Written by Jacques deLisle.
Image credit: Public domain.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s May 2026 summit with U.S. President Donald Trump has uncertain implications for Taiwan and cross-Strait relations. The uncertainty and, in turn, the fears yielded by the meeting reflect, and are likely to worsen, the challenges Taiwan faces in cross-Strait and international relations.
Taiwan avoided the worst imagined outcomes. The Xi-Trump summit did not produce a formal shift in the U.S.’s declaratory policy from “not supporting” to “opposing” Taiwan independence. There was no public statement that the U.S. would commit to curtailing arms sales to Taiwan. More extreme fears—which had faded as the summit approached—did not come to pass. Trump and Xi did not reach a “grand bargain” that would exchange venerable U.S. Taiwan policies for Chinese commitments on trade.
There were notable signs of—and attempts to signal—continuity. On the U.S. side, the summit was framed as focused on maintaining stability in the recently troubled and volatile bilateral relationship. In the midst of Trump’s visit, a senior U.S. official—in this case, Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Marco Rubio—issued the customary explicit rebuttal to notions that there had been any change in U.S. policies toward Taiwan and denied any incipient acquiescence in Beijing’s assertion of a right to use force to take Taiwan, declaring that efforts at coerced unification would be a “terrible mistake.” In a Fox News interview, recorded while the president was in Beijing, Trump asserted that “nothing has changed” in U.S. Taiwan policy and that the Trump-Xi meetings should have a “neutral” effect on Taiwanese people’s sense of security.
Xi’s public remarks during his interlocutor’s visit were consistent with familiar PRC positions. He asserted, albeit especially pointedly, that Taiwan is a top-priority issue in U.S.-China relations, and that impermissible U.S. interference (as Beijing sees it) with China’s achievement of its unification agenda risks conflict between the two superpowers.
U.S.-side assertions of continuity partly reflect, and sought to respond to, the uncertainty and concerns that their visits had generated. The opacity of the meetings was a factor. Concerns focused on what the famously impulsive and briefing-dismissive Trump might have conceded to a calculating Xi in their non-public conversations. Such worries were exacerbated by the U.S. president’s thin and seemingly inconsistent public statements. The Trump-Xi meetings were the latest in a series of bilateral summits that failed to produce a formal joint statement. In contrast to official PRC statements, the initial U.S. readout and final “fact sheet” did not acknowledge that Taiwan was discussed. Trump’s evasive response to reporters outside the Great Hall of the People seemed to say that Taiwan was not much addressed. On Air Force One en route back to Washington, however, Trump indicated that he had talked with Xi at some length about Taiwan, including about U.S. arms sales. He also said he had listened to Xi’s concerns about Taiwan but “didn’t make a comment on it.”
Adding to the uncertainty and fears were remarks from Xi’s guest that could be read as signalling significant policy changes. Depending on the undisclosed details, Trump’s reported lengthy discussion of Taiwan arms sales with Xi could have breached of the Six Assurances. In his exchange with journalists on the flight home, Trump seemingly dismissed the Reagan-era document, long regarded as one of the five pillars of the U.S.’s cross-Strait policy (along with the Taiwan Relations Act and the three U.S.-PRC Joint Communiqués) as “a long way” in the past. Thus, it seemed, of little continuing force. In his Fox News interview, Trump declared—to the frustration of Taiwan’s President Lai Ching-te and U.S. supporters of established policy—that he would “hold[]…in abeyance” a decision on whether to move forward with the $14 billion arms package that he had earlier delayed in an effort to assure a smooth summit. Trump said that he had “not approved [the sale] yet,” and that he might, or might not, do so (presumably after the conversation he twice said he would have with the Taiwanese president, much to Beijing’s consternation).
Also disconcerting was Trump’s answer, aboard the presidential jet, to a reporter asking whether the U.S. would defend Taiwan against a forcible unification attempt: “There’s only one person that knows that, you know, it is me…. [Xi] asked me if I’d defend them, and I said I don’t talk about that.” The ambiguous statement was in tension with longstanding U.S. policies that are often characterised as “strategic ambiguity” and “dual deterrence”, but that have been taken as entailing some level of commitment to defend Taiwan in the event of an unprovoked attack. Trump’s comment was strikingly different from President Biden’s statements that had strained traditional U.S. policy in the opposite direction, pledging to defend Taiwan in the event of a PRC attack.
On this issue, too, Trump’s Fox News interview compounded concerns, with the president saying “they”—meaning Taiwan under Lai—“are going independent because they want to get into a war…and they figure they have a United States behind them…. I’m not looking to have somebody go independent…and…we are supposed to travel 9,500 miles to fight a war. I’m not looking for that.” Although muddled, the comment aligned with perceptions of a second Trump term erosion of U.S. support for Taiwan and, in turn, intervention in a cross-Strait crisis by suggesting that Trump would be inclined to blame Taiwan and thus not to intervene.
