Did Taiwan “Lose Trump?”

“In all negotiations of difficulty, a man may not look to sow and reap at once; but must prepare business, and so ripen it by degrees.”

—Francis Bacon

OVER THE LAST WEEK Christian Whiton’s essay “How Taiwan Lost Trump” has ricocheted its way through the Taiwanese media.1 Ever sensitive to foreign perceptions of Taiwan, the Taiwanese chattering classes have been especially sensitive in the fallout of two news items: Taiwan’s failure to reach a trade deal with the United States and the Trump administration’s cancellation of a planned New York stopover by Taiwanese President William Lai. Most Taiwanese observers have linked these events together. In Taiwan they have been depicted as a terrible portent of future American policy. The general mood is a fatalistic “now we see what Trump truly thinks of us!”

Whiton’s essay succeeds because it confirms this narrative (“You are right: Trumpworld does think the worst of you!”) while also offering an explanation for how this doleful circumstance came about. To the outrage of their allies and the glee of their enemies, Whiton lays all blame squarely at the feet of the powers that be in the DPP.

Hence the essay’s viral run. What of its accuracy? To those familiar with this administration, its personnel, and the broader intellectual environment that it feeds on, does his argument ring true?

Partially. The essay is directionally correct, but glaringly wrong in many specifics.  

Here is Whiton’s core claim: TECRO and the Green leadership have not built meaningful bridges to MAGA world. They must earn the trust of that world, but they do not speak or act in a way that might gain this trust.

This is all basically true. The Greens do not have deep ties with MAGAland’s nationalist conservatives, and have torched some of the ones they once had. From Taipei’s perspective this is not a good thing. The nationalist conservative wing of the Republican Party now staffs much of the Trump administration’s foreign policy bureaucracy, dominates conservative media, and has an absolute lock on the younger Republicans who will determine their party’s future. In Washington’s inner councils, these men often cast the deciding vote. No nation dependent on American arms for its survival can afford to alienate them.

But have William Lai and Hsiao Bi-khim done that? Is the Trump administration, the national conservative movement, or MAGAland writ large as hostile to Taiwan as Whiton makes out? Do their attitudes account for the two events—20% tariff rates and Lai’s canceled stopover in New York—that have set Taiwanese media into this tizzy?

Here Whiton’s arguments do not hold up. Events simply did not unfold as he describes them. U.S.–Taiwan  trade talks were similar to the administration’s other tariff negotiations. Trump’s personal fondness for or personal disgust with a foreign nation rarely makes any difference in these deals. Trade talks are also walled off from the broader strategic questions in the relationship. Linking Lai’s stopover to the tariff decision is a category error. Whether Lai visited New York or not, the tariffs would have been the same. It is doubtful anyone in the White House meant them to be read as twin pillars of a single strategy.

Whiton also misreads Trumpist attitudes. Neither the administration nor MAGAworld harbors a special grudge against Taipei. The administration has not yet reached a firm consensus on what American policy towards China should look like, let alone Taiwan. Most national conservatives have yet to think deeply about the problem posed by Taiwan. Whiton claims that this crowd is repelled by Hsiao Bi-khim. The truth is that hardly any of them would recognize her name.

One day they will. At some point in the not-too-distant future, the powerbrokers of MAGAland will have real debates about both China and Taiwan. In that day the ties between Taiwanese elites and their MAGA counterparts will be tested. But that day has not yet come.

LAST YEAR I INTERVIEWED around 40 figures in the Trump foreign policy world. These interviews were wide-ranging: they included cabinet officials, congressional staff, and Republican think tankers and editors. The subject of these interviews was China policy in the new administration. I wrote a long report outlining my findings for the Foreign Policy Research Institute, which you can read here.2 The upshot of that report is that there is no consensus position on China in MAGAland. I identified eight separate schools of thought on how America should manage its relations with China. Today there are important officials from each school in positions of power.

