All posts tagged "Taiwan"

U.S. allies are rattled by seeing Trump going wobbly on his position on a critical defense deal for a tense region.

Axios reported on Friday that Trump told Chinese leader Xi Jinping that "he's unsure whether he would greenlight a planned $14 billion weapons package for Taiwan."

Axios noted that Trump's cold feet have "alarmed" one of the key U.S. allies in the region, Japan. Trump talked to Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi aboard Air Force One after the summit. ...

A White House statement about Trump's discussion with Chinese leader Xi Jinping curiously took on a different tone from what counterparts put out, reporters noticed.

Politico correspondent Phelim Kine posted on X that the White House statement touted discussions of Chinese investment in the United States, fentanyl, the Strait of Hormuz, purchasing oil from the United States, and an agreement that Iran can't have a nuclear weapon.

"A Tale of Two Readouts: Here's what's in the WH readout of the Trump-Xi meeting but conspicuously absent in the Chinese readout: 1. Chinese investment into the U.S. 2. fentanyl 3. Hormuz 4. Chinese purchases of U.S. oil. 5. Agreement that Iran "can never have a nuclear weapon," Kine said....

A tense exchange was caught on a hot mic Thursday as the summit between the U.S. and China began, according to The Daily Beast.

Inside the Great Hall of the People, Washington and Beijing's top officials were sitting down face-to-face for high-stakes bilateral talks. As they entered the room, a press pool camera that was broadcasting for PBS News was rolling live when someone with an American accent unloaded on the operator, The Beast reported.

"No, no, get the f--- out of here," the unknown person said. "No. Move. Got to move."...

China is not recruiting its spies through meetings in dark alleys, nor by courtship over covert drinks. Rather, the intelligence agency and military of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) are using LinkedIn, the professional networking site, to send as many as 30,000 messages per hour to recruit spies, according to a new book, “The Great Heist: China’s Epic Campaign to Steal America’s Secrets.”

David R. Shedd, a former director of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), called the book he co-wrote with Andrew Badger, a former DIA case officer, “a real, urgent call” to Americans, from corporations to government, to better respond to China’s success in stealing tech and defense innovations.

“I still don't think America has woken up on how serious the problem is,” Shedd told Raw Story. ...

A third world war could soon “technically” come to pass if Donald Trump’s presence in the White House encourages China to attack Taiwan, a former UK Foreign Secretary said.

“To me, there is a very dangerous scenario in which [Russian President Vladimir] Putin gets something he can describe as a win in Ukraine and China thinks that they will have a crack at Taiwan while Trump is still president, because they don't think in a month of Sundays he would actually send American troops to defend Taiwan,” Jeremy Hunt said.

“If that happened, it would potentially be technically a world war, because you could have conflict in Europe and in Asia at the same time, with a whole set of alliances behind Ukraine and Taiwan and another set of alliances behind China and Russia.”...

Donald Trump's decision to threaten massive tariffs on China only to retreat risks making the U.S. a “paper tiger” and encouraging Chinese aggression against Taiwan, a former U.S. ambassador to Beijing and a former CIA chief and defense secretary said.

“We have a very tough, tough position on Taiwan,” said Nicholas Burns, who was ambassador to China under Joe Biden from 2021 to 2025, referring to U.S. support for the island nation whose independence Beijing does not recognize.

“If [Chinese President] Xi Jinping concludes from a tariff negotiations that the United States is in essence a paper tiger, that it doesn't mean what it says, that it blinks first, that's not what you want to have in his mind on something even more serious, which would be Taiwan, for instance, and a cross-strait invasion by the People's Liberation Army. ...