Trump Signals Openness to Discussing Taiwan Arms Sales With Xi

President Donald Trump said Monday he would raise U.S. arms sales to Taiwan directly with Chinese President Xi Jinping during a summit in Beijing, placing a decades-old cornerstone of U.S.-Taiwan defense policy on the bilateral negotiating table. "I'm going to have that discussion," Trump told reporters, acknowledging that Xi prefers the sales stop. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, asked about the remarks, maintained that there had been no change in Washington's Taiwan policy. The White House issued the same assurance to reporters. The gap between those statements and Trump's own words crystallized the central legal and diplomatic tension heading into the summit.

The policy framework at issue is the 1982 Six Assurances, a set of commitments the Reagan administration conveyed to Taipei during negotiations over the U.S.-China Joint Communiqué on arms sales. Declassified State Department cables from 1982 make explicit that the United States did not agree to set a date for ending arms sales to Taiwan and did not agree to consult with the People's Republic of China on arms sales to Taiwan. Successive administrations have generally reaffirmed the Six Assurances. Prior to 2016, they carried purely informal status, but that year the House and Senate adopted concurrent resolutions giving the assurances formal, if non-binding, weight. The assurances are not codified as law. Because the Six Assurances are not statutory, the Trump administration is not legally bound by them in the way it is bound by the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979. Legislation pending in the 119th Congress, the Six Assurances to Taiwan Act (H.R. 3452 and S. 3208), would change that by codifying the commitments and requiring congressional notification before the executive branch could pause or negotiate arms sales to Taiwan. The bill was introduced in May 2025 and remains in process.

The immediate transactional question involves a $14 billion arms package Congress approved in January. Congress approved the package earlier this year, but the sale still requires Trump's formal notification to advance. The administration has not moved ahead with arms deliveries following a separate $11 billion weapons package for Taiwan authorized in December. That earlier deal reportedly led Xi to warn Trump against further arms deliveries to Taiwan in a February call. A bipartisan group of eight senators, led by Senate Foreign Relations Committee ranking member Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., sent a letter to the White House the week of the summit urging Trump to formally transmit the $14 billion package to Congress as required by law. The senators urged Trump to "formally notify the $14 billion package of arms to Congress as required by law." Republican Sens. Thom Tillis of North Carolina and John Curtis of Utah signed the letter alongside Democrats, reflecting cross-party concern that the sale's delay signals a policy shift.

Taiwan's domestic defense posture further complicated the administration's calculus. Taiwanese lawmakers approved a special defense budget of $25 billion, well short of the $40 billion amount sought by President Lai Ching-te. A senior Trump administration official described the outcome as "disappointing," saying items the U.S. believes still need funding were left out. Beijing has consistently characterized U.S. arms sales as interference in an internal matter. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun stated in December that "by aiding Taiwan's independence through arms sales, the U.S. will only end up harming itself," adding that any attempt to use Taiwan to contain China "is doomed to fail." At the summit itself, Xi warned Trump that the U.S. and China "will have clashes and even conflicts" if the long-standing issue of Taiwan's independence is mishandled.

The summit produced no formal commitments on arms sales. Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on his return from Beijing that he and Xi discussed arms sales and "talked a lot about Taiwan," but said he made no commitments to Xi regarding the island. Trump said Friday he was unsure whether he would greenlight the pending $14 billion weapons package after discussing arms sales in "great detail" with Xi. A U.S. readout of the bilateral talks, which did not mention Taiwan, said Trump and Xi had "a good meeting" centered on enhancing economic cooperation. The omission of Taiwan from the readout left analysts to parse Trump's subsequent Air Force One comments as the operative U.S. statement on the subject.

The legal architecture governing the relationship between arms sales and executive discretion runs through several authorities simultaneously. The Taiwan Relations Act (P.L. 96-8, 22 U.S.C. §§3301 et seq.) obligates the United States to provide Taiwan with defensive arms and to maintain the capacity to resist any resort to force. The Six Assurances, layered on top of the TRA, address the process by which sales occur, specifically prohibiting consultation with Beijing. Rush Doshi of the Council on Foreign Relations has argued that 40 years of bipartisan consensus and congressional action have effectively solidified the consultation prohibition as a firm "will not" mandate, notwithstanding the past-tense "has not" language in the 1982 cables. Richard Bush, former chairman of the American Institute in Taiwan and a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, acknowledged "some ambiguity" in the 1982 formulation, noting it technically leaves open the possibility of future consultation. That ambiguity, unresolved for four decades, is now a live policy dispute with concrete transactional stakes.