speak

May 21 (UPI) — President Donald Trump has said he will speak with Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te about a stalled $14 billion arms deal, a call that would be precedent-setting for a sitting U.S. president and likely anger China.

“I’ll speak to him,” Trump said Thursday from the tarmac of Joint Base Andrews in Maryland.

The president was responding to a reporter’s question on whether he planned to call Lai before making a final decision on the Congress-cleared weapons deal, the future of which remains uncertain following Trump’s visit last week to Beijing for meetings with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

Taiwan has requested the weapons package as it faces an aggressive China, which claims sovereignty over the self-governing island it views as a breakaway province and has said it will take it back by force if necessary.

The weapons deal was pre-approved by Congress in January 2025, and Taiwan’s legislative body earlier this month approved a special defense budget of $25 billion to buy weapons from the United States. The package now requires Trump to sign off on it.

But Trump on Friday told reporters aboard Air Force One while en route back to the United States following his visit with Xi in Beijing that they had “talked a lot about Taiwan” and that he would “make a determination over the next fairly short period” on whether to give the arms deal final approval.

Taiwan was a significant topic during the trip, with Xi warning Trump that the island was “the most important issue” in bilateral ties and that, if mishandled, could trigger “clashes and even conflicts.”

Amid the uncertainty, Lai issued a Facebook post Sunday night stating Taiwan-U.S. security cooperation and arms sales “are key elements in maintaining regional peace and stability” and that the island’s security is the region’s security.

Trump did not say Wednesday when he would speak with Lai or discuss specifics concerning the arms deal.

“We have that situation very well in hand,” he said, adding that he had an “amazing” meeting with Xi.

“We’ll work on that,” he said.

Trump spoke with Taiwan’s then-President Tsai Ing-wen in 2016, when he was the president-elect, but no sitting U.S. president is known to have spoken with the leader of Taiwan since Jan. 1, 1979, when the Carter administration formally severed diplomatic ties with the Republic of China, the official name of Taiwan’s government, and established relations with the People’s Republic of China in Beijing.

Spokeswoman Zhu Fenglian of Beijing’s State Council Taiwan Affairs Office gave reporters a standard answer during a press conference Wednesday, stating: “We firmly oppose the United States conducting any form of official exchanges with China’s Taiwan region, and we firmly oppose the United States selling weapons to China’s Taiwan region.”

“This position is consistent and clear,” she said.

UPI has contacted Taiwan’s Foreign Ministry for comment.

Democrats and some Republicans have urged Trump to approve the arms deal and expressed concern over its future as the president was in Beijing.

“Trump must not sell out Taiwan, period,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said in a social media statement.

The Republic of China, the current government of Taiwan, once governed mainland China but retreated to the island following its defeat by the Chinese Communist Party in the Chinese Civil War in 1949.

The Chinese Communist Party views Taiwan as part of China under its One China principle and seeks reunification with the island — an act Taiwan says would amount to an illegal annexation.

TAIPEI, Taiwan — A resolute Secretary of State Marco Rubio took to the White House lectern Tuesday and declared the United States, under President Trump’s leadership, had launched a bold new operation to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, based on the principle that international waterways must remain free.

An hour later, Trump walked it all back, ending the complex military endeavor after less than a day.

It was just the latest evidence to America’s allies that the word of the U.S. government is subject entirely to the president’s whims. And such is the worry fueling concerns in Taipei ahead of Trump’s state visit to China this week.

Privately, senior administration officials have assured Taiwanese leadership ahead of the trip that Trump has no intention of changing long-standing U.S. policy on the island, two sources familiar with the discussions said — a stance of “strategic ambiguity” that has avoided any declarative statements on Taiwanese independence since it was coined by Henry Kissinger 55 years ago.

A White House official was definitive that U.S. policy toward Taiwan “remains the same as the first Trump administration.”

“The U.S. One China policy, as our cross-strait policies are collectively known, is based on the Taiwan Relations Act, the three U.S.-PRC Joint Communiques and the Six Assurances to Taiwan,” the official said. “There is no change to our policy with respect to Taiwan.”

But Chinese officials told The Times that their president, Xi Jinping, intends to raise the matter as a top priority, knowing that only one person — Trump himself — speaks for the administration today.

Whether Xi can leverage the intimacy of a private audience to shift Trump’s stance, potentially linking it to other U.S. objectives, is the source of significant concern here.

Taiwanese officials fear even the most subtle rhetorical change in policy from Trump could imperil a delicate status quo that has held, to its benefit, for decades. They have similarly sought assurances that the administration will follow through on a pending U.S. arms sale worth over $10 billion, which received approval from Taiwan’s legislature on Friday.

