President Trump has said he’s undecided on moving forward with a massive $14 billion package of arms deals for Taiwan following his visit to Beijing and talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
“I’ll make a determination over the next fairly short period. I’m gonna make a determination,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One as he was heading back to the US, according to POLITICO.
The president said he needed to speak with the person “running Taiwan,” though a US president hasn’t spoken with Taiwan’s leader since Washington severed formal diplomatic relations with Taipei in 1979 as part of a normalization deal with Beijing. Back in 2016, Trump became the first president-elect to hold a call with Taiwan’s president.
The Trump administration approved a massive $11 billion package of arms deals for Taiwan in December 2025, more than was approved for the island during the entire Biden administration. US officials have already put together another package worth $14 billion, which includes Patriot missile defense systems and advanced surface-to-air missiles, according to the Financial Times.
Trump is under pressure from Democrats in Congress to move forward with the new arms package, and he has been criticized for discussing weapons sales to Taiwan with Xi since the “Six Assurances” the US gave to Taiwan in 1982 under the Reagan Administration said that the US had “not agreed” to consult with Beijing on arms sales to the island.
“He brought that up,” Trump told reporters when asked about discussing the arms sales with Xi. “He talked about that to me, obviously. So what am I going to do, say ‘I don’t want to talk to you about it because I have an agreement that was signed in 1982?’”
For its part, Beijing often points to the 1982 joint comminique between the US and China that states the US government “does not seek to carry out a long-term policy of arms sales to Taiwan, that its arms sales to Taiwan will not exceed, either in qualitative or in quantitative terms, the level of those supplied in recent years since the establishment of diplomatic relations between the United States and China, and that it intends gradually to reduce its sale of arms to Taiwan, leading, over a period of time, to a final resolution.”
The Six Assurances the US gave to Taiwan do not take back the pledge to reduce and eventually end arms sales to Taiwan, but do say that the US “has not agreed to set a date for ending arms sales to Taiwan.”
China has made clear that it strongly opposes the continued US arms sales to Taiwan, which have increased in recent years, and it responded to the $11 billion package that moved forward in December by launching major military drills around Taiwan that simulated a blockade.
Xi also issued a strong warning to Trump regarding Taiwan during the talks in Beijing, saying it is the “most important issue in China-US relations” and that if it’s mishandled, the US and China will have “clashes and even conflicts, putting the entire relationship in great jeopardy.”
Trump told reporters that Xi “feels very strongly” about Taiwan and “doesn’t want to see a movement for independence.” The US president added that he “didn’t make a comment on it. I heard him out. I have a lot of respect for him.”
