EDITORIAL: Taiwan is not a negotiating chip, so unfreeze the $14 billion before Xi gets his verb

A blank American page

No readout from Washington

There is still a blank page.

On Thursday evening, after Donald Trump met Xi Jinping at the White House, Washington had released no official readout, Focus Taiwan reported.

In front of reporters, neither man answered on Taiwan. Trump spoke of an excellent meeting. Nothing more.

Beijing put something in writing. Washington has not. Not yet.

That is where everything can still be kept. Or lost.

The people on watch in the coastal posts don’t read readouts either. They watch a radar screen, and the coffee goes cold beside it.

Twenty-three million

In Taipei, on a Friday morning, people ride the metro. They drop the kids off. They read their phones between two stations.

They learn that two presidents talked about them. Without them.

Every small country knows the feeling. You are the subject of a conversation in a room you were never invited into.

Taiwan has 23 million people, its foreign ministry points out. Not one of them was in the room.

Outside the White House, the Chinese dissident Wang Dan was protesting. The wishes of those 23 million must be respected, he said, according to Focus Taiwan.

Until Washington writes something down, nothing is given away.

Every morning at six

Two sorties

Every morning at 6 a.m., Taiwan’s defense ministry publishes a count.

Aircraft. Warships. So-called official ships. Everything the People’s Liberation Army sends around the island in 24 hours.

On September 25, the count covers the day of the summit. In the air: 2 sorties. Only one enters the air defense identification zone, to the east.

The day before, and the day before that, the same ministry counted 10 sorties a day.

While Xi was being received, the sky went quiet.

Two. Down from 10.

Six warships, still

The sea did not.

Six warships on the 22nd. Six on the 23rd. Six on the 24th. Six on the 25th, plus 5 official ships.

Chinese navy vessels, every morning of the week, at the same level. Taiwan’s forces answered as they do every day: air patrols, ships, coastal missile systems.

On the 20th, the count showed 11 ships. On the 21st, seven. Since the 22nd, six, every morning, without exception.

The sky emptied. The sea stayed full.

What leaves the sky stays on the water.

The verb Xi wants

What the Chinese readout says

The Chinese readout, published on the 25th, sums up what Xi said about Taiwan.

Beijing’s position on “national reunification” and territorial integrity is clear, he said. Xi hopes Washington will stick to the correct position of “opposing ‘Taiwan independence.’” And handle the matter “with caution.”

Beijing’s word means a planned annexation. The annexation of an island the People’s Republic has never governed.

Further than in May

The verb matters. Everything turns on it.

In May, Xi asked for caution. This time, AFP notes, he went further. He is asking Washington to explicitly oppose independence.

Not supporting means keeping your distance. Opposing means taking a side against one of the futures Taiwanese voters might one day choose.

It shuts a door before they have voted.

A word in a Chinese readout does not bind Washington. The same word in an American text would.

We stand with Taiwan and its 23 million people. We stand against the demand Xi made at the White House on September 24, and against the freeze on the $14 billion package that does him a favor.

Because the next morning, at 6 a.m., six Chinese warships were still circling the island.

A verb given away is not taken back at the next summit.

Taipei answers the same day

Four sentences from the ministry

Taipei answered the same day.

In a statement dated September 25, Taiwan’s foreign ministry calls it a familiar maneuver. Beijing twists the facts to impose its own version, on its own.

The reply comes down to four claims.

The Republic of China and the People’s Republic of China are not subordinate to each other. Taiwan’s sovereignty belongs to all its people. The Communist Party regime has no right to represent them.

And Taiwan’s future can only be decided by the people of Taiwan, together, through democratic means.

Who threatens whom

The ministry adds what Beijing never says. Chinese harassment and military threats in the East China Sea, in the South China Sea, in the Taiwan Strait, around the island.

It recalls who spoke before the summit. The foreign ministers of the United States, Japan and South Korea, together. Then 8 countries, France and Germany among them, in another joint statement.

And more than 60 members of the US Congress, from both parties.

Beijing’s efforts to weigh on other countries’ normal exchanges with Taiwan, the ministry adds, are being watched closely.

President Lai Ching-te, the ministry notes, keeps saying that Taiwan is the responsible party when it comes to the status quo.

Taipei answered in one sentence. Washington, not yet.

Two pandas and a silence

What the summit produced

What did the summit actually produce?

According to AFP, the only agreements announced are an invitation to 100,000 young Americans for exchanges in China. And the loan of two pandas to a zoo in Atlanta.

