Amid a multitude of uncertainties within a fast-changing geopolitical landscape, the bilateral relationship appears to be deepening on a number of fronts.
For years, discussion of U.S.-Taiwan defense cooperation could be reduced to a familiar set of markers: arms sales deals, periodic American naval transits through the Taiwan Strait, and carefully worded statements from Washington emphasizing the need for regional peace and stability.
That framework no longer adequately captures how the relationship operates in 2026.
The scope of practical cooperation has expanded well beyond the transfer of weapons systems. Today, it encompasses defense industry coordination, collaboration on supply chain resilience, military training, and integration of the two countries’ command-and-control systems. The shift has been driven by a greater awareness in Washington that deterrence in the Taiwan Strait must take a host of factors into account.
“There’s a growing recognition that deterrence is about more than platforms,” says Brian Hart, deputy director of the China Power Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). “It’s about building secure, integrated systems — across supply chains, data, and infrastructure — that can function under pressure.”
Mike Chinoy, consulting editor of the Taiwan Strait Risk Report and a nonresident scholar at the 21st Century China Center at the University of California, San Diego, frames the stakes in economic terms as much as military ones — a context that inevitably influences how policy is shaped in Washington.
“If Taiwan were to go offline, the global impact would be enormous,” he says. “It would be like shoving a stick into the gears of the global economy. The scale of disruption would depend on the nature of the crisis, but there’s no scenario where it isn’t profound.”
Chinoy cautions against an over-focus on the most extreme, and least likely, possibilities. “There’s a tendency to fixate on a D-Day-style scenario,” he says. “But from China’s perspective, the question is whether you can achieve your objectives without taking on the enormous risks of a full-scale invasion.”
Hart echoes that sentiment, adding that broadening the perspective “opens the door to a much wider range of coercive options.”
Despite scary headlines occasionally appearing in international media, Beijing has never referred to 2027 — or any other date — as a deadline for a move against Taiwan. Rather, U.S. intelligence and military sources, as early as 2022 made known that Chinese president Xi Jinping had instructed his armed forces to develop the capability for military action by 2027. The most recent U.S. intelligence assessment, reported just last month by numerous major media outlets, has concluded that China has no fixed plan for an attack.
Expert commentators have generally concluded that Xi will need to consider much more than sheer military capability, including the potential impact on the Chinese economy as well as domestic political developments in China, Taiwan, and the United States. For those analysts, the challenge of predicting future scenarios is now compounded by the difficulty of anticipating how policy toward Taiwan will evolve in Washington.
To complicate matters, messaging on the subject in the Trump administration has been exemplified by sharply mixed signals. At times in public remarks, President Trump has downplayed the U.S. commitment to Taiwan — similar to comments he has made about other parts of the world in emphasizing “America first.” In a 2024 interview with Bloomberg Businessweek that temporarily unsettled markets, he stated that Taiwan should “pay us for defense” since the United States is “no different than an insurance company.”
On other occasions, he has suggested that Taiwan built up its powerful semiconductor industry by “stealing” American technology, a contention that was widely refuted. And in January this year, he was dismissive when reporters asked about rising tensions in the Taiwan Strait due to China’s escalation of its military exercises in the area.
While large-scale exercises have become more routine, their evolution matters. “Each round tends to push a little further — whether in proximity to Taiwan or in the complexity of operations,” Hart says. “The concern is not just about frequency but how China is using a range of actions to steadily erode Taiwan’s space and ratchet up pressure.”
At the same time, the Trump administration has acted in ways that recognize Taiwan’s profound strategic significance and serve to tighten the bilateral relationship. It has increased military-to-military cooperation and communication and last December approved the largest-ever arms package for Taiwan, worth US$11.1 billion. An even larger US$14 billion package is reportedly undergoing internal U.S. review.
In the rounds of tariff negotiations that the Trump administration undertook with dozens of countries, the talks with Taiwan took longer than most. Still, the talks ended with relatively satisfactory results not only on tariff rates but also protection for Taiwan’s crucial semiconductor industry and ability to safeguard supply chains.
Those negotiations were conducted at an unprecedentedly high level, considering the absence of formal diplomatic ties. The Taiwan team, led by Vice Premier Cheng Li-chiun, was able to engage with American officials as high as Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick.
At AmCham’s 2026 Hsieh Nien Fan banquet late last month, both President Lai Ching-te and American Institute in Taiwan Director Raymond Greene used the term “Golden Age” to describe current U.S.-Taiwan economic relations.
Non-traditional approaches
Assessing the current White House approach to Taiwan, editor Chinoy notes that “decision-making doesn’t follow a traditional policy process — it’s driven by instinct.” That unpredictability complicates planning on all sides, he says.
Riley Walters, a senior fellow at the American think tank Hudson Institute, notes that differences in approach between Washington and Taipei extend to economic policy. Taiwan continues to prioritize integration with the global economy — seeking entry into frameworks such as the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership — while the United States has moved toward tariffs and investment controls to pull supply chains closer to home, he says.
“Those approaches don’t always align, even if the broader goal of reducing dependence on China is shared,” says Walters.
Meanwhile, Congress has been moving in a consistently supportive direction that expands the scope of cooperation with Taiwan beyond traditional defense channels. The bilateral relationship “has strong bipartisan support in Congress,” U.S. Senator Jeanne Shaheen said in a video message delivered at the Hsieh Nien Fan banquet.
Examples of that support are numerous. Congress has approved a spending package that included US$1 billion a year for the Taiwan Security Cooperation Initiative to bolster Taiwan’s self-defense capabilities through enhanced military training and joint development of drones and anti-drone systems.
At the same time, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has backed a set of Taiwan-related bills that illustrate how U.S. policy is evolving. Proposals under consideration include promotion of increased liquefied natural gas exports to Taiwan to strengthen energy resilience, steps to protect the undersea cables that support Taiwan’s digital economy, and assistance to countries that face pressure from Beijing due to their ties with Taipei.
Beyond reflecting a broader conception of deterrence, the measures highlight a structural feature of U.S. policy. Even as signaling from the executive branch fluctuates, Congressional support for Taiwan remains firm across multiple domains.
Although no longer the defining feature of the relationship, arms sales continue to be the most visible component of U.S. support. Over the past several years, Washington has increasingly encouraged Taiwan to emphasize the development of a wide-ranging defense capability over reliance on large weapons platforms.
The shift reflects broader changes in U.S. defense thinking, shaped in part by lessons drawn from the war in Ukraine and reinforced more recently by U.S. and Israeli operations in the Middle East. In both contexts, relatively low-cost, distributed systems have demonstrated their ability to disrupt larger forces, while the integration of intelligence, targeting, and command structures has proven decisive success factors.
Recent strikes against Iran, including coordinated decapitation operations and the rapid integration of signals, geospatial, and human intelligence, have underscored the importance of speed, coordination, and system-level execution. Analysts note that these are precisely the capabilities that would define a theoretical conflict involving Taiwan — not simply the number of platforms deployed, but how effectively they are connected and utilized.
Rupert Hammond-Chambers, president of the U.S.-Taiwan Business Council, says the shift toward asymmetric capabilities makes sense — within limits. “Since 2020, Taiwan’s procurement has been heavily focused on asymmetric systems — drones, counter-drones, command-and-control, and what’s often described as a ‘Taiwan dome,’” he says. “The risk is that this narrows the focus too much.”
Blockades, quarantines, and other gray-zone activity may present more immediate challenges than a full-scale invasion, he notes.
New areas for cooperation
“Quantity has its own quality,” Hammond-Chambers says. “If you’re pursuing an asymmetric strategy, you need the capacity to produce and replace systems at speed.” Taiwan’s manufacturing base is well-suited to that task, particularly in sectors aligned with its existing strengths in electronics and advanced production.
As policy evolves, Walters of the Hudson Institute sees some promise in emerging technologies. “There’s real potential in drone manufacturing and other smaller autonomous systems,” he says. “There could also be opportunities in munitions and missile production. But the challenge for Washington is that it won’t want to become too reliant on Taiwan-manufactured defense products in the event of a conflict around Taiwan.”
Beyond traditional defense and drone manufacturing, new domains are emerging. “There’s growing interest in cooperation on space and communications infrastructure,” says Hart of CSIS. “That includes building redundancy — ensuring systems can continue functioning even if one network is disrupted.”
In terms of the flow of U.S. military equipment to Taiwan, deliveries of delayed U.S. F-16V fighter jets reportedly are expected to begin in 2026, while Taiwan has already upgraded 141 of its older F-16 aircraft to the newer standard based on advanced “5th-generation” technology.
Taiwan is also expecting deliveries of PAC-3 air defense missiles later this year, and U.S. officials have told Congress that weapons shipments remain a priority despite competing global demands. While not eliminating concerns over delivery backlogs, currently reported to be worth more than US$8 billion, these developments do show that tangible outcomes are being produced.
Even as deliveries proceed, the Trump administration is redefining America’s overall security commitments, emphasizing that allies are expected to take primary responsibility for their own defense. The 2026 National Defense Strategy states that the United States will no longer seek to make up for what it describes as allies’ “security shortcomings” and communicates that U.S. support is not automatic.
The Lai administration has signaled a clear intention to raise defense spending beyond the current level of around 2.5% of GDP, framing the increase as both necessary and urgent, considering the changing security environment. Lai has repeatedly stated that Taiwan must demonstrate greater self-reliance in its defense posture, including a willingness to allocate more resources to military preparedness and resilience. To that end, his administration has proposed a special defense budget aimed at accelerating procurement and strengthening capabilities in areas such as asymmetric warfare and civil defense.
However, progress has been constrained by political realities. The administration does not hold a legislative majority, and divisions within the Legislative Yuan have delayed approval of the proposed budget. Opposition parties have raised concerns over both the scale and structure of the spending package, leaving the proposal stalled and injecting uncertainty into the timeline for implementation.
In March, Taiwan’s legislature authorized the signing of four U.S. arms-sale agreements worth about US$9 billion after U.S. officials warned that delays could push Taiwan to the back of the production queue. Even so, defense systems depend on sustained investment in infrastructure, software, and coordination across agencies. These are multi-year efforts that require continuity.
Beyond the Trump administration’s request for Taiwan to ramp up its defense investments, expectations in Washington have shifted toward burden-sharing in more practical terms. Emphasis has increased on whether — and how well — Taiwanese partners can be integrated into the industrial, technological, and supply-chain systems that sustain U.S. security policy.
While both sides have taken important steps toward increasing domestic defense, says Walters, “there will still need to be collaborative efforts as neither country can build sufficient deterrence alone.”
