On the first day of China’s pomp-filled National People’s Congress, the yearly agenda-setting meeting of the country’s rubber-stamp legislature, Beijing announced that it would ramp up its military spending by nearly $250 billion this year, an increase of more than 7%, as it continues to modernize its armed forces. Beijing has been bolstering its military rapidly while pressing, with increasing assertiveness, territorial claims over disputed islands across the South China Sea — and its claim over the democratically governed island of Taiwan.
China considers Taiwan a renegade province and President Xi Jinping has vowed to reassert Beijing’s control over the island for years, by force if necessary. But Taiwan has had vital backup for decades from its biggest international partner, the U.S., which is obligated under domestic American law to provide the island with sufficient means to defend itself from any aggressor.
American military ships and aircraft continually ply the South China Sea’s waters and skies around Taiwan, demonstrating, the U.S. military says, the right to free navigation in international space. The freedom of navigation operations have led to some tense encounters in recent years.
Over the past week, Taiwan’s government and many of its 23 million people have watched and considered President Trump’s aggressive posturing with Ukraine, and his blowup with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the White House last Friday in particular, with unease.
“I think these events in their totality are deeply unnerving for the people of Taiwan,” Russell Hsiao, the executive director at the Global Taiwan Institute in Washington, D.C., told CBS News. “This seeming about-face from the United States in its position of support for Ukraine, I think, raises some doubts among people in Taiwan whether this could potentially happen to them as well, in the heat of a battle against China – to have its most important and principal security partner essentially pull the rug from underneath them.”
Taiwan’s history with the U.S., and with Trump
Since 1950 – the year after communist forces won China’s civil war against the Nationalists, who then fled to Taiwan and eventually established their own, democratic administration – the U.S. has sold more than $50 billion worth of weapons to Taipei, including HIMARS rocket systems, F-16 jet fighters and dozens of advanced Abrams battle tanks, according to the Council on Foreign Relations think tank.
The Taiwanese government has earmarked nearly 2.5% of its 2025 budget, nearly $20 billion, for defense.
But pressure is building from the Trump administration for Taiwan to do more — similar to the pressure aimed at the United Kingdom and the European Union to bolster their defense spending as the White House seeks to shift the financial burden of supporting Ukraine onto its neighbors, and to get America’s NATO allies to contribute more to the alliance.
On Tuesday, Mr. Trump’s nominee for undersecretary of defense for policy said Taiwan should quadruple its defense spending.
“I agree with President Trump that they should be [spending] more like 10%, or at least something in that ballpark, really focused on their defense,” nominee Elbridge Colby told the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Taiwan President Lai Ching-te quickly offered a proposal to boost his administration’s defense spending to over 3%, a move that would require approval by Taiwan’s congress, the Legislative Yuan.
taLai has not spoken directly with Mr. Trump since the American president won reelection in November, but he conveyed his congratulations through Mr. Trump’s former national security advisor, Ambassador Robert O ‘Brien.
That was in stark contrast to Lai’s predecessor, Tsai Ing-wen. Mr. Trump, in the weeks just after his first election win in 2016, controversially accepted a congratulatory call from then-Taiwanese President Tsai, breaking decades of U.S. diplomatic protocol that was aimed at keeping relations with Beijing cordial.
Mr. Trump’s transition team said at the time that the presidents had spoken about, “close economic, political, and security ties,” which angered Beijing.
Up until that point, no U.S. president-elect or sitting president had spoken directly with a Taiwanese leader since 1979, when Washington switched its diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to Communist Party-ruled China during a detente with the Nixon administration.
Taiwan may have “a better hand” with Trump
While the difference in their personal engagement may be some cause for concern in Taipei, Hsiao, at the Global Taiwan Institute, played down anxiety this week, using Mr. Trump’s own framing of geopolitics as a game of cards, after he told Zelenskyy that Ukraine, “does not have the cards” to make demands for U.S. security guarantees.
“Taiwan does have a better hand in terms of what it can offer to the United States in terms of a reciprocal bilateral relationship,” said Hsiao. “That remains a robust economic partnership, a strong security relationship and certainly a very critically-important high-tech industry.”
Despite its size — Taiwan covers significantly less ground than West Virginia — the densely populated island is one of the United States’ top trade partners. According to U.S. government data, in 2024 it was the seventh biggest, with total estimated trade worth almost $160 billion dollars.
This week, with Ukraine’s critical minerals deal with the U.S. hanging in unsigned-limbo, Taiwan’s most important, most valuable company, TSMC, which supplies semiconductors to some of the world’s biggest companies, including Nvidia, Apple and Google, agreed a new $100 billion deal with Mr. Trump to build five new semiconductor facilities in Arizona.
President Trump said it would “create thousands of jobs — many thousands of jobs, and they’re high-paying jobs.”
He said the announcement would bring Taiwan’s U.S. semiconductor investment to about $165 billion in total.
“We’re going to produce many chips to support AI progress and to support the smartphones’ progress, and we thank President Trump again for his support,” said TSMC CEO C.C. Wei, standing side-by-side with the president at the White House.
Samuel Corum/Sipa/Bloomberg/Getty
Mr. Trump has frequently accused Taiwan of “stealing” from the U.S. semiconductor industry, and taking American jobs.
With the agreement signed, Mr. Trump said TSMC would now be immune from the 25% tariffs he is levying across the foreign semiconductor industry.
The deal likely drew a sigh of relief from leaders in Taipei, but with an increasingly pushy, vastly larger and better-armed China less than 100 miles away, they are unlikely to let their guard down.
“It’s very key for Taipei, its leaders, to maintain calm and [be] cool headed with regards to dealing with the Trump administration,” Hsiao told CBS News. “But more needs to be done in order to make sure that the U.S.-Taiwan relationship, which is of course the most important security partnership for Taiwan, remains robust and strong under the Trump administration.”
