the German Marshall Fund separately argued that purges in the People's Liberation Army make near-term Chinese military action against Taiwan unlikely regardless of what Washington signals.
The arms-sale ambiguity lands as U.S. munitions stocks are stretched by the Iran war. "The Iran war has once again highlighted deficiencies in the U.S. defense industrial base. If the United States does not move quickly this time, it may have to learn this lesson — the hard way — against China in the Indo-Pacific," Seth G. Jones of the Center for Strategic and International Studies wrote in an analysis this week.
Trump described the pending tranche only as "another potential large sale of weapons" to Taiwan, and said he would decide soon, leaving Taipei to wait on a signature that arrives, or does not, against Beijing's wishes.