Taiwan buys time while the great powers haggle over its head

Taiwan spent the window paying for protection it no longer fully controls. The February trade deal with the United States cut its tariff exposure but cost a pledged 250 billion dollars of investment in American chip, energy, and AI projects, plus another 250 billion in credit guarantees for Taiwanese firms moving production east. The defense ministry then signed six arms agreements worth 6.6 billion dollars on deferred payment terms after the opposition-controlled legislature refused to fund the full package up front. What that money was supposed to buy was Washington's attention. What it actually bought was a Trump-Xi summit in Beijing with the strait on the agenda and Taipei locked out.

The summit set the new pattern. Trump told Fox News afterward that he wanted Taiwan to "stay the way it is," a line Taipei had no role in writing. The presidential office answered that Beijing is the only destabilizing factor in the strait, but the response read like a press release written for an empty room. Beijing was also opening a second channel that bypassed Lai entirely: a leadership audience with Cheng Li-wun, the new chair of the Kuomintang opposition, the first such meeting in almost a decade. Cheng called the trip deterrence through dialogue and pledged to reopen cross-strait tourism if her party retakes power in 2028.

President Lai Ching-te worked the side stages. He flew to Eswatini in early May to sign a customs accord with King Mswati III on Taiwan's only remaining African ally. He had to charter a foreign aircraft to get there: Seychelles, Mauritius, and Madagascar had all quietly revoked overflight permits for the presidential plane. Taipei said the same Beijing message had reached each capital. A Vatican visit to Hualien around the same time was friendlier but smaller, the kind of friendship that does not show up in a strait crisis.

Beijing did not need to fly jets. The People's Liberation Army held 169 Air Defense Identification Zone sorties in April, well below the 2025 rate, because the politicians-and-airspace channel was working. The bill landed in Taipei. The legislature passed a 25 billion dollar supplementary defense budget in early May, about two-thirds of what Lai had asked for, and the gap between request and approval is the most honest measure of how much room he has left to act.