When Donald Trump boarded Air Force One for the return from Beijing, the public message had been carefully crafted: no commitments made with Xi Jinping on the Taiwan issue, only the listening to a warning that the Chinese leader wanted to deliver to him in person.
The government in Taipei also received the reassuring signal that the American policy, from a formal point of view, had not changed: a position publicly confirmed by the U.S. Secretary of State as well.
However, already during the flight hours, the American president himself had acknowledged that the issue of arms sales to Taipei had been discussed directly at the Chinese table, implying that the decision on the next package would come within a short horizon, and that its possible implementation would be the result of a personal evaluation rather than an established procedure.
The sequence of the following weeks did the rest. A series of presidential statements presented the $14 billion arms package destined for Taipei as a bargaining tool towards China; hinted at the possibility of a direct talk with Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te — a step that, if realized, would be the first since 1979, the year of the formal break between Washington and Taipei — and finally saw the acting Deputy Secretary of the Navy, Hung Cao, speak to a Senate subcommittee about a pause in supplies motivated by the logistical needs of the American operation against Iran.
On the ground, however, the rhetorical sequence produced no consequences.
Procedures and rhetoric
Four different sources between Washington and Taipei confirmed to Reuters that there are no concrete plans for a meeting between the two presidents, and that American officials have privately communicated to the Taiwanese counterpart not to expect any change in policy.
On the arms front, the spokesperson of the Taipei presidency and the Ministry of Defense report having received no formal notification of postponement, and maintain ordinary coordination with American interlocutors so that the process continues according to plans.
The statement by the acting Deputy Secretary of the Navy was also met in Washington with some institutional skepticism: this is an inadequate figure, in terms of level and attributions, to communicate such a decision, and the multi-year contracts with Taipei have little operational relation to the strategic needs of the operation in Iran. Beijing, according to the same reconstructions, has privately informed Washington through confidential channels that any direct dialogue between Trump and Lai could damage bilateral relations and nullify the understanding just patched up at the summit.
Within this gap between declarations and actions lies an interpretative key that deserves more attention than it has been given.
The American institutional apparatus supporting Taiwan continues to operate by inertia: the Taiwan Relations Act, the Porcupine Act, relevant provisions of the National Defense Authorization Act, the approximately eleven billion dollar package approved at the end of 2025, the backlog of military deliveries that at the end of last year exceeded twenty billion dollars due to the limits of American contractors’ production capacities.
The structure holds. It is the grammar that supported it that wavers.
The reassurances the United States gave to Taipei in 1982, which excluded prior consultations with Beijing on arms sales to the island, have been downgraded by the American president to a procedural constraint now emptied of relevance. The principle that military support to Taiwan should remain methodically separate from the negotiating framework with China has been explicitly set aside.
Taiwan’s centrality remains intact, but in a different form: administered by procedures rather than proclaimed by rhetoric.
Officially, the reading coming from Taipei has remained composed, even positive.
The worst-case scenario floated in previous weeks — the island reduced to a bargaining chip in a major economic deal, a recurring image in American press reconstructions — did not materialize.
No commitment was signed, and the American formula of non-support for Taiwanese independence held, without slipping towards the formal opposition that Beijing had been demanding for weeks.
It is a technical but decisive distinction, which Taiwanese observers have noted carefully: in the diplomatic lexicon of the Strait, the difference between not supporting and opposing is the difference between a posture of procedural neutrality and a substantial alignment with Chinese lexicon.
Even in signals directed at short-term priorities, the presidency indicated the parliamentary process of the special defense budget as the most urgent issue to close.
Internal problems
Yet the Lai government today finds itself navigating a more complicated internal framework than the official reading suggests. The opposition coalition led by the Kuomintang has cut a significant part of the defense budget proposed by the executive, which in the original draft amounted overall to about forty billion dollars.
In the weeks preceding the summit, the leader of the main opposition party — fresh from her own trip to Beijing — publicly asked the American president to explicitly declare his opposition to Taiwan’s independence.
These moves, read from the perspective of Taiwanese security circles, risk transmitting abroad a distorted image of the island’s public opinion and weakening Taipei’s negotiating position precisely when Washington shows willingness to discuss the dossier at the Chinese table.
