The incoming Trump 2.0 administration’s nomination of China hawks such as Marco Rubio, Mike Waltz and Elbridge Colby for senior leadership positions would seemingly bode well for Taiwan.
Sydney Morning Herald correspondent Lisa Visentin is among those who conclude that “Trump has sent an early message to Beijing that Washington is unlikely to abandon Taiwan.” A recent Taipei Times editorial exulted that the composition of Trump’s proposed leadership team “indicates that the US would continue its robust support for Taiwan.”
Alas, the reality is more complicated. Taiwan is already expecting rough weather from Washington on two fronts.
The first is a demand that Taiwan must raise its defense spending from its current level of 2.5% of GDP. Trump said the figure should be 10%. Lest we dismiss that as casual Trumpian hyperbole, Colby, the newly appointed undersecretary of defense for policy, has said the same thing.
The second anticipated tsunami is a revived US-China trade war, which would indirectly harm Taiwan among other US friends by decreasing China’s earnings from the US market, thereby reducing China’s ability to purchase the exports of other Asia-Pacific countries.
But there’s more. Despite the presence of China hawks in the Oval Office, Trump 2.0 is more likely than any US government since the Korean War to discontinue US support for an autonomous Taiwan.
The core of current US support for Taiwan dates back to 1950. Chinese Communist Party armies under the command of Mao Zedong had captured mainland China in 1949, forcing Chiang Kai-shek’s Republic of China government and remaining troops to relocate to Taiwan.
Washington had lost confidence in Chiang and Beijing was planning to finish the Chinese Civil War by attempting to conquer Taiwan in the fall of 1950. The outbreak of the Korean War in June of that year, however, convinced US President Harry Truman to position the US Navy to prevent PRC forces from attempting to cross the Taiwan Strait. Thereafter, Taiwan became a US protectorate.
Fast forward to the present, previously reliable US support suddenly looks uncertain for several reasons.
First, Trump does not accept the bipartisan internationalist approach that has dominated postwar US foreign policy-making. Allowing Taiwan to choose its own international political destiny has long been part of US grand strategy.
As its originally Leninist government successfully implemented land reform and eventually gave way to political liberalization, Taiwan became a prosperous Chinese liberal democracy, exemplifying the kind of transformation that Washington promotes worldwide. This project stems from America’s self-image but also reflects a widely-held belief that democratization promotes peace because democratic governments tend against fighting each other.
An autonomous Taiwan also helps anchor the US-sponsored liberal political order in Asia. As such, acquiescing to a hostile PRC takeover of Taiwan would weaken, perhaps fatally, America’s position of strategic leadership in the Asia-Pacific region.
Trump’s thinking about Taiwan, however, is not seemingly based on ideological or strategic visions that make Taiwan’s autonomy valuable to the United States.
Instead, Trump emphasizes his resentment toward Taiwan for allegedly stealing semiconductor manufacturing from the United States and for failing to pay for US military protection—even though the US-Taiwan Relations Act does not obligate the US to militarily defend Taiwan and Taiwan pays for the weapons the US supplies.
On four occasions, Biden said publicly he would send US forces to defend Taiwan in the event of a PRC attack. In contrast, Trump often expresses hesitancy about defending Taiwan because it is too small, too close to China and unimportant relative to China. On the other hand, Trump touts his respect for and friendship with Chinese leader Xi Jinping and has even admitted to taking counsel from Xi.
A second reason to doubt continued US support for an autonomous Taiwan is that Trump’s China hawk advisors may not actually drive US policy. It is true that during his first term, Trump allowed his staff to toughen US posture toward China.
They changed the wording of key US policy documents to describe China as an adversary state bent on displacing America’s global influence. A strategy paper declassified by the outgoing Trump administration in January 2021 said the US has a strong interest in preventing the PRC from seizing Taiwan. The previous Trump White House was also the first to characterize the Chinese government’s persecution of its Uyghur Muslim minority as “genocide.”
However, Trump also demonstrated that he was willing to compromise strategic goals in pursuit of a bilateral trade deal with Beijing. Trump decided to drop US sanctions against Chinese telecommunications giant ZTE as a favor to Xi in 2018. He also reportedly told Xi he endorsed China’s harsh treatment of Uyghurs.
Furthermore, the anti-China, pro-Taiwan hawks in the Trump 2.0 administration may not last long. During Trump’s first term, the rate of turnover among senior officials was extraordinarily high.
Third, the influence of other senior advisors in the incoming Trump administration less sympathetic toward Taiwan, such as mega-billionaire Elon Musk and near-billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy, may overshadow the influence of the pro-Taiwan advisors.
Ramaswamy has said Taiwan matters to the United States only because it makes advanced semiconductors and that after ramping up its own chip production, America should stop protecting Taiwan. Meanwhile, Musk is thoroughly compromised by his business interests in China, where his most profitable Tesla factory is located.
Musk has called himself “kind of pro-China.” He takes the PRC government’s position that Taiwan is part of China, equating Taiwan’s relationship to the PRC with the US federal government’s relationship to the US state of Hawaii.
Musk wants Taipei to submit to Beijing’s demands to avoid the possibility of a cross-strait war that would disrupt the supply chains that Musk’s companies rely on. In their advice to Trump, Ramaswamy and Musk can be expected to prioritize avoiding a US war with China rather than preserving Taiwan’s democracy.
Alternatively, there is a risk of the China hawks having so much influence over US policy in Asia that they love Taiwan to death. Beijing is deeply worried that US efforts to ensure Taiwan is not forcibly annexed by the PRC are a cover for an alleged American plot to consolidate Taiwan independence through salami-slicing.
Some China hawks are prone to indulging in grand symbolic gestures designed to taunt or humiliate China, as if premised on the belief that a show of US strength and commitment will cause the Chinese government to acquiesce. Then-Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan in 2022 was one such example.
China reacted not by backing down but by upgrading the size and quality of its military exercises near Taiwan. US Indo-Pacific commander Admiral Samuel Paparo observed that in 2024 he “saw the most rehearsal and the most joint exercises from the People’s Republic of China that I’d ever seen.”
US supporters of Taiwan should aim for policies that meaningfully improve Taiwan’s security and defensibility, ideally without stoking hysteria in Beijing. If completely empowered, the China hawks might not have the restraint to stay on this prudent middle path, which is best for Taiwan’s well-being.
There is also a non-trivial possibility that Trump and Xi could reach a mega-deal to reset US-China relations. Beijing would promise to redress China’s huge trade surplus with the US—the China-related issue Trump has talked about the most—by buying tens of billions of dollars worth of additional US products. This would be a reboot of the failed “Phase One” trade agreement announced just before the Covid pandemic struck.
Secondly, China would assure Trump that the US could continue to trade freely in a China-dominated eastern Asia. In return, Trump would abandon US strategic leadership in Asia. He is already inclined to believe that the costs of global US leadership outweigh the benefits realized by average Americans.
As part of this retrenchment, Washington would give up its alliances and military bases on the western rim of the Pacific and cease arms sales to Taiwan. Of course, many members of the US Congress would object. But as the Trump phenomenon has made plain, we should not underestimate the degree to which Republican Party politicians will sacrifice their principles and even core beliefs to stay on Trump’s good side.
Although America has never been tougher on China, this occurs amidst an anti-internationalism that is part of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” package. Consequently, the perennial Taiwan fear of being sold out by America is more relevant than ever. Koreans traditionally see their country as a “shrimp among whales.”
Increasingly, that metaphor applies at least as well to Taiwan, with a potentially fickle US as one of the whales.
Denny Roy is Senior Fellow at the East-West Center, Honolulu
