The Downside of Tactical Issue Linkage
Treating everything like a transactional bargain has some drawbacks.
My initial take on the Trump-Xi summit was that the outcome might have been underwhelming but it could have been worse: “in 2026, we should be grateful for an event involving Trump in which not much happens.”
That assessment, however, omitted Trump being decidedly noncommittal about the previously arranged $14 billion arms sale to Taiwan. In a Fox News interview that aired as he was coming home from China, he was quite explicit about viewing the Taiwan arms sale as a bargaining chip vis-a-vis Xi Jinping. According to the New York Times’ Chris Buckley:
President Trump has described a potential multibillion-dollar weapons sale to Taiwan as a “negotiating chip” with China, raising new doubts about the pace and scale of American military support for the island democracy.
Taiwan’s government has been waiting for months for Mr. Trump to sign off on a $14 billion package of missiles, anti-drone equipment and air-defense systems intended to fortify the island against Beijing’s military threats.
Mr. Trump himself had pressured Taiwan to spend more on its own defense. Now he is using the very arms his administration had pushed the island to buy as leverage with China, the United States’ main adversary.
Mr. Trump told reporters on Air Force One after leaving China on Friday that he had discussed the weapons package with China’s president, Xi Jinping, during their summit this past week in Beijing….
“I’m holding that in abeyance and it depends on China,” he said in the [Fox News] interview, which was recorded in Beijing but aired after he left. “It depends.”
“It’s a very good negotiating chip for us, frankly,” he said. “It’s a lot of weapons.”
He did not go into details about what he wanted in return, but Mr. Trump has pushed China to make major purchases of American airplanes, ethanol, soybeans, beef and sorghum.
His comments appear to undermine the assurances to Taiwan from some in his own administration that U.S. support for the island is steadfast and nonnegotiable.
There is little doubt that Trump thinks linking arms sales to Taiwan to unrelated economic demands made on Beijing is just a smart bargaining ploy. If there is any consistent throughline in Trump’s first-term and second-term approach to China, it has been a willingness to engage in what international relations scholars might call “tactical issue linkage."
Trump has always cared the most about securing economic concessions from China — mostly in the form of quantitative purchasing agreements of U.S. goods. In return, Trump has also always displayed a willingness to acquiesce on either human rights or security matters: criticism of Chinese repression in Xinjiang or Hong Kong, for example, or selling weapons to Taiwan.
It’s not entirely new for a U.S. administration to engage in tactical issue linkage; the Nixon administration did so as well. Most postwar administrations have been more resistant, however, treating each many issue areas as discrete bargains with their own institutions and norms, and therefore should be negotiated separately. This is the right move to make if those institutions and norms seem to work.
As the clip below suggests, Trump does not give a flying fig about norms and institutions. He welcomes the issue linkage:
Tactical issue linkage isn’t the craziest idea in international bargaining. If the United States has a lot of leverage in a whole array of issue areas where another country is vulnerable, it might make sense to link them. This is what Trump has done by linking U.S. security guarantees to economic concessions from U.S. allies.
Still, the problem with unlimited tactical issue linkage is two-fold.