Another source of uncertainty and worry is not just the messaging but the messenger. On many occasions before the concern-spawning remarks during and after the summit, Trump had expressed a bewildering welter of views that range from assertions that Xi had pledged not to—and would not dare to—attack Taiwan during Trump’s presidency, to calls for Taiwan to spend more on its own defence (including increased purchases of U.S.) arms, to condemning Taiwan for “stealing” the U.S. chip industry (a charge repeated in his Fox News interview), and more.
It is far from certain that Trump’s statements will have policy consequences. With Trump, there are often questions about whether words—even more consistent ones than his remarks on Taiwan have been—translate into action. For shifts in cross-Strait policy, the linkage is especially doubtful. Trump can force wrenching changes in American foreign policy when he makes them a sustained priority. But he may well not do so. Although Trump asserted in the Fox News interview that he probably knew more about Taiwan than any other country (knowledge that, troublingly for U.S. policy, could have come from his conversations with Xi), Trump generally has not focused on Taiwan issues, at least absent the chimerical (at least for now) prospect of a grand bargain with Xi.
Without such presidential intervention, much of China and Taiwan policy, and related areas of foreign policy, have been left to cabinet and sub-cabinet officials, some of whom have histories as “China hawks” and some of whom generally favour continuity in U.S. policy toward Taiwan and cross-Strait issues. Moreover, support for Taiwan and stability in Taiwan-related U.S. policies remains relatively robust and bipartisan in Congress. Although sceptics understandably can question whether the often-supine Republican-led Congress and highly Trump-accommodating political appointees could or would push back, the long-held views within the legislative and executive branches on Taiwan issues might still limit highly disruptive presidential initiatives.
A final, most significant source of uncertainty, and cause for worry for Taiwan, its leaders, and those who favour U.S. support for Taiwan and continuity in U.S. cross-Strait policy, is more fundamental and loomed over the Beijing summit. As observers have noted, the largely host-managed vibe was one of a meeting among equals. Xi cautioned Trump about the importance of the two countries’ working to avoid the “Thucydides trap”—the likelihood that a rising power (China) and the previously dominant power (the U.S.) would come into conflict (most likely over Taiwan). That warning came against the backdrop of the increasingly prevalent narrative in the PRC that China is ascending while the U.S. is declining (a view that, according to Trump, Xi reiterated at their meeting).
Events in the run-up to the summit reinforced this reading. Most notable was Trump’s war of choice in Iran, which led the U.S. president to seek China’s help in pressing Iran to make a deal (despite asserting that such help was not needed), depleted U.S. stores of weapons that would be needed in a U.S.-China conflict over Taiwan, eroded Trump’s political standing at home, diminished the U.S. public’s likely appetite for military intervention abroad, and facilitated China’s accretion of soft power through Beijing’s calls for peace in the Persian Gulf and offers of relief to regional states hit hard by constricted oil supplies. These developments dovetailed with already-rising doubts among U.S. regional partners and allies about U.S. reliability and China’s self-presentation as an underwriter of stability.
For Taiwan, all of this means deepening challenges in evaluating risks and making difficult choices. The summit and the broader context of U.S.-China relations offered much to support the views of Taiwanese proponents of yimeilun. This “America scepticism” often underpins arguments, from Taiwan’s “blue” camp (and evident in Kuomintang Chair Cheng Liwun’s Mainland visit a month before the summit), for a more accommodating approach to an increasingly powerful and determined China. On the “green” side of Taiwan’s political divide, the summit also sharpened the imperative to keep the U.S. on side, while also avoiding reinforcing the Kuomintang narrative (also prominent in KMT Chair Cheng’s dialogue with Xi) that Democratic Progressive Party control in Taiwan meant heightened risk of conflict. Trump’s summit-related comments thus drove Lai down the fraught path of a possibly Trump-provoking pronouncement that Taiwan’s sovereignty and cross-Strait peace and stability were not to be bargained away, while also reiterating thanks for U.S. support for Taiwan’s security, pointing to China as the source of instability and threats to peace in the region, and waiting (surely with ambivalence) for a possible call from the U.S. president. Taiwanese leaders and policymakers—and the voters who ultimately will choose among the options they present—must also reckon with the underlying geopolitical questions of the relative capacities and wills of the U.S. and China and whether Beijing’s apparently increased self-confidence regarding the U.S. could be dangerously excessive. The Xi-Trump summit gave ample reasons for uncertainty and concern about these questions, but no definitive answers.
Jacques deLisle is the Stephen A. Cozen Professor of Law, professor of political science, and director of the Centre for the Study of Contemporary China at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also the chair of the Asia Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.