The White House’s arms dealer diplomacy

US Ambassador to China David Perdue on Sunday told Fox News that US President Donald Trump had asked Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) if he would like to buy US weapons. Perdue offered no further detail and no word on Xi’s answer, which is itself instructive: Apparently even the ambassador telling the story thought better of dwelling on it.

Asked to confirm the story, the US Department of State said US law forbids arms sales to China and that no such offer exists. Both can be true. The department’s formal denial can be several steps removed from whatever Trump says to Xi over dinner in Beijing or Washington.

Set aside for a moment the legality of such sales. That a US president floated it to the leader of a country the Pentagon has spent two decades identifying as the pacing threat, the one building the world’s fastest-growing military and the one most US officials across party lines expect to eventually collide with US forces somewhere over Taiwan, tells you what Trump actually thinks a defense relationship is.

It is a transaction, available to whoever is in the room.

That China’s defense companies are arming Iran and Russia with dual-use equipment and satellite imagery, some of it linked to strikes that killed US troops, did not apparently register as disqualifying.

The more damning context sits one paragraph over. While Trump was reportedly pitching Xi on US weapons, his administration has spent the better part of a year sitting on a US$14 billion arms package for Taiwan, a package State Department officials assembled and congressional leaders approved, and which the US has been legally obligated to provide since the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s excuse, that the sale is under review for its effect on the US’ own industrial base, might carry some weight if the same administration were not simultaneously offering weapons to the country Taiwan needs the arms to deter. You cannot claim a shortage of rifles while asking the other side of the fight if it wants to buy some.

Trump has been candid about what Taiwan is in his calculus. In May he called the withheld arms package a good negotiating chip with Beijing. Asked about a 1982 commitment barring Washington from consulting China on Taiwan arms sales, a commitment his own conversations with Xi appear to violate, he waved it off as ancient history, a “big, far distance.”

Four Republican senators led by Mitch McConnell last week wrote to Rubio and US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth begging them to release funds Congress had already approved. Representative to the US Alexander Yui (俞大?) still managed to sound hopeful on CBS on Sunday, saying he trusted nothing had changed in Washington’s position, which is either admirable discipline or the diplomatic version of whistling past a graveyard.

Ryan Hass, director of the Brookings Institution’s John L. Thornton China Center, put it plainly: This disclosure should end any lingering doubt about whether Trump treats China as a genuine security threat. It should also end any illusion that Taipei occupies a fixed place in US strategy rather than a rotating one, useful as leverage when Trump needs something from Xi and inconvenient when he wants a smooth summit.

A superpower that offers its rival first pick of the arsenal while stalling delivery to the ally that rival is threatening has not miscalculated. It has simply told you, plainly, what it values and in what order, and Taiwan should take the hint.

Clive Hazell is a Kaohsiung-based writer and educator. A 30-year-resident of Taiwan and Japan, he writes on geopolitics, culture and East Asia.