Two pandas. A hundred thousand young people invited. And one verb, requested.

For Taiwan? Nothing in writing.

Xi speaks of many new points of consensus. Not one of them on Taiwan has been published by Washington.

It was his first visit to the White House in 11 years, and his second meeting with Trump this year, Focus Taiwan notes. The two men had already talked in May.

Two kinds of silence

Xi did not answer in public. His sentence exists only in the text Beijing chose to publish. That silence is comfortable: his readout speaks for him.

Trump’s silence is of another kind. It is a page. It can take the usual formula. Or Xi’s verb.

That is our last hope, and it is a concrete one. The first American text after the summit will tell us whether Washington has slipped.

One changed word in a communiqué, and Beijing quotes it for a decade.

And yet that word has not been written. It may never be.

A silence can still say no.

Stability on Beijing’s terms

Thucydides at the White House

Xi came with a formula.

He again called for avoiding the Thucydides trap, AFP reports. The theory holds that a rising power ends up at war with the established one.

It should be a race to catch up, he said, according to Al Jazeera. Not a contest where one wins and the other loses.

The line is elegant. It has a blind spot.

Stability that runs one way

In that race, Taiwan is not a runner. It is the trophy.

The stability Beijing offers comes with a condition, written into its own readout: that Washington sign on to the word “opposing.”

An analyst quoted by AFP sums up the summit’s goal: to show that the two leaders can manage their rivalry within tolerable limits.

Another, Mitter, of Harvard, notes that Trump is willing to discuss the level of arms sales in a way no administration before him was.

One expert, again according to AFP, says he still sees no sign of a fundamental change in American assurances to Taiwan.

A stability that demands giving up, in advance, on defending a vote is not stability. It is surrender on credit.

And yet a sign fits inside a single verb. That verb has not been written.

Beijing’s stability has a price. The price has a name.

Fourteen billion dollars on hold

Rubio on Wednesday

There is the verb. There are also the weapons.

A US$14 billion American arms package for Taiwan has been blocked for months, according to the Taipei Times.

On September 23, the eve of the summit, Secretary of State Marco Rubio repeats that it is still under review. Any sale, he says, to Taiwan or to anyone, is weighed against America’s own needs.

Then the line that sticks: “when we sell something, that means we don’t have it anymore.”

This is not about Taiwan in particular, he says. It is about the industrial base.

People are wrong, he adds, if they think Washington sees its arms sales through a single place in the world.

The biggest one, in December

The same day, a senior administration official recalls a fact. In December, Trump approved “the largest ever arms package for Taiwan”: US$11.1 billion.

He adds that Trump had promised, earlier this year, to decide on the new package “in a fairly short time.”

A fairly short time. For months now.

A weapon under review deters no one.

Rubio’s industrial-base case

Sold means gone

Rubio’s argument deserves its strongest form. Here it is.

American stockpiles are not infinite. The war against Iran has been eating through munitions since February. Every missile sold to Taipei is missing somewhere else. Perhaps where American soldiers will need it tomorrow.

That is not cowardice. It is industrial arithmetic.

The argument is serious. It deserves a serious answer.

What the 1979 law says

And yet American law does not frame the question that way.

The Taiwan Relations Act, in Section 3, commits the United States to provide Taiwan with the defensive arms it needs to maintain a sufficient self-defense capability.

It specifies that the president and Congress set their nature and quantity based solely on their judgment of Taiwan’s needs.

Solely. Taiwan’s needs.

Not the mood of a summit. Not the calendar of a state visit.

The same section requires the president to inform Congress promptly of any threat to Taiwan’s security. Six warships a day is one.

And a notification empties no warehouse. It reserves a place on the production line.

The law speaks of Taiwan’s needs. Not Beijing’s moods.

Stockpiles that really are short

A true argument

We owe our readers what makes our own camp uncomfortable.

The stockpile argument is true. It was not invented for the occasion. Interceptors are already short elsewhere, in Ukraine among other places, since the war against Iran diverted deliveries.

And Trump is not the man who abandoned Taiwan. In December he signed the largest package in the island’s history.

A calmer sky

This has to be written too. During the visit, Beijing cut its flights around the island. From 10 sorties to two. That is a gesture.

A gesture that costs little. One that can be reversed overnight. But a gesture.

These three facts are true. We publish them. We will not pretend otherwise to win an argument.

None of them justifies keeping a package frozen while Xi demands a verb.

Grant the facts, yes. Grant the verb, no.

A very good negotiating chip

Four Republican senators

The word is not ours.

