The most revealing line of last week’s Trump-Xi summit was not delivered at the Great Hall of the People. It came afterward, aboard Air Force One, when the American president was asked by Fox News what he thought of the island that had dominated his two days of talks with Xi Jinping.
“We will call it a place,” Donald Trump said, “because nobody knows how to define it.” Asked whether Taiwanese citizens should feel more or less secure after the summit, he answered: “Neutral.”
Washington’s bipartisan Taiwan lobby is, predictably, scandalized. The op-ed pages will fill in coming days with warnings about appeasement, abandonment and credibility. But Trump’s careless phrasing has done something the careful prose of three administrations could not.
It has named, in plain English, the strategic reality that the American foreign policy establishment has spent a generation pretending does not exist.
The asymmetry no one wants to discuss
Taiwan sits roughly 100 miles from the Chinese mainland and roughly 7,000 miles from the continental United States. For Beijing, the island is what Chinese strategists have for decades called a “core interest”, bound up with sovereignty, civil-war memory and the legitimacy of Communist Party rule.
Xi reminded Trump of this in unusually direct language, calling Taiwan “the most important issue in US-China relations” and warning that mishandling it would put the relationship into “great jeopardy.”
For the US, Taiwan is something else entirely. It is a democratic society with which Americans have warm sympathies, a critical node in the global semiconductor supply chain, and a useful, if minor, piece of the Western Pacific’s geography. None of this rises to the level of a vital national interest in the classical sense, the kind for which a great power risks general war.
That is not a moral statement. It is a statement about distance, logistics and the balance of conventional military power in the First Island Chain. The honest assessments by serious analysts, not the wargame press releases, have for some time pointed in the same direction.
That is, in any near-term Taiwan contingency, the People’s Liberation Army would fight at home with mass and interior lines, while the US would fight at the end of supply chains stretching across an ocean, from bases in Japan and Guam that are themselves within range of Chinese missiles.
Trump, for all the inelegance of his vocabulary, appears to grasp this. “I don’t think they’ll do anything when I’m here,” he said of a Chinese move on Taiwan. “When I’m not here, I think they might, to be honest with you.”
Translated out of Trumpese, this is something close to the position long argued by foreign policy realists: deterrence by personal unpredictability for as long as possible, accommodation thereafter, and certainly no war for an island a hundred miles from China and seven thousand miles from California.
The American readout speaks loudest
Diplomatic statements should be read for what they include, but also for what they leave out. The Chinese readout of the summit placed Taiwan at the center of the conversation. The American readout, according to multiple reports, did not mention Taiwan at all.
This is not an oversight. It is a quiet acknowledgment that the US, having just fought one war in the Persian Gulf and presiding over an open-ended security entanglement in Europe, is in no mood to advertise a third front in the Western Pacific.
The framework Xi proposed and Trump accepted in principle — “constructive strategic stability” between two great powers — is, whatever the diplomats wish to call it, the language of accommodation. The Chinese are already treating it as the operating doctrine of US-China relations for the rest of this decade.
In Washington, this will be presented by Trump’s critics as weakness. In Beijing, it is being presented as historic. Both are partly right. What it actually is, however, is something more interesting: the slow, embarrassed admission that the unipolar moment is over and that the US must once again live in a world in which other great powers have spheres of vital concern.
The danger of the in-between
None of this means Taiwan is doomed, and none of it means Washington should hand Beijing the keys.
The pragmatic course, the one this column has argued for some time, has always been the maintenance of the awkward but durable architecture set up in 1979: the One China policy, robust unofficial relations, arms sales sufficient for self-defense, and the deliberate ambiguity about American intervention that has helped keep the peace across the Strait for nearly half a century.
What is dangerous is neither realism nor restraint, but the in-between posture that Washington has drifted into since 2016: rhetorical commitments that grow ever more sweeping, military preparations that remain insufficient, and a bipartisan habit of treating Taiwan less as a place than as a symbol in America’s larger ideological contest with China.
That is the worst of all worlds. It invites Beijing to test American resolve precisely where American resolve is weakest, while encouraging Taipei to believe in guarantees Washington has not in fact made.
Trump’s “place” remark, mocked as it will be, is closer to the spirit of the 1972 Shanghai Communiqué than anything the last three administrations have managed. The original American genius on the Taiwan question was to leave the question’s definition usefully unresolved. It was Washington, not Beijing, that began rewriting that script in recent years.
A modest recommendation
The lesson the Beijing summit ought to teach the foreign policy establishment is not that Trump has betrayed Taiwan. He hasn’t, at least not yet.
The lesson is that even an instinctively combative president, surrounded by China hawks, finds himself drawn, by the sheer gravitational pull of geography and military reality, toward something resembling the realist accommodation that Henry Kissinger sketched out half a century ago and that his many critics have refused to update for the present age.
Those who claim to put America first have an obligation to ask the question that Washington’s think-tank class will not: is the US really prepared to send its sons and daughters to die in the Taiwan Strait, against a nuclear-armed adversary, over an interest that any honest accounting would call peripheral?
If the answer is no, and one suspects, in the private rooms where these things are actually discussed, that it is, then the public posture must eventually catch up to the private one. Trump, in his characteristically inarticulate way, has just begun that catching up. The grown-ups in the room would do well to finish the sentence.
This article was originally published on Leon Hadar’s Global Zeitgeist and is republished with kind permission. Become a subscriber here.