TAIPEI, Taiwan — The new U.S. administration is taking a sharp turn on support for Ukraine. Thousands of miles away from Kyiv, policy makers and analysts in Taiwan are wondering whether it will be the next casualty of the changing moods in Washington, and what they can do to avoid a similar outcome.
Developments in the Ukraine-U.S. relationship have regularly made headline news in Taiwan in recent weeks. Taiwan's leadership and civil society have long compared Ukraine's fate to its own, as China continues to threaten an invasion. "We must ensure that anyone contemplating the possibility of an invasion understands that, and that is why Ukraine's success in defending against aggression is so important also for Taiwan," said Hsiao Bi-Khim, Taiwan's vice president in 2023, when she was the island's de facto ambassador to Washington.
But America's support for Ukraine appears to be waning. On Friday, President Trump publicly berated the visiting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the Oval Office, accusing him of "gambling with World War III," in a dramatic showdown that ultimately left a deal on Ukrainian critical minerals unsigned.
Although Trump and his team have yet to articulate their policy towards Taiwan, on the campaign trail he said that Taiwan needed to spend more on its own defense. Since taking office, he has also accused Taiwan's semiconductor industry of stealing American jobs, worrying many in Taiwan.
Trump's 'art of the deal'?
"For Mr. Trump, it seems like there's no concept of allies. Everything is transactional, everything's measured by how much benefit the U.S. can get," Chen Fang-yu, a professor of political science at Soochow University in Taipei, says.
Chen says this new dynamic is hard for the Taiwanese public to adjust to, as in the past decade, successive U.S. administrations deepened the U.S.-Taiwan relationship and formed a bipartisan consensus on supporting Taiwan. He notes that public opinion in Taiwan favored President Trump during his first term as a result, and favored President Biden for similar reasons.
"If everything is transactional, then that solid relationship is gone," Chen said. "Now, we have to make an offer to Mr. Trump, and worry about whether he's satisfied with it. We have to get used to this, because Mr. Trump is like this. This is his style."
Previous U.S. administrations have urged Taiwan to commit more resources to its defense, and the U.S. has for decades been intentionally ambiguous on whether it would defend Taiwan from a potential Chinese attack. But Trump's accusations around Taiwan's semiconductor industry are new — and unfounded, according to Bonnie Glaser, director of the German Marshall Fund's Indo-Pacific Program.
Glaser says Trump's aggressive stance may be part of his "art of the deal" on Taiwan. "I think President Trump is trying to gain leverage, to convince Taiwan to do things that he wants," she says, adding that Trump may want Taiwan to, for example, balance its trade relationship with the U.S. by buying more American goods, including liquefied natural gas and imported food.
In 2024, Taiwan's exports to the U.S. hit a record of $111.4 billion, driven primarily by semiconductors and other high-tech products. Taiwanese officials have taken note of Trump's words. Last month, Taipei's economy ministry said it was assessing the feasibility of importing natural gas from Alaska in order to narrow its trade surplus and avoid U.S. tariffs.
But it is Taiwan's relations with neighboring China that worry the island's policy makers most. Last year alone, Chinese aircraft crossed near Taiwan over 3,000 times, according to figures from Taiwan's Defense Ministry. This is why, Taiwanese politicians say, they are paying close attention to recent events in Ukraine, which was invaded three years ago by its more powerful neighbor, Russia.
"We have to keep supporting [the] Ukrainians," says Wang Ting-yu, a legislator with the ruling Democratic Progressive Party, and the co-chair of the Legislative Yuan's committee on foreign relations and defense. "If we allow autocratic invaders to win this war, there will be a failure of democracy, a failure of civilization, that will enable autocrats everywhere to bully their neighbors."
Taiwan debates how to navigate Trump 2.0
Wang attended Trump's inauguration in January. He said the key to navigating relations with the U.S. under Trump is to keep emphasizing "win-wins". He mentioned that in the past decade, Taiwan has shifted much of its investment from China to the United States, and it has been steadily increasing its defense budget for the past eight years — with President Lai Ching-te recently committing to a target of spending three percent of Taiwan's GDP on defense.
"If you don't help yourself, nobody else will," Wang said. "We've been increasing our defense budget not because our friends request this, but because we realize we need it ourselves."
Taiwan is already one of the top buyers of U.S. arms, having purchased billions of dollars' worth of equipment — including HIMARS rocket launch systems, howitzers, air defense, tanks, and fighter aircraft in recent years. Reports last month suggest Taipei is in talks with the U.S. to buy more American weapons, in order to demonstrate its commitments to the U.S. partnership and its own defense.
But some of these ambitions have been tempered of late, after the opposition parties that control Taiwan's legislature cut or froze a significant chunk of national defense funding. Wang acknowledges that if Taiwan's president and the ruling party want to build up defense capabilities much more in the coming years, they'll need to compromise with the opposition — or count on discontented voters to pressure or even recall politicians that voted to freeze defense spending.
For their part, many opposition politicians say they also support national defense, but have a right to query the government's budget. "The freeze is part of opposition legislators' duty to exercise supervision over government spending," said Judie Lin, foreign affairs director for the opposition Taiwan Peoples' Party.
The danger of becoming a "chess piece"
Trump's shifting stance on Ukraine has added fuel to the continuous debate about how Taiwan should approach relations with the U.S., with some arguing that Taiwan needs to change course to improve security.
Former lawmaker Wang Yi-shiung, for example, recently argued that President Lai was in danger of becoming a "chess piece" rather than a "chess player" and that Taiwan should try harder to balance relations between China and the U.S. to avoid being "sold out" by Trump.
After he watched Zelenskyy being publicly criticized by the U.S. president on Friday, Apollo Chen, another former lawmaker for the opposition Kuomintang (KMT) party, warned on his Facebook page that Taiwan needs to "find a balance" between the U.S. and China. If the idea of "abandoning Taiwan" becomes mainstream in Trump's policy, he wrote, "it's difficult to guarantee Trump's scolding of Zelenskyy today won't happen to Taiwan as well."
For many in Taiwan, the parallels with Ukraine aren't abstract. Last Sunday, about a hundred people assembled with posters and Ukrainian flags on a drizzling afternoon outside Moscow's representative office in Taipei to commemorate the three-year anniversary of Russia's full scale invasion of Ukraine.
Members of the Ukrainian community in Taiwan, as well as Taiwanese activists, sang the Ukrainian national anthem and spoke about their commitment to shared values.
Although the protest didn't mention the U.S. peace negotiations directly, on the sidelines Deng Ruei-yun, who came to the protest with her daughter, worried about the way that the U.S. was sidelining Ukraine in its negotiations with Russia.
"I think it's not a good idea that Trump may sacrifice the interests of the Ukrainian people for only the American interest. It may encourage China to invade Taiwan as well," Deng said. "I think Trump's promises on Taiwan's defense are not strong enough; he often says things on both sides and we don't know what he actually thinks. I think the Taiwanese people should think about what we can provide to the Americans so they can offer us more help instead of selling us out."
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