President Donald Trump said Wednesday that he’s preparing to speak with Taiwan’s President Lai Ching-te as part of his decision process on whether to approve a $14 billion arms sale to the self-governing island.
Trump’s comments may strain the relationship between the White House and Beijing, which the president worked in earnest to strengthen on a visit to China last week.
“l’ll speak to him. I speak to everybody. We have that situation very well in hand,” Trump told reporters Wednesday when asked if he planned to have contact with Lai ahead of making a decision on the arms sale.
The president added that “we’ll work on that, the Taiwan problem,” without elaborating. Trump’s statement to reporters follows comments he made on Air Force One last week that he planned to speak with the person “that’s running Taiwan.”
Direct leader-to-leader communications between the U.S. and Taiwan has been almost nonexistent since the U.S. switched diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing in 1979. And any move by Trump to speak to Lai will infuriate Beijing, which claims Taiwan as Chinese territory.
Trump violated that norm when he took a congratulatory call from Taiwan’s then-President Tsai Ing-wen after winning the 2016 presidential election. U.S.-Taiwan ties are otherwise considered non-official, and are conducted through outposts in Washington and Taipei that lack official diplomatic status.
Neither the Chinese Embassy nor Taiwan’s diplomatic outpost in Washington immediately responded to requests for comment.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping worked to make Taiwan a key part of his two-day summit with Trump in Beijing last week. He “stressed to President Trump that the Taiwan question is the most important issue in China-U.S. relations,” Chinese officials said in a statement following the two leaders’ meeting.
Trump appeared receptive.
He spooked Taipei and Taiwan supporters on Capitol Hill by confirming last week that he had discussed “at length” the issue of U.S. arms sales to Taipei with Xi during the summit. That also upends decades of U.S. policy that bars the U.S. from consulting Beijing on such sales.
Trump compounded those fears by saying that he was holding off on the approval of a $14 billion arms sale to Taiwan as a “negotiating chip” with China. Withholding weapon sales to Taiwan would also violate the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, which commits the U.S. to “provide Taiwan with arms of a defensive character” to deter potential Chinese aggression.
Lai urged the Trump administration to continue arms sales to Taiwan in order to ensure “regional peace and security” in a Facebook post Sunday.