I noted in that report that opinions on Taiwan policy cut across these categories. To my surprise, I found that what one believed about industrial policy, AI competition with China, or force posture in the Pacific was not cleanly correlated with one’s judgments on strategic ambiguity, the ultimate importance of Taiwan to American interests, and so forth.  There were only two exceptions to this. Both the “trade warriors” and the “prioritizers” have something of a party line on Taiwan. In both cases the median view in each group is shaped by a fairly long history dealing with the Taiwanese in their sphere of work, and in both cases this party line strictly concerns relations in that sphere. For the trade warriors that sphere is trade; for the prioritizers, defense.   

Let’s talk about trade first.

During the confirmation hearings of Jamieson Greer, the soon-to-be ambassador articulated a general vision for the new global trading order.3 Under his schema, America’s important trading partners could be grouped into four categories:

1. China
2. Southeast Asia
3. The industrialized democracies of Asia and Europe
4. The Western Hemisphere

All else equal, countries in each bucket get similar tariff rates—highest for China, lowest for the Western Hemisphere. The strategic logic of these categories is fairly clear: the highest rates go to America’s greatest strategic rival. The next-highest rates are levied against the region with the highest trade imbalance with the United States and the greatest propensity for transshipping Chinese goods. America’s allies are given relatively preferential rates. The best deals go to neighbors. If we must rely on foreign suppliers for raw materials or light industry, the administration wants those goods coming from as close to home as possible. Though Ambassador Greer did not say this in his testimony, my assumption is that this is because these supply lines will be easier to protect in time of war, while in times of peace a prosperous Latin America is less likely to expel waves of migrants towards the southern border.

Think of this schema as the strategic baseline for American tariff rates. No country in Southeast Asia is ever going to get Latin America rates, no matter what they offer. In contrast, if a Latin American country has Southeast Asian rates levied against it then that country has fumbled badly in its negotiations with the United States.

In previous eras, strategic considerations set the ceiling for American tariffs. Now they set the floor. Above that floor strategic considerations do not matter. The focus of trade officials is entirely on the economic questions (e.g., “What is the bilateral trade imbalance?,” “What market access can we pry open?,” “How much revenue will these tariffs generate?,” “Which trade goods can we reshore?”). These are the metrics they bring to the President for deal approval or rejection.

Secretary Rubio’s team does not interfere in Commerce’s and USTR’s negotiations over reciprocal tariffs. The two tracks are siloed—almost to a fault. This administration’s greatest weakness is sequencing. One can point to multiple examples over the last six months where the defense, trade, and diplomatic bureaucracies, each siloed from the others and running on its own decision cycle, have delivered blows that landed harsher than the administration intended. Intentionally spaced out over several weeks or months these blows would not have stung so sorely.

The place where the siloes converge is with the president himself. On the few occasions when security or cultural issues impact trade negotiations, it is usually because the president wants to mix the two policy streams. Sometimes, this is because a foreign leader has personally made the case to Trump that concessions in other policy spheres should be linked with trade outcomes.

Here the Taiwanese face a severe structural disadvantage: unlike most foreign leaders, the Taiwanese president cannot call Trump up and make his case.

What does all of this mean for the Taiwanese? First of all, it gives us a baseline by which to judge the tariffs levied against Taiwan. Taiwan is an industrialized ally of the United States. It belongs in the same bucket as Japan, Korea, and the EU. Its tariff rates are in the same range as these countries, but on the higher end: the Koreans, Japanese, and Europeans all came away with a 15% tariff rate, in each case bundled with market access concessions and investment deals. The Taiwanese did not reach a deal and came away with 20% tariffs levied against their exports.

This is a defeat, but given Lai’s inability to call Trump and negotiate directly, it is only a small one. The defeat is softened by another fact: this tariff rate does not apply to semiconductors. Given the economic value of semiconductor exports and the administration’s determination to shrink the U.S.–Taiwan trade gap, a higher tariff on other export goods was probably inevitable. Avoiding this would have required massive import commitments from the Taiwanese—commitments hard to meet except through defense spending. Given that the Blues in the Legislative Yuan only passed relatively modest defense budget increases under the shadow of a national recall this might be too much to ask of President Lai.4

However, the most important takeaway from this discussion for Taiwanese readers is that “reciprocal” tariffs are not a barometer of Trump’s feelings toward any given country. They do not say very much about America’s larger diplomatic posture. Trump certainly is not afraid to use tariffs to muscle foreign powers on the cultural or strategic front (see this week’s tariffs on India), but those tariffs have a different legal basis from the ones now being levied on Taiwanese exports. Taiwan’s 20% tariff rate was decided by trade math, not MAGAland’s feelings about Hsiao Bi-khim.

