US President Donald Trump is not expected to have a phone call with Taiwanese leader Lai Ching-te any time soon, despite saying earlier that he would be open to speaking with the person “running” the island.
Two people familiar with the matter said there had been no movement towards arranging such a conversation, which was reliant on the American leader’s willingness to take the initiative.
Three other sources said the US believed that a call with Lai could derail an expected summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Washington in September and the detente reached between the two presidents in May.
There is precedent for such possibilities – Beijing gave the incoming Trump administration the cold shoulder in late 2016 when the president-elect took a congratulatory phone call from Taiwan’s then-leader, Tsai Ing-wen.
The call was the first direct contact of its kind since 1979 and Beijing responded by lodging a formal diplomatic protest and criticising the call as a “small trick” by Taiwan.
The apparent restraint this time around goes beyond high-level contacts. Multiple sources suggested that no new US arms-sale announcements for Taiwan were likely in the near term, either. However, some packages are expected to be announced or approved afterwards.
When asked on Wednesday when a Trump-Lai call could happen, Taiwanese Foreign Minister Lin Chia-lung said he could not speak for Trump but “we are ready to have a call at any time”.
Lin also described the arms sale delays as a “technical issue”.
Beijing regards Taiwan as part of China and has vowed to reunify it by force if necessary. Most countries, including the United States, do not recognise Taiwan as an independent state, but Washington opposes any attempt to take the self-ruled island by force and is committed to supplying it with weapons.
According to the White House, Trump invited Xi to visit the US on September 24. The Chinese embassy in Washington has said that no date has been fixed but that the autumn was being considered.
On the sidelines of the Group of Seven summit in France, Trump mentioned his expected meeting with Xi, saying: “We have a G2 coming up ... you know what the G2 is.”
Trump has repeatedly described the US and China as the “G2”, referring to the world’s two biggest economies.
But tensions persist between the two countries over Taiwan, an issue that Beijing says is a red line in its relations with Washington.
One diplomatic source said Taiwan was expected to be a key issue for high-level exchanges between Beijing and Washington.
Another person familiar with the matter said Beijing had learned that merely dangling the prospect of future engagement with Washington could be enough to delay arms sales to Taiwan.
Some sales have already been put on hold this year.
Just before Trump’s visit to China in May, the US administration pressed pause on a US$14 billion package for the island approved by Congress.
That package included advanced air and missile defence systems such as PAC-3 Patriot interceptors and National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems, or Nasams.
Six months earlier, Washington’s announcement of a separate US$11 billion arms sale to Taiwan prompted fury from Beijing.
Rupert Hammond-Chambers, president of the US-Taiwan Business Council, said there were four outstanding arms packages for the island, two of which had been publicly reported.
Hammond-Chambers said the council had not been updated on the president’s position on the sales but the US Congress had been “completely briefed”.
“All the president has to do is say ‘go’, and they will be notified, and then we will move to contracts as status between the US Department of War and the main contractors for PAC-3 and for Nasams,” he said, referring to the Department of Defence.
He said that with the administration’s silence on the sales, Trump was repeating the “mistake” made by former US presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, both of whom briefly paused arms sales to Taiwan during their terms.
“[Trump is] making a false assumption that if he makes a unilateral concession on arm sales, it will change Chinese calculations in other areas, like economic opportunities, for example, Boeing aircraft, or soybeans, or these other economic sales that Mr Trump has championed,” he said.
Hammond-Chambers said Trump believed that arms sales were “some sort of leverage or bargaining chip that the Chinese will respond to, and that’s not the case”.
Obama froze arms sales from 2011 to 2015 and Bush did the same from 2007 and 2008.
The Trump administration has already approved more arms sales to Taiwan by value than its predecessor under Joe Biden, which cleared a little over US$8 billion.
Hammond-Chambers also said the council had been told that “Taiwan remains a priority customer” of the US, despite the delays.
Senior officials also maintain that Washington’s position on Taiwan has not changed.
Some of the weapons systems already delivered to the island were put through their paces last week, when Taiwan test-fired its Lockheed Martin-made High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (Himars) towards the mainland. Himars has been used extensively by Ukraine in its war against Russia.
Bonnie Glaser, director of the Indo-Pacific programme at the German Marshall Fund in Washington, said she expected arms sales to Taiwan to be announced “sometime after” Xi’s visit.
“The timing of arms sales to Taiwan has previously been influenced by events on the US-China calendar. This isn’t unprecedented,” she said, adding that a “common narrative is that since there is a backlog in the production of US weapons, a few months won’t make much of a difference”.
Glaser also said that she “very highly” doubted that Trump would speak to Lai.
“Such a call would likely torpedo a Xi visit and upset the fragile stability that was achieved in Beijing.”
Hammond-Chambers agreed, saying that the prospects for such a call were slim.
“I don’t think any call is going to take place between Trump and Lai. I think that’s very low likelihood, let’s say less than 10 per cent likelihood,” he said.
On delivery delays, he said F-16 fighter jets that Taiwan ordered in 2019 for a 2023-2024 handover were expected to be fully delivered by the end of 2027, and the hold-ups would not affect approvals for future orders.
“We’re talking about deliveries in the 2030s,” he said. “So they are not in any way impacted by customers who are expecting delivery now, because their deliveries would happen in three, four, or five years.
“Therefore, they’re not affected by the short-term production efforts.” -- SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST
