Bonnie Glaser, director of the Indo-Pacific Program of the German Marshall Fund (GMF), a Washington think tank, and Noah Munk, a Dean's Scholarship winner at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, published an article titled "U.S. Suspension of Arms Sales to Taiwan" on the GMF official website on the 9th. They believed that the Trump administration's continued delays will cost the United States and Taiwan and their allies four costs, and called on Washington to quickly resume the arms sales notification process to Taiwan and restore the regular congressional notification mechanism.
The article said that in January this year, the U.S. Congress informally approved an arms sales to Taiwan worth approximately US$14 billion. However, the White House has not yet issued a formal notification to Congress, indicating that Taipei is still far away from receiving these weapons. The Trump administration claims it must prioritize U.S. military needs in other regions, but this delay comes at a cost.
China views this delay as having a say and even a veto over the timing of U.S. arms sales. However, the longer the delay lasts, the angrier Beijing will become once it is lifted. For Taiwan, the delay has slowed down its defense buildup and deepened a domestic political battle over the budget's spending. For U.S. allies in the Indo-Pacific, this raises questions about Washington’s commitment to the region and undermines U.S. credibility around the world.
To prevent these challenges from worsening, the Trump administration should quickly initiate the notification process to Congress, starting with notifying Congress of its readiness to provide a small batch of weapons to Taiwan.
The article pointed out that this arms sales delay is the fourth major interruption in 21 years. The previous three were from 2005 to 2006, 2007 to 2008 and 2011 to 2015. U.S. concerns that supporting Taiwan would harm cooperation with Beijing often account for these delays. The Trump administration has defended the delay in arms sales on the grounds that Iran needs arms for the war, but many observers believe that Trump’s move is intended to please Chinese leader Xi Jinping or use the arms sales to Taiwan as a bargaining chip.
White House officials and their supporters defended the delay on three grounds, including: The amount of arms sales to Taiwan approved by Trump exceeds that of previous presidents; the United States' limited production capacity, including needs related to the wars in Iran and Ukraine, takes precedence over providing more weapons to Taiwan and other U.S. partners; delaying the delivery of this batch of weapons can maintain the trade truce with Beijing and buy time for the United States to reduce its reliance on China's rare earths and magnets.
However, delaying the arms sales to Taiwan has four costs, including: 1. Delaying the construction of Taiwan's air defense network and weakening Taiwan's defense capabilities; 2. The delay of the US arms sales intensifies Taiwan's internal political struggle over the defense budget, giving Taiwan's "American skeptics" an opportunity to believe that the United States is an unreliable supplier and that these expenditures are wasteful; 3. Let Beijing realize that "delay tactics" are effective and do not need to pay any price. The fourth cost is that the strategic planning of allies such as Japan and South Korea relies on the United States' willingness to fulfill its commitments in the Indo-Pacific region. If Washington is willing to sacrifice Taiwan's national defense in order to maintain smoother relations with Beijing, this will give allies reason to be suspicious of Washington.
The article also makes three major suggestions, including: 1. Immediately notify Congress to provide a small initial batch of weapons to Taiwan, thereby reducing the possibility of a strong response from China; 2. Return to normalized individual review: Washington should instead conduct case-by-case reviews when Taiwan makes a request, rather than bundling them into large regular arms sales packages; 3. Use Congress to restore normalcy and transparency. Members of Congress can require formal notification through oversight and the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), and can require public tracking of the weapons backlog so that delayed deliveries are considered a cost.
The article concludes that the Trump administration should resist Beijing's attempts to use the recently agreed "constructive strategic stability" framework to influence the timing of U.S. arms sales to Taiwan, let alone veto these arms sales. Resuming arms sales to Taiwan could trigger Chinese retaliation, but Beijing's own willingness to maintain the trade truce and its response to the U.S. announcement in December 2025 of another tranche of arms sales to Taiwan worth $11.1 billion suggest that its response will be limited and temporary. However, continuing to suspend arms sales to Taiwan will harm the strategic interests of the United States and its allies. Washington should quickly resume the notification process for arms sales to Taiwan and restore the regular congressional notification mechanism.