WHAT ABOUT THE OTHER denizens of MAGAland?

Let us remind ourselves of Whiton’s charges. Trumpworld has turned on the Taiwan, he argues, because:

Far from being seen as an asset in the struggle with China, most Americans who follow foreign policy see Taiwan as a liability. Not only might Taiwan drag America into an unwanted war with China, there is little cultural affinity for Taiwan as something America must defend. Taiwan’s own government declines to position it as a capitalist bastion of freedom that will do whatever it takes to survive, instead advertising it as a computer chip factory…..  What Trump officials see is a DPP-led government beholden to lefty cultural issues like denuclearization and transgenderism, indifferent to U.S. business, unserious about defense, and unwilling to close a trade deficit. 5

There is a measure of truth to this accusation—but only a measure. To speak bluntly: most of Trump’s advisors cannot think of the DPP as beholden to lefty cultural issues because most of these advisors do not think about the DPP. This is especially true with the young culture warriors who have been sucked into the Vice President’s office and the State Department—the men most sensitive to the sort of issues that preoccupy Whiton. These men are smart and absurdly hard-working, but only a few have deep experience in foreign policy and almost none have any direct experience with Taiwan. This is also true for business moguls and media figures who regularly advise Trump and whose opinions shape the views of the MAGA masses. These are not people who know much about the Second Taiwan Straits Crisis or the DPP’s rocky relations with the ROC Army or the SIGINT station the NSA runs out of Yangmingshan. That is not a dig against them—there are plenty of old China hands who do not know about that station on Yangmingshan—but it means that from Taipei’s perspective things are not nearly as dire as Whiton paints them out to be. MAGAland has not made up its mind about Taiwan. Far from despising Hsiao Bi-khim, most important national conservatives do not know who she is.      

That is a problem in its own way. A diplomat’s job is to court foreign elites—including those not yet in power. In a different world, TECRO might have spent more time building relationships with the national conservatives and the “deep right” before they had climbed to their current positions of influence. Hsiao Bi-khim can be faulted for the failure of her mission to do this—especially given her success building bridges with other influential actors in the conservative coalition. But in this she is not unique: very few diplomats had the foresight to forge ties with the rising American right.

 To the Lai administration’s credit, they seem to be aware of this problem and are groping for solutions to it. The administration’s invitation to Shawn Ryan to visit Taiwan and Hsiao Bi-khim’s hour-long podcast episode with him is a step in the right direction (and not one Whiton gives the administration any credit for).

My advice to the Greens: think hard about whom you have speak for your cause.

American journalists in Taiwan, generally hostile to Trump and Trumpism, are poor guides to the new administration or the MAGA thoughtspace. When I was living in Taiwan in 2016, I noticed a strange disjunction between the Taiwanese political campaigns I saw playing out before my eyes and the Taiwanese political campaigns as they were described in American media outlets. (See, for example, this editorial in the Washington Post).6 Like most Americans, American journalists tend to sympathize with the Greens. These sympathies led them to recast Taiwanese political parties in the American image. In their hands, the became DPP a vehicle of multicultural progressivism, and the KMT, avatars of everything hoary and hidebound. It was all very strange. The real divide between the two parties has nothing to do with social progressivism or social conservatism. What divides the DPP from the KMT is nationalism. Both parties have their progressive and conservative wings. Social questions—like the debate over gay marriage in 2018—highlighted divisions within the two parties, not divisions between them.

These realities were sometimes obscured by American journalists and progressive Taiwanese-Americans who freely associated the good fight abroad with the good fight at home. I suppose that Taiwan benefited from this when American foreign policy was in the hands of a progressive-minded civil service. It does not favor Taiwan’s national interests now. If the Greens want to build meaningful bridges in the new Washington, they need to highlight other voices and center other themes.

I will not go into great detail on this point—but I will offer a few brief questions for people at the DPP party headquarters and in the various TECRO offices to mull over.

First: the Republican Party is now a nationalist institution. It explicitly aims to change international norms surrounding national self-determination and national cultural sovereignty. Are there bridges that might be built here? Who might do that building?

Second: from the early days of the Tangwai movement, Christian churches have been a pillar of the Green coalition. This is not unique to Taiwan: in Hong Kong and on the mainland, Christians, especially Protestants, are often the fiercest opponents of Leninist rule. Why is this? Are there bridges that might be built here? Who might do that building?

Third: technologists are an important part of the new Republican coalition. They bring to this coalition personnel, money, and ideas. Taiwanese have strong relationships with many people in this coalition already, but most of these relationships are transactional. What would it take to forge a partnership of ideas?

As a follow-up to that last one: Technological competition with China is at the center of the tech-right/nat-con synthesis. This is partially a cultural synthesis—the technological vision for America’s future is just as much a cultural vision as an economic one. Are there Taiwanese who can speak to this vision?

Fourth: this administration seeks to downgrade the importance of many international institutions. Taiwan is formally barred from entry into almost all of these. Is there an alignment of interests here?

Fifth: every MAGA influencer seems to end up in Japan, marveling at cities where the subways work, strangers are polite, and anyone can walk safely alone at night. Why are these stories being told about Tokyo instead of Taipei?

Sixth: much of the hand-wringing about Taiwanese progressivism is actually hand-wringing about Taiwanese toughness. In essence, MAGAland is asking, “Do the Taiwanese have the grit needed to survive? If we get in a war, are they going to fold?”

So, how might a country foster grit? How might it demonstrate grit? Which individuals and institutions inside Taiwan demonstrate it most compellingly?  

Some of these questions—especially the first one—might have to be handled below the presidential level. President Lai is president over all Taiwanese, not just those committed to his party’s nation-building platform. But Taiwanese leaders are inordinately proud of Taiwanese civil society. If its leaders cannot be tapped for this sort of thing, what use are they?

THERE IS ONE smaller faction on the right that I have not discussed in any depth, but whose perceptions of Taiwan matter. I have briefly mentioned them twice already. These are the defense-intellectuals at the core of the “prioritizer” school. This is where the Greens have burned some of their bridges.

The prioritizers are one of the few national conservative cliques who have thought deeply about foreign affairs. Elbridge Colby wrote an entire book that laid out a realist argument for the American defense of Taiwan. The basic claims of this camp run as follows: military force is the ultimate arbiter of the international order; the consequences of ceding control of this order to the Chinese will be dire; the challenge posed by the PLA is so large that the United States cannot afford to divert military resources to other conflicts and theaters; Taiwan is both the cornerstone of America’s defensive posture in the Pacific and the place China will attempt to overturn the existing order; ergo, the United States military must urgently orient itself around the defense of Taiwan to the exclusion of lesser problems.

These ideas were largely academic when Colby introduced them in 2019. That changed with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. By late 2023, Republicans were deeply divided on whether to authorize another spending package for Ukraine. The prioritizers argued hard and long that any new military assistance package should go to Taiwan, not Ukraine. At this point the Taiwanese intervened. Taiwanese diplomats argued, both in public and in private, that failing to support Ukraine against Russian aggression would signal to the Chinese that the West would not have the will to stand up against Chinese aggression in similar circumstances. The supporters of the assistance package carried the day. The House voted for the spending package, 311 to 112. Every one of the 112 dissenting votes was cast by a Republican.

It is not clear to me that the Taiwanese intervention changed that outcome—I suspect Speaker Johnson had the votes he needed to pass the bill irrespective of Taipei’s position on the question.

It is clear to me that the Taiwanese intervention in this debate damaged TECRO’s relationship with the core prioritizers. They drew two lessons from the Taiwanese stand against their arguments.

