During that first term, approvals of US weapons sales to Taiwan soared, US navy movements in the Taiwan Strait increased, and Trump broke with convention to accept a phone call from Taiwan’s then-president Tsai Ing-wen, lending legitimacy to her administration.
“There are two areas of uncertainty – the first is how the president will assess Taiwan’s value to the US in any given scenario or contingency, and the second is whether the rest of the government is influential when it comes to Trump’s opinion on how to support Taiwan,” says Rorry Daniels, managing director of the Asia Society Policy Institute.
The US sells Taiwan billions of dollars in weapons under legal obligations to provide it with defensive means and uses its military and foreign policy to support the peaceful “status quo” in the Taiwan Strait.
This week the US state department removed a line from its Taiwan page that explicitly said the US did not support Taiwan independence.
“[It] is signalling that it is excising liberal democratic values from its foreign policy calculations – opening up the possibility that US support for Taiwan may become divorced from any inherent value ascribed to Taiwan as a democracy worth preserving for its own sake.”.
