8:46
The US press is pause on a 14 billion dollar arm sale to Taiwan just days after Donald Trump returns from his big trip to China. Coincidence? Probably not. Fact is, Taiwan is left in the lurch by its most important ally. And to find out what that means for the island and the region, I talked to our correspondent Rick Gloward in Taipei. Yeah. Well, obviously it's not great news for Taiwan and there's been a lot of unease here since the Trump sto summit. Let's look at how we got here. Ahead of his most recent visit to China, Donald Trump called arm sales to Taiwan a negotiating chip and broke with a decades old policy of not discussing military support to the island with Beijing. Returning to the US, he told
reporters this. We discussed Taiwan, you know, the whole thing with the arms was in great detail actually and I'll be making decisions. What will I do? But, you know, I think the last thing we need right now is a war that's 9,500 miles away. I think that's the last thing we need. We're doing very well. Understandably, that set off alarm bells in Taipei. I think there is a sense that Xiinping really did get to Trump and I think it is not good for Taiwan that Donald Trump was adopting some of the wording and messaging from Xiinping. Um on the one
hand that is saying that Taiwan wants to go for independence. Um saying that Taiwan that calling the Taiwan situation the Taiwan problem. This all paints Taiwan as the troublemaker in this situation. The US has been Taiwan's foremost weapons supplier for decades by a long shot. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, between 1950 and 2025, some 90% of weapons sales to Taiwan came from the United States. and hiccups are not unusual as I heard from our Washington correspondent Janelle Dum Malawan. So backlogs and arms deliveries to Taiwan are not unheard of. In fact, the current backlog is already close to something like $30 billion and obviously
China protests every time there's such a sale on the books and the US would then sort of try to manage China on that front but push through with the sales anyway. But, you know, just to review this timeline, Trump first announced late last year that he's going to be meeting with Xiinping earlier this year. So, US lawmakers approved that sale to Taiwan last January. Trump says as early February, so before the war with Iran, that he was speaking about arm sales to Taiwan with China, which is obviously a break with orthodoxy. Now, the shei Trump summit of course also ended up being delayed for about a month, but suffice to say that for most of that timeline, there really was this
upcoming Shei Trump summit hanging over the deal, and it's hard to see that as a coincidence. For now, the deal is on hold, and the US blames the war in Iran. At a Senate hearing, the acting head of the US Navy said this. Right now, we're doing a pause in order to make sure we have the munitions we need for Epic Fury, which we have plenty. Not convinced. Neither is Taipei. I don't think many people believe that anywhere in the world. Um, you know, Taiwan's government hasn't specifically commented on that. Uh, but we should say that, you know, weapon sales packages take years to go through. They're not
sales from existing stockpiles. They're orders. So to think that the US wouldn't okay arm sales just because current stocks are perhaps running low because of the ar Iran war doesn't really hold much water because um the US is happy to okay arm sales when it doesn't have them to hand and is happy to deliver them um delayed and to have a backlog. For decades Taiwan has relied on the assumption that the United States would back it against the threat of force from China. But in order to not upset Beijing, the US official position has always been deliberately vague under a policy known as strategic ambiguity.
The US doesn't exactly lay out how it would help Taiwan or under what circumstances. But that kind of backing has always been there since um since the 1970s that the US would uh would be willing to sell Taiwan weapons. So, it's a really important relationship. Um and Taiwan's kind of defensive posture has been based on buying these weapons, sophisticated weaponry from the US. And obviously when uh everyone here in Taiwan was watching um for words coming out of the Shei Trump summit, we were watching really carefully would he um say something that showed that the US policy on Taiwan was changing because these are asurances.
