Trump denies ever discussing US weapons sales to China, contradicting his own ambassador
President Trump on Monday denied ever discussing American weapons sales to China with Xi Jinping — flatly contradicting his own ambassador to Beijing, David Perdue.
US President Donald Trump on Monday denied that he ever discussed selling American weapons to China during Chinese President Xi Jinping’s state visit to Washington last week — directly contradicting comments made a day earlier by his own ambassador to Beijing.
Asked about the remarks on Monday, Trump appeared surprised: “To China? You mean to Taiwan? I’ve never heard of that one. I’m going to have to ask him,” he said. “Now, they’d probably like to buy it because we do make better equipment than that, so maybe it’s a good idea. But we didn’t discuss that.” He later added: “He may have been talking about Taiwan. I think he was talking about Taiwan.”
The denial followed an extraordinary claim by US Ambassador David Perdue in a Fox News Sunday interview, in which he said Trump had asked Xi whether China would like to buy US weapons. “President Trump continues to say: ‘Hey, we sell arms to other people around the world.’ He actually asked President Xi — would he like to buy some — at one point,” Perdue said.
The State Department moved quickly to close the matter down, telling The New York Times that “US law prohibits arms sales to China and there is no offer or plan to sell arms to China,” while a US official told AFP that “the US government has no plans to sell weapons to China.”
The Taiwan backdrop
Perdue’s comments came in the context of long-strained US-China relations over Taiwan, the self-governed island China claims as its territory. Washington is required by law to supply Taiwan with weapons for its defence. The US approved an $11.1 billion arms sale to Taiwan in December — which Perdue said was more arms than any president had sold since 1979 — but paused a proposed $14 billion weapons package in May, with Trump calling the deal a “very good negotiating chip” in dealings with China.
During his Washington visit, Xi urged Trump to show “prudence” over Taiwan and called on the US to explicitly oppose Taiwanese independence. Trump has declined to say whether Taiwan was discussed in the meeting. The two leaders have met twice this year and are expected to meet again at the APEC summit in Shenzhen in November and the G20 at Trump’s Doral resort in Miami in December.
Sources
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