Taiwan and the Trump Administration’s National Security Strategy

The Donald Trump administration’s National Security Strategy (NSS), which was released in November 2025, purports to be a different type of document from its predecessors. Its preamble says that “American strategies since the end of the Cold War have fallen short” because, among other things, “American foreign policy elites convinced themselves that permanent American domination of the entire world was in the best interests of our country.” Read in isolation, that statement might be taken as evidence of a new isolationism, which would raise questions about the United States’ commitment to deterring the expansionist tendencies of Russia and China.

Considered as a whole, however, the NSS does not clearly indicate a new direction in Taiwan policy. There has been a shift is in the relative importance of the Indo-Pacific region as a whole: the Americas now appear to be the priority theater (an interpretation that finds support in the sudden and dramatic U.S. exfiltration of Nicolás Maduro), and China no longer has the label of the “pacing challenge” that it had during the Biden administration. But in spite of the persistent concerns about U.S. abandonment, the language on Taiwan is generally consistent with existing policy and does not signal a weakening of U.S. support.

The NSS describes the U.S. stake in Taiwan’s security in terms of material self-interest (in contrast to the cultural framing that pervades the language on Europe). It defines the entire Indo-Pacific region’s strategic significance for the United States in terms of the “ongoing economic damage that foreign actors inflict on the American economy,” the prevention of which requires “preserving freedom of navigation in all crucial sea lanes, and maintaining secure and reliable supply chains and access to critical materials.”

Within this context, Taiwan is primarily significant because of how it geographically “provides direct access to the Second Island Chain and splits Northeast and Southeast Asia into two distinct theaters,” with semiconductors having an importance that is considerable but secondary. David Sacks at the Council on Foreign Relations describes the language on Taiwan as “unfortunate” because it “instrumentalizes Taiwan,” but it is consistent with the realist lens through which the Trump administration views much of the world outside of Europe.

More debatable is how Sacks and other analysts have parsed language on unilateral changes to the status quo across the Taiwan Strait. Whereas the Biden administration used the verb “oppose” to express how it viewed such changes, the NSS uses the phrase “does not support.” Ryan Fedasiuk at the American Enterprise Institute characterizes this new language as a “meaningful downgrade.” Sacks seems to agree with this assessment, calling the new language a “counterproductive adjustment.”

However, this change of language should be understood in the context of recent reports (from around September 2025) that Xi Jinping was exerting pressure on Trump to shift the language from not supporting Taiwan’s independence to opposing Taiwan’s independence. Read in this light, the NSS is evidence that the Trump administration did not concede to Chinese pressure. There is further evidence that the “does not support” language applies to Taiwan becoming independent rather than China invading Taiwan. The U.S. State Department reverted to the use of “oppose” to express its concerns over the recent Chinese military exercises dubbed “Justice Mission-2025.”

There is concrete evidence to indicate that the shift of language from “opposing” to “not supporting” unilateral changes to the status quo does not signal a weakening of U.S. support for Taiwan. The NSS explicitly and assertively states the United States’ continuing commitment to deterrence across the Taiwan Strait. While it doesn’t use the Biden administration’s language of describing China as the “pacing challenge” and a conflict over Taiwan as a “pacing scenario,” the NSS says that “deterring a conflict over Taiwan, ideally by preserving military overmatch, is a priority.”  The NSS goes on to say that this will involve “reinforcing U.S. and allies’ capacity to deny any attempt to seize Taiwan or achieve a balance of forces so unfavorable to us as to make defending that island impossible.” The reference to “capacity” (which also appears in the Taiwan Relations Act 2(b)(6)) indicates that the Trump administration is maintaining the policy of strategic ambiguity.

There are signs of a departure from previous administrations, however, in the NSS’s general and abstract statements of strategy. The exhortation on allies and partners to increase defense spending, whether it mentions Taiwan or not, is hardly new; similarly, the language on reindustrialization and re-shoring is familiar, though the Trump administration is distinctive for its extensive use of tariffs to achieve that objective. What is noteworthy is the apparent elevation of the Americas to the priority theater and the “Predisposition to Non-Interventionism” elaborated in the section on strategy. The first of these has gotten significant attention; the latter less so.

In the section “What Do We Want In and From the World?,” the description of the administration’s objectives in the Americas appears before those in the Indo-Pacific and is twice as long. This is in contrast to the Biden administration, under which the Pentagon explicitly labeled the Indo-Pacific as the “priority theater.” Given the vastly different issues that the United States faces in the two regions, it is not clear (nor even likely) that this change of regional priorities will result in a reallocation of resources or a permanent redeployment of assets away from the Indo-Pacific despite the NSS claims.

Less attention has been given to the “Predisposition to Non-Interventionism” elaborated in the NSS and what that might mean for Taiwan. The NSS says that “for a country whose interests are as numerous and diverse as ours, rigid adherence to non-interventionism is not possible. Yet this predisposition should set a high bar for what constitutes a justified intervention.” Once again, however, the shift is theoretical rather than practical: it does not define a new set of policies or directives, but characterizes a general attitude toward crisis and contingency scenarios, which may prove to be mainly aspirational. It does not state, even at a conceptual or theoretical level, the criteria for defining a “justified intervention,” or what kind of issues would be eligible for consideration. Moreover, the recent exfiltration of Maduro raises doubts about how much of a practical impact this will have on U.S. policy. An explicit bias against intervention might raise questions among allies as to the conditions under which the United States would intervene, but it is not clear that the stated shift is consequential in policy terms.

In summary, the National Security Strategy of the second Trump administration appears to send inconsistent signals about U.S. policy toward Taiwan, but I have argued that there is more continuity than change. The Indo-Pacific seems to be less important for the Trump administration than the Americas are, and the administration professes to be more selective about whether or how it intervenes overseas compared to previous administrations. These theoretical changes have not been consistently reflected in policy, however: the recent exfiltration of Maduro may reinforce the elevation of the Americas to the priority theater but also casts doubt on the commitment to “non-interventionism.” The language specifically about Taiwan is consistent with the United States’ longstanding “One China policy.”  The Trump administration has continued to proceed with arms sales and has not adopted any new positions on Taiwan’s sovereignty or fundamentally altered the United States’ capacity to intervene in a cross-strait conflict. If anything, that commitment was formally restated.

James Lee is an assistant research fellow/professor at the Institute of European and American Studies at Academia Sinica in Taiwan, and an affiliated researcher at IGCC.

Thumbnail credit: Kevin Harber (Flickr)