These are um State Department wordings that have been really carefully um kind of crafted over time to both support Taiwan um in a way that's necessary for um the US and its um interests in the region, but also without kind of crossing so-called red lines for Beijing. Taipei is in a tough position here. And if you're watching us from Europe, it's one that might sound familiar. They're highly reliant on a superpower, no longer considered a reliable partner. Sentiment towards the US has been changing. Um, so in April this year, 40% of Taiwanese held a negative view towards the US and that was only 24% I think two years before then. Um, yeah, and there is a sense that the US um is
not a reliable partner and that's not just in Taiwan. And I mean if you look at leaders of um South Korea, the Philippines, Japan, they're all taking measures to hedge to bolster their own defense industries to spend more on their security arrangements to link more with so-called like-minded countries in the region because they know that there is no longer that strong security guarantor um in the US. Taiwan needs to find a way to keep an increasingly assertive China at bay. The pressure is huge. At any given time, there are up to 10 Chinese military vessels around Taiwan. Some come as close as 24 nautical miles from the island's coast. But Rick tells me a
military operation to seize Taiwan isn't the most imminent threat. So, I was speaking to a senior security official not that long ago and he said, "We need to stop thinking about D-Day and start thinking about the everyday." The fact is that Taiwan is already in a gray zone warfare with China. I'll tell you some of the um things that Taiwan faces every day. So Taiwan receives the world's most cyber attacks, millions a day on um Taiwanese government websites and infrastructure coming from China. Um there's diplomatic coercion, there's economic coercion, and there's massive in misinformation campaigns. And that's all part of, you know, this everyday um grayzone warfare tactics that we're seeing. The other aspect is of course military
intimidation. Um and that, you know, has really ratched up in recent years. Um you know, and that means that there at any given time there are quite a few boats and planes moving around Taiwan. Um which obviously creates um a hostile environment for Taiwan. In light of all this and Donald Trump's unclear position, the Taiwanese are coming to terms with the fact that if push comes to shove, they might have to stand up for themselves. And they seem to be increasingly willing to do so. Recent polls show that as many as 60% of Taiwanese would defend their country even without the US help. So that gives you a sense of just how um determined Taiwanese people are to defend themselves. Another thing we can point
to is that just um a few days ago recently um people in Taiwan gathered for a protest demanding that the legislature passes a special military defense budget in full. Um Taiwan's government wanted to spend an extra $40 billion US on defense. Um the parliament is in the hands of opposition parties who declined to pass the whole bill. They just passed about 2/3 of it$2 billion US. Um and so Taiwanese came out onto the streets to protest this move, saying that Taiwan needs to be spending that money on defense. Um another thing we can really point to, which is something that you will have seen in Ukraine over the last few years, is just how much civil society has been um maneuvering itself, has been mobilizing
itself. um you know partly they have been wanting to um you know learn how to defend their country, get equipped in skills like first aid um and that's really important not only because it shows that Taiwan um you know is taking interest in the big geopolitical situation but also this sends a really important message to China that this isn't a country that's just going to walk over that you could just walk over that everyday Taiwanese um are willing to give up their time energy effort even now to start thinking about how they're going to defend their nation. And that really sends an important message to China. It's all part of making any move on Taiwan look as unattractive as it
can be, that there will be significant losses, that it would mean a long and hard battle and that Taiwan isn't just for the taking. And if you're thinking, what do I care about what happens in Taiwan? Well, you might want to think twice. There's also a really important um geopolitical economic background that we need to keep in mind whenever we're talking about what maneuvers or what um China might do against Taiwan. And that is that Taiwan is an integral part to the global tech supply chain. Right? most of the world's most sophisticated semiconductor chips, chips that you'll find in everything from your smartphone, electric vehicles, robotics, um, weaponry, they a lot of them are made here in Taiwan. So, if you
think we now know what Russia's invasion of Ukraine does for oil prices, we now know what this um, the war on Iran has done with blocking the straight of Hormuz and how that's disrupted the global economy. Many people will say that a unilateral move from China on Taiwan and the disruption it would cause to global shipping to the that really fragile tech supply chain would be, you know, gargantuan. So the international interest in strengthening Taiwan's position visa v China should also be gargantuan. But looking at Trump's calendar and his reluctance to upset the Chinese leader ahead of a face-to-face meeting, our Washington correspondent says it's quite unlikely he'll sign off on any deal before the end of the year.
If meeting she is a consideration for Trump in deciding whether to sign off on that arm sales to Taiwan, well, that could be a challenge since there are at least three potential meetings in the pipeline in September. She is planning to come to Washington. Then there's the APIC summit in November as well as then the G20 meeting hosted by the US in December. So the pause may be temporary, but the signal it sends is not. For Taiwan, the question is no longer just how to deter China, but how much it can still count on the United States. And that uncertainty could reshape the balance of power in the region for years to come.
