Acting US Navy Secretary Hung Cao told a Senate hearing this past week that the US $14 billion arms package for Taiwan — approved by Congress in January and only awaiting US President Donald Trump’s formal submission — has been “paused” because the Pentagon needs the interceptors for the war on Iran. Taipei says no one has told it any such thing. Both statements may be technically true, and that presents an interesting problem.
In 2024, it was likely that Trump 2.0 would treat Taiwan less as a strategic commitment than as a transactional asset, and that the Taiwan Strait had moved from a space where Washington and Beijing were guard-railing to one where they were gambling. This is technically now on record, as while returning from his Beijing summit with Xi Jinping last week, Trump told Fox News that arms sales to Taiwan are “a very good negotiating chip.”
Xi’s signal in his February 4 call with Trump was that the US must handle arms sales to Taiwan with great prudence (慎重). Whether the Iran rationale is genuine or convenient is beside the point because the largest pending US arms package for Taiwan in history has become a deliverable in a US-China bargain, and Taipei is the last to know.
A separate US $11 billion package announced in December 2025 has also not moved. Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te, governing without a legislative majority, has limited room to push back. All the while, the opposition (KMT+TPP)-led Legislative Yuan has spent the past year hindering defence appropriations bills and a special budget from taking shape. The political deadlock that manifested in the form of parliamentary brawls last summer is now compounding the US’s so-called “strategic ambiguity,” rather than being a siloed challenge.
The US Senate has authorised the package; the letter of guarantee Defence Minister Wellington Koo received from Washington in March still stands; and Trump did not, in Beijing, agree to cancel the sale outright. But “pending” describes the operative nature of the US’s Taiwan policy now — pending Trump’s mood on Xi, pending the US’s war objectives re: Iran, and so on. For Taipei, that is the worst of both worlds: armed enough to provoke, not armed enough to deter.