First: Taiwan’s Green leadership does not take the possibility of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan seriously. When I interviewed these folks back in the summer of 2024, I heard various explanations for why that might be. One suggested that the Greens have been lulled by the siren song of liberal internationalists—seduced into thinking “norms” trump hard power. Another suggested that leading Greens came from legal, academic, and activist backgrounds and are thus ill-prepared to do the whole Churchill thing. One told me that the affair caused him to rethink the entire logic of the prioritizer case. He now took the libertarian/restrainer critique of their program far more seriously: America should not commit itself to Taiwan’s defense because it incentivizes the Taiwanese to neglect their own military preparedness. If this preparedness was not Taiwan’s single largest national priority, the United States could not and should not risk war for its sake.

All three of those men—along with almost every other individual in their network—now serve in the administration. Back when the Ukraine spending package was a live debate, however, the lessons they drew from the affair were not widely shared. For the prioritizers the House vote was a resounding defeat. The Taiwanese, for their part, correctly surmised who would win that contest and went out of their way to side with the winners.    

That win was temporary. Few of the China hawks who led the pro-Ukraine charge joined this administration. Congress—the old citadel of pro-Taiwan sentiment, and the battleground for the 2023 and 2024 fights—now lies prone before the White House. The intellectual architects of the prioritizer project now hold real positions of power.

They also remember who aided and who opposed their cause.

This brings us to the second lesson these folks took from that debate: the Taiwanese think we are a problem.

Keep in mind that the funding controversy was not just a debate over Ukraine. It was also a contest over the leadership of Republican foreign policy. Taipei took a side in that contest. It would have been hard enough for the prioritizers had this all happened in private, but it did not. The Taiwanese rebuke of the prioritizers was very public. Whether TECRO intended to  humiliate these fellows does not really matter: TECRO did humiliate them—and humiliation has consequences.

A group of people that MAGAland honors and respects, a group whose entire project was oriented around the defense of Taiwan, found itself disillusioned with and estranged from the Taiwanese leadership.

Now, one should not overplay the significance of this affair. The core group of defense intellectuals that we are discussing numbers fewer than 15 people. It is not difficult to track where they landed in this administration and how much influence they have. Their voice is important—but it is not dominant.

More important still, these guys remain focused on the same military metrics that drove their analyses back in 2019. Whiton-style concerns about cultural affinity matter for many of the officials in this administration, but they do not figure prominently in the calculations of this set. The worries of the prioritizer core are squarely focused on Taiwan’s defense budget. The games the KMT played with the governmental budget this year have done far more damage to Taiwan’s standing in their eyes than anything Hsiao Bi-khim said as Taiwan’s representative to the United States.7

That will not be true for the rest of the Trump coalition. Avoid the temptation to dismiss Whiton’s cultural critique as a “fringe political view.”8 This view of international politics is no longer “fringe.” It is the viewpoint of the Vice President of the United States of America! It is also the viewpoint of the Vice President’s staff, the Secretary of State’s closest advisors, most of the political appointees at the State Department, the family of Donald Trump, and the media figures whom Trump calls regularly for counsel. This is a hard reality that cannot be wished away. We live in a world where men like Donald Trump Jr. and Charlie Kirk wield immense influence.  What they think about Taiwan will shape its fate. Any American who tells you otherwise is either deceiving themselves or is deceiving you. Either way, they are a danger to listen to.

P.S. For the Taiwanese and Chinese readers about to discuss this essay on social media, you might consider using the author’s Chinese name in your discussions: 葛天樂。

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For more of my thoughts on Taiwan, see the posts “Understanding Taiwanese Nationalism: A Historical Primer in Bullet Points,” “Losing Taiwan is Losing Japan,” “We Can Only Kick Taiwan Down the Road So Far,” and “Why Taiwanese Leaders Put Political Symbolism Above Military Power.” For more of my writing on the American right, see “Further Notes on the New Right,” Thoughts on Post-Liberalism (I)”, “Culture Wars are Long Wars,” and “The Eight Tribes of Trump and China.” To get updates on new posts published at the Scholar’s Stage, you can join the Scholar’s Stage Substack mailing list, follow my twitter feed, or support my writing through Patreon. Your support makes this blog possible.

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