President Donald Trump offered to sell weapons to China during President Xi Jinping’s recent summit in Washington, a move foreign policy experts said makes a mockery of U.S. warnings about the looming Chinese military threat.
In an interview with Fox News Sunday, David Purdue, the U.S. ambassador to China, suggested U.S. weapons are open to a multitude of countries, China included.
“President Trump continues to say, ‘Hey, we sell arms to other people around the world,’” he said. “He actually asked President Xi, would he like to buy some at one point.”
The White House said the U.S. government has no plans to sell weapons to China. The State Department did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
The comment baffled foreign policy experts, who argued the suggestion of selling weapons to Beijing would contradict the slew of sanctions and trade restrictions the Trump administration has placed upon the country, as well as dismiss China’s role in supplying munitions and military intelligence to Iran. The remark also came after reports China had obtained sensitive parts for the F-35 fighter that could be used to neutralize U.S. stealth technology.
“You would not [want to] help China to modernize its military and turn against yourself,” Zhiqun Zhu, professor of political science and international relations at Bucknell University, told Fortune. “Especially with the intense competition between the two powers now. I mean, it doesn’t make sense.”
While Trump has characterized China as a strategic competitor, and referenced that when rejecting calls to slow down AI development, the president has also expressed affinity for dictators like Xi, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un.
As a result, Trump has often appeared to prioritize his personal ties with the leaders of U.S. adversaries to the detriment of U.S. allies.
“If there was any ambiguity about whether President Trump views China as a security threat, this disclosure by @USAmbChina Perdue puts the question to rest,” Ryan Hass, director of the Brookings Institution’s China center and senior fellow in the Center for Asia Policy Studies, wrote in a social media post on Sunday. “Trump’s offer to sell weapons to China will be unsettling to American partners at the pointy edge of China’s spear.”
‘A very good negotiating chip’
Further complicating Trump’s suggestion of an arms sale to China is America’s preexisting commitments to provide arms to Taiwan, an independent island that China has continued to claim. The White House is withholding a $14 billion arms package and violating the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, which was passed after the U.S. established diplomatic relations with China and requires the U.S. to provide necessary weapons for Taiwan to defend itself.
In May, senators signed a bipartisan letter to complete the sale. Ahead of Xi’s arrival at the White House last week, a group of Republican leaders led by Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell presented another letter to the Department of State and Department of Defense reiterating the need to finish the transaction.
Trump previously called the pending arms sale to Taiwan a “very good negotiating chip” with China. To Zhu, Trump’s tactics reveal what he is willing to give up or defy in order to maintain good relations with China.
“He still considers the arms sales as a leverage, as a bargaining chip at least,” Zhu said. “If China offers something really effective, it’s not inconceivable that he may further delay or even just temporarily cancel further arms sales to Taiwan.”
The art of the deal
The simultaneous withholding of arms to Taiwan while offering a deal with China is a quintessential example of Trump’s interest in wielding commercial transactions as his chief method of diplomacy. In this instance, Zhu explained, Trump has little interest in actually engaging with China as a diplomatic partner, but is more concerned with making a deal that would mint the U.S. more money.
“He really viewed this as part of the commercial diplomacy he’s conducting,” Zhu said. “He views all these things as transactional. This is obviously from the U.S. perspective a very important geopolitical, geo-economic issue. But from Trump’s perspective, this is transactional. This has almost nothing to do with China.”
Trump has previously facilitated commercial arrangements with China, carving out an exception to the U.S. ban on sales of Nvidia and AMD chips to China. Despite the heated AI race, he allowed the companies to sell certain chips under a revenue-sharing model in which the U.S. receives a cut of up to 25%.
Trump has a history of mixing commerce and diplomacy elsewhere. Last year, the Trump administration brokered a peace deal between Armenia and Azerbaijan that granted the U.S. exclusive rights to build a transit corridor, dubbed the “Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity” that would run between the two countries.
While presidents for decades have employed the strategy of “transactional diplomacy,” few have prioritized financial gain over long-term national security advantages. Zhu believes in this instance, those two objectives are diametrically opposed.
“If this is a strategic issue, obviously, he will not offer arms sales to China to help China modernize its military,” he said.
