Donald Trump offered to sell weapons to China during last week's summit with Xi Jinping, according to US Ambassador to China David Perdue. The ambassador told Fox News that Trump said, "We sell arms to other people around the world," and asked Xi directly if China would like to buy some. The White House and State Department both scrambled to clarify that US law prohibits arms sales to China and no such plan exists. The offer — even if rhetorical — arrived against a specific backdrop: Taiwan has waited months for Trump to approve a $14 billion arms sales package, after a record multi-billion dollar deal was unveiled in December. At a May meeting with Xi in Beijing, Trump described the Taiwan package as a "very good negotiating chip" in dealings with China, placing it explicitly in abeyance. This is the structural problem. The Taiwan Relations Act legally requires Washington to provide Taipei with sufficient military equipment to defend itself. Trump is simultaneously withholding that legally mandated defense capability from Taiwan while floating arms sales to the country Taiwan needs defending from. The leverage runs one direction: toward Beijing. Taiwanese deputy foreign minister Chen Ming-chi, speaking before Perdue's interview, underscored the severity: "Taiwan faces a severe situation in the Taiwan strait. Even though China's economy is declining, it continues investing more resources into building military capacity." Taiwan's defense establishment is watching its primary security guarantor treat its survival as a bargaining chip in a bilateral deal it has no seat at. Perdue himself told CNBC on Friday — before the Fox interview — that there had been no change in Taiwan policy, including on arms sales. The contradiction between "no change" and "the president asked Xi if he'd like to buy weapons" is the story. Either Perdue revealed something the administration didn't intend to surface, or the offer was performative dealmaking that accidentally undermined decades of strategic positioning. The 20-year pattern here is corrosive. If US defense commitments become transactional bargaining chips, every security partner in the Indo-Pacific recalculates. Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Australia all operate under frameworks that assume American reliability. Each time Taiwan's defense package is delayed or leveraged, the signal propagates: alliance commitments are negotiable, and the price is bilateral concessions to Beijing. China's position remains unchanged and explicit. Xi urged Trump to oppose "Taiwan independence" during the summit, per Xinhua. Beijing regards Taiwan as a breakaway province despite never having ruled it, and has not renounced the use of force to take it. The asymmetry is total: China's demands are non-negotiable and structural; America's commitments are, increasingly, conditional and transactional.