“The most serious scenario would be if President Trump were to make an impromptu statement, such as, ‘I oppose Taiwanese independence,’ particularly if he were to link this to trade, the Iran issue, or a summit agreement,” said Chienyu Shih, of the Institute for National Defense and Security Research in Taiwan. “This would constitute a rhetorical concession of substantial significance to Beijing.”

Rubio told reporters at his news conference Tuesday — with a similar confidence he expressed on the Iran file — that China understands Washington’s long-standing position on the island.

“I’m sure Taiwan will be a topic of conversation. It always is. The Chinese understand our position on that topic — we understand theirs,” Rubio said.

“I think both countries understand that it is in neither one of our interests to see anything destabilizing happen in that part of the world,” he added. “We don’t need any destabilizing events to occur with regards to Taiwan, or anywhere in the Indo-Pacific. And that’s to the mutual benefit of both the United States and the Chinese.”

Trump has suggested a willingness to shift U.S. policy on Taiwan before.

During his initial campaign for the presidency in 2016, Trump openly questioned the One China policy, drawing ire from Beijing for suggesting he might endorse Taiwanese independence. He accepted a call from Taiwan’s president after his victory and would later support significant arms sales to Taipei.

And yet, at a 2017 meeting with Xi, Trump vacillated, telling the Chinese leader he could “deal with” the Taiwan issue in “a matter of months,” according to the Wall Street Journal. The Chinese were reportedly so flabbergasted by the comment that they dismissed it as rhetorical flourish.

“There is concern that the conversation between the two leaders could veer into sensitive territory on the topic of Taiwan,” said Brian Hart, deputy director of the China Power Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, “but there are many in the administration who would still appreciate the importance of general continuity in U.S. policy.”

U.S. support for Taiwan’s democratic movement used to be a matter of principle. Today, Washington sees it as a matter of national security. Over 60% of semiconductors are produced in Taiwan, including 90% of the world’s most advanced chips. And it is viewed as the clasp of the first island chain guarding against Chinese maritime expansion.

A robust debate between Taiwan’s Cabinet and the opposition in parliament ended Friday not over whether to accept U.S. defense equipment, but over how much to spend. The Legislative Yuan approved $24 billion in purchases — including a defense package passed by Congress in December and the pending arms sale — falling short of Taipei’s $40-billion proposal.

Anticipation for the president’s state visit is high here in the capital city, where local news is filled with questions over the influence Trump’s war in Iran might have on his appetite for supporting Taiwan.

Chinese defense analysts have seen the war as a sign of U.S. weakness. But Taiwanese defense experts have taken away a different lesson: cheap equipment from a lesser military, such as dumb mines thrown in a strait, may just be enough to paralyze a superpower.

The latest U.S. National Security Strategy, released by the Trump administration in December, emphasized the importance of support for Taiwan and the status quo.

But the Taiwanese took note that the strategy also called for an end to forever wars in the Middle East, offering little preview of the president’s sudden strategic pivot on Iran in February, launching a war few saw coming.

What Trump chooses to say in China “might be difficult to predict,” said Jyh-Shyang Sheu, a scholar of Chinese politics and military capabilities based in Taiwan.

But “in Taipei, we are still focusing on the U.S. policy,” he added, “more focusing on what he does instead of what he says.”

DEVELOPING STORYDEVELOPING STORY,

US president says the leaders of the two countries will speak for the first time in 34 years on Thursday.

United States President Donald Trump says the leaders of Israel and Lebanon will speak for the first time in 34 years on Thursday.

The announcement on Wednesday came a day after Israel and Lebanon’s envoys to the US held direct talks in Washington, DC, to discuss an end to Israeli attacks on its neighbour.

“Trying to get a little breathing room between Israel and Lebanon,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform.

“It has been a long time since the two leaders have spoken, like 34 years. It will happen tomorrow. Nice!”

The US president did not specify who will be involved in the talks.

Lebanon was drawn into the US and Israel’s war on Iran on March 2 after Tehran-aligned Hezbollah resumed attacks on Israel.

Hezbollah said the attacks were in retaliation for Israel’s killing of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on the first day of the war, on February 28, as well as Israel’s near-daily violations of a ceasefire it agreed to in Lebanon in November 2024.

Israeli attacks since March 2 have killed more than 2,000 people in Lebanon and displaced more than 1.2 million others. The Israeli military has also launched a ground invasion in southern Lebanon, seeking to seize more territory and create what it calls a “buffer zone”.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday ordered the military to expand the invasion in southern Lebanon towards the east.

He said that Israel was pursuing negotiations with the Lebanese government alongside its military campaign against Hezbollah in hopes of disarming the armed group and achieving a “sustainable peace” with its northern neighbour.

The Lebanese government, which is not a party to the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, is seeking a ceasefire and a withdrawal of Israeli troops from southern Lebanon.