Internal consensus around rearmament and the increase of the military budget, which the United States has been asking Taipei to support for years, becomes harder to maintain if on one side the White House publicly introduces doubts about the opportunity to deliver what Taipei has already decided to purchase, and on the other the internal opposition leverages those same doubts to build its own platform of rapprochement with China.
Trusting Washington?
It is in this space, between a substance that holds and a form that cracks, that the most important strategic indicator nests: the collective perception of reliability.
The annual American Portrait survey, conducted by Academia Sinica, Taiwan’s main research center, focused on Taiwan’s perception of relations with the United States, returns an unprecedented picture.
The belief that Washington would intervene militarily in case of a Chinese attack has dropped by about ten percentage points after Trump’s election. More than half of respondents still believe it, but the curve is descending and strongly sensitive to presidential signals.
A second datum concurs in the same direction: less than half of Taiwanese today consider the United States a fully credible partner.
It is the double uncertainty with which the Taiwanese ruling class is forced to reckon — a systemic and determined adversary, an indispensable but not entirely reliable ally — and it is the real ground on which Beijing is working.
The most relevant novelty, however, is not in the average data but in its age composition. Among under 35s, support for an unconditional defensive effort is markedly lower than among older generations, and the gap had never been so pronounced in previous surveys.
For those who have experienced Taiwanese democracy as a starting condition and not as the outcome of a conquest, the combination of a determined adversary and a fickle ally produces a different political calculation.
The war in Ukraine is read more as a warning than as a model; the withdrawal from Kabul remains a difficult precedent to remove; American strategic ambiguity is perceived more as a factor of exposure than as a guarantee of protection.
On this generational ground is measured, in the medium term, the deep coherence of Xi Jinping’s strategy: a line that no longer aims only to discourage a possible American intervention, but to delegitimize the hypothesis in the eyes of the Taiwanese themselves.
Chip anxiety
Added to this is the other lever, concerning the technology industry. The insistence with which Trump urged Taiwanese semiconductor companies to relocate their production to the United States, accompanied by the accusation directed at Taipei of having essentially taken away the American chip industry, fuels a long-standing fear on the island. That of a progressive transfer of the technological heart towards the United States, followed in the medium term by a reduction of Washington’s strategic interest in Taiwan’s defense.
It is an anxiety that recent declarations have made more tangible, and that combines with the survey data in a politically significant way.
How much the pause evoked by the acting Deputy Secretary of the Navy is really worth operationally is the first knot to be untied in the coming weeks. It is plausible that the declaration will not materialize in formal acts, that the sales process will resume its ordinary course, and that the apparatus will confirm what several officials have already privately told Taipei: no policy change.
If so, the story will close as it apparently opened, with the structure intact. But the trace will remain in the dossiers. For a few weeks, the package was presented by the American president as a bargaining tool, the hypothesis of a direct talk was publicly formulated, decades-old reassurances were dismissed as outdated formalities, and even the question about a possible defense of Taiwan in a hypothetical crisis received in response a display of personalistic decision-making.
It is a change of grammar that, regardless of administrative outcome, redefines the framework within which Beijing, Taipei, and the Taiwanese citizens themselves will interpret everything that comes next.
The paradox is precisely this. The American institutional apparatus continues to operate — supplies, training, strategic integration, interoperability programs — and the structure holds. But in Taipei, security is no longer measured only in Himars and Atacms: it is counted in the maintenance of a collective perception of the ally’s reliability, and it is that variable that is under pressure today.
Xi does not necessarily need to force a military scenario, which remains unlikely in the short term due to strategic, economic, and reputational costs.
It is enough that a sufficient portion of Taiwanese public opinion comes to consider American intervention unlikely, or at least subject to contingent calculations, for the internal political calculus on the island to begin to change.
It is in the gap between the deterrence Washington proclaims and that in which Taipei actually trusts that the future of the Strait is being played today. And in that gap, while the administrative structure functions undisturbed, Beijing has just gained ground.
(Excerpt from Appunti)
