Edward Wong
Washington: US President Donald Trump has asked Chinese President Xi Jinping whether he would like to buy American weapons, David Perdue, the US ambassador to China, said in a television interview on Sunday (Washington time).
“President Trump continues to say, ‘Hey, we sell arms to other people around the world’,” Perdue said on Fox News Sunday while discussing the state visit by Xi to Washington last week. “He actually asked President Xi would he like to buy some at one point.”
Perdue did not give further details and did not reveal Xi’s reply.
An admission that the US president offered to sell arms to China is extraordinary. The Communist-ruled nation is considered by most US policymakers and legislators of both parties to be the greatest military, economic and diplomatic rival of the US – the only real challenger to America as a superpower.
When asked for comment, the White House said through an official that the US had no plans to sell arms to China. The State Department said in a statement that “US law prohibits arms sales to China, and there is no offer or plan to sell arms to China”.
The Chinese embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
China has the world’s fastest-growing military and for decades US officials across administrations, including in the current one, have warned of a potential military clash between the two nuclear-armed powers in the Asia-Pacific region, particularly over the island of Taiwan or China’s aggressive actions in territory claimed by US allies in the South and East China Seas.
Chinese defence companies, with the approval of the Chinese government, are supporting adversaries of the US, including Iran and Russia, by selling them dual-use equipment and satellite imagery, as well as planning the secret export of weapons, according to US officials. The US has imposed sanctions on some Chinese companies.
The US has been the dominant military power in the Asia-Pacific region, but that strength is fading relative to China’s, especially as the Trump administration diverts resources from the region for use in its war against Iran. In recent years, the US defence industry has also struggled to manufacture weapons systems at a rate considered sufficient for global needs by US officials.
“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, a former career diplomat and White House national security official who is director of the China centre at the Brookings Institution, wrote on social media.
“Trump’s offer to sell weapons to China will be unsettling to American partners at the pointy edge of China’s spear.”
Those partners include the Philippines, Japan and Taiwan, the de facto independent island and democracy that the Chinese Communist Party seeks to rule.
Trump has been withholding a $US14 billion ($20 billion) sale of weapons to Taiwan, even though the US government has been required by law since 1979 to send arms of a defensive nature to the island. The latest arms package was put together by State Department officials and was approved by congressional leaders early this year, but has since languished at the department, The New York Times reported.
Senators sent a bipartisan letter in May to Trump urging him to move forward with the sale. On Wednesday, hours before Xi arrived in Washington, four Republican senators, led by Senator Mitch McConnell, sent a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth asking for the same thing.
They also pressed the two men to allocate $US300 million in aid for purchasing arms that Congress had already approved for Taiwan, as well as $US1 billion for the Taiwan Security Co-operation Initiative, a US defence program.
When a Fox News interviewer asked Perdue on Sunday about the widespread concerns over withheld weapons sales and military aid to Taiwan, Perdue pointed out that Trump had approved $US11 billion in arms sales to Taiwan last year. And he said, “there are continuing conversations about other sales. He and President Xi talk about that every time they get together.”
It was then that Perdue said Trump had argued that the US sold arms to “other people around the world” and offered such sales to Xi.
China has said Xi has told Trump that he opposes the US selling weapons to Taiwan. In May, after leaving a Beijing summit with Xi, Trump told reporters he had discussed Taiwan arms sales with Xi “in great detail”. Such conversations – the existence of which Perdue underscored in his remarks on Sunday – are a violation of a 1982 document in which the US agreed to broaden its support of Taiwan; one of the assurances said Washington “has not agreed to consult with” China on arms sales to Taiwan.
When asked in May about that commitment, Trump replied: “Well, I think the 1980s is a long way. That’s a big, far distance.”
In a Fox News interview recorded in May while he was in Beijing, Trump said he was holding back Taiwan arms sales because it was a “very good negotiating chip” with China.
After the summit last week, Trump said he and Xi did not talk much about Taiwan. “Right now, it’s fine,” he said. “It’s just moving along.”
On Sunday, Taiwan’s de facto ambassador to the US, Alexander Yui, said on CBS News’ Face the Nation that he felt confident, based on public remarks last week by administration officials, that “there’s no change in Taiwan’s position for the US”. He added, though, that he hoped Taiwan could get the $US14 billion withheld arms package “as soon as possible”.
On Wednesday, Rubio was asked by reporters in New York about the withholding of the Taiwan arms package. He said the sale was being reviewed in light of the need for “balancing our industrial capacity and our military-industrial base” and determining whether the US needed the arms for itself. It is unclear how Trump’s offer to sell arms to China is consistent with that reasoning.
Trump said last week that he would meet with Xi again in China in November during a regional leadership summit, and that the Chinese leader would return to the US in December, also for a multilateral summit. Analysts say it is unlikely that Trump will approve any sales of arms to Taiwan before the end of the year, for fear of upsetting Xi before those planned meetings.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