On September 23, four Republican senators put their concern in writing. Mitch McConnell. John Cornyn. Lisa Murkowski. Thom Tillis.

They quote Trump himself. He described Taiwan as “a very good negotiating chip” in his dealings with Xi and the Chinese Communist Party.

They write that it is hard to imagine Washington carrying weight in the Indo-Pacific if the price of diplomatic appearances is denying its partners the means of deterrence.

These are not Trump’s opponents. They are Republicans.

Al Jazeera recalls the original remark: arms sales to Taiwan, a very good negotiating chip with China.

More than $15 billion

Their tally tops $15 billion in blocked aid, according to the Taipei Times.

The $14 billion package. $300 million in military financing approved by Congress and never released. And $1 billion the Pentagon has not obligated.

Three hundred million, already approved. No stockpile to drain to pay it out.

Here the industrial argument stops holding.

What is left is the chip. Nothing else.

Money already approved leaves no warehouse empty.

Armed in December, frozen in September

December’s good call

We judge acts. Not the man.

December 2025, $11.1 billion for Taiwan: a good call. It arms the democracy most exposed to the West’s leading threat.

Hosting Xi, talking, avoiding a crisis in the strait: that is no mistake. Diplomacy is not capitulation.

Declining to answer on Taiwan in front of the cameras may even be prudent. Writing Xi’s verb into a text would not be.

September’s bad call

Calling Taiwan a negotiating chip: a bad call. It tells Beijing the island’s security is on the table.

Keeping $14 billion frozen in the very week Xi demands the word “opposing”: a bad call, if it serves Beijing. The week’s facts say it does.

Beijing gets a quiet sky for the photo. Beijing gets six warships on the water, without an American word. Beijing gets a package still under review.

Three gains. Nothing written in return.

A gesture from one. A gain for the other.

If Trump adds the verb…

December armed Taiwan. September puts it on the table.

A place in the production line

Split the package

There is a way out. It comes from a man who knows the machinery.

Retired Rear Admiral Mark Montgomery, in Taipei on the 25th, proposes resuming notifications to Congress after the summit. Splitting the $14 billion into smaller packages. Announcing them over several weeks.

The notifications have to go out, he says, “so that Taiwan can get in line.” And receive those weapons when they are ready.

A booked order

This is not an activist’s idea. It is a procedure.

It is the exact answer to Rubio’s argument. A notification delivers nothing tomorrow. It books an order.

Montgomery adds that weapons are not enough. It is very hard, he says, to fight together in wartime if you have not worked together in peacetime.

That is what remains to be saved. A place in line. A calendar. A habit.

Notify. Split. Hold.

I admit one fear. That the delay, summit after summit, becomes the policy itself.

You keep a place in line by staying in it.

Three hundred million and a verb

One verb refused

We demand that the first American text after the summit refuse Xi’s verb. No “opposing.”

We demand that this text restate what Taipei wrote on the 25th: Taiwan’s future is decided by its people, through democratic means.

One notification, one transfer

We demand that the first notification to Congress go out in the coming weeks, split up if need be.

We demand that the $300 million already approved be paid out. It is missing from no stockpile.

We demand that Section 3 of the Taiwan Relations Act be read for what it says: Taiwan’s needs, and those alone.

One verb. One notification. One transfer.

None of this requires a break with Beijing.

Only that nothing be handed to Beijing that it has not paid for.

What we ask for fits inside a 1979 law.

Six warships, tomorrow too

The next 6 a.m. count

Tomorrow morning at 6 a.m., Taiwan’s defense ministry will publish a new count.

The sky may be full again. The sea stayed full all week.

Six warships, while two presidents talked about stability, pandas and student exchanges.

Six warships nobody mentioned at the White House.

Weapons, not currency

If Taiwan’s weapons become a bargaining currency, what will stop the next democracy from being put on the table?

The American page is still blank.

It will not stay that way for long.

Six warships this morning. No chip, no verb.

Sources:

Primary Sources:

• Taiwan Ministry of Foreign Affairs — response to Xi’s post-summit remarks, September 25, 2026
• Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs — readout of the Xi-Trump talks, September 25, 2026
• Taiwan Ministry of National Defense — PLA activity around Taiwan, September 25, 2026

Secondary Sources:

• Taipei Times — senators and the $15 billion in blocked aid, September 25, 2026
• Focus Taiwan — Rubio says Taiwan arms sales remain under review, September 24, 2026
• Focus Taiwan — Mark Montgomery proposes splitting the $14 billion package, September 25, 2026