AP (“Trump asked China’s president if he wants to buy US arms, ambassador says“):
President Donald Trump has justified the pending U.S. arms sale to Taiwan to Chinese President Xi Jinping by downplaying it as just one of many sales Washington makes around the world — even asking Xi if he’d be in the market for U.S. arms, Trump’s ambassador to China said on Sunday.
David Perdue said Trump raised the prospect of the arms sales from the U.S. to its ascendant geopolitical rival, an unlikely offer that if consummated would upend generations of U.S. policy toward China and Taiwan and potentially expose U.S. technology to a potential foe. Perdue, speaking to Shannon Bream on “Fox News Sunday” days after Trump hosted Xi for a state visit in Washington, didn’t specify when the offer was made.
Bream had cited concerns from Republican and Democratic lawmakers over delayed aid packages and weapons orders to Taiwan, the self-ruled democracy, to defend itself from China’s threat to invade the island. Bream asked if the U.S. is denying arms to Taiwan to appease the Chinese president, who visited Trump last week.
Perdue pushed back on the suggestion, stating that Trump “is as strong on Taiwan as I’ve ever seen anybody” and has sold it plenty of weapons. Perdue also said Trump and Xi continue to talk about future U.S. weapons sales to Taiwan.
“But President Trump continues to say, ‘Hey, we sell arms to other people around the world,’” Perdue said. “He actually asked President Xi, would he like to buy some, at one point.”
So, on this surface, this may seem odd.
In his 2017 National Security Strategy, Trump declared, “China . . . want[s] to shape a world antithetical to U.S. values and interests. China seeks to displace the United States in the Indo-Pacific region, expand the reaches of its state-driven economic model, and reorder the region in its favor.”
President Joe Biden was even more explicit in his 2022 National Security Strategy: “The People’s Republic of China harbors the intention and, increasingly, the capacity to reshape the international order in favor of one that tilts the global playing field to its benefit, even as the United States remains committed to managing the competition between our countries responsibly.”
Trump’s 2025 National Security Strategy downplayed this rhetoric a bit. It claimed, “President Trump single-handedly reversed more than three decades of mistaken American assumptions about China: namely, that by opening our markets to China, encouraging American business to invest in China, and outsourcing our manufacturing to China, we would facilitate China’s entry into the so-called ‘rules-based international order.’ This did not happen.” But it later declared, “Going forward, we will rebalance America’s economic relationship with China, prioritizing reciprocity and fairness to restore American economic independence.”
I suppose selling them weapons would help with that!
Now, I strongly doubt Xi will take Trump up on this offer. It turns out that the PRC has developed a rather robust domestic military manufacturing sector that is outpacing ours by quite a bit, at least in terms of throughput.
But if he did, it would put them in quite the pickle if they decided to invade Taiwan or otherwise provoke military conflict with the United States. Why, we would control the resupply! And we could potentially equip the systems such that we could disable them remotely. Which would be a genius move.
Again, though, it’s unlikely Xi would go for it.
