President Donald Trump told Taiwan not to escalate tensions with China, warning the island not to push too hard against China and suggesting the U.S. should not automatically be expected to defend it militarily. “When you look at the odds, China’s a very, very powerful big country. That’s a very small island. If you think of it, it’s 59 miles away, 59 miles,” Trump told FNC’s Bret Baier. <\/p>\n
BRET BAIER, FOX NEWS: Should the people of Taiwan feel more or less secure after your meetings with President Xi? Neutral. PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Neutral. BAIER: Has the policy changed at all? TRUMP: No, nothing’s changed. BAIER: U.S. policy? TRUMP: No, nothing’s changed. I will say this. I’m not looking to have somebody go independent and, you know, we’re supposed to travel 9,500 miles to fight a war. I’m not looking for that. I want them to cool down. I want China to cool down. BAIER: But you’re waiting on approving billions of dollars of weapons for Taiwan. Is that moving forward? TRUMP: Well, I haven’t approved it yet. We’re going to see what happens. BAIER: What are you looking for? TRUMP: I may do it. I may not do it. BAIER: Yeah, what’s your hinge point? TRUMP: Well, I’m not going to say that, but I may do it. I may not do it. But we’re not looking to have wars. And if you kept it the way it is, I think China’s going to be okay with that. But we’re not looking to have somebody say, let’s go independent because the United States is backing us. BAIER: So President Xi probably liked that you haven’t approved the weapons to Taiwan. TRUMP: I would say like is maybe too strong a word because he thinks I could do it with just the signing of my signature, unlike Biden, who couldn’t sign his signature. No, I’m holding that in abeyance and it depends on China. It depends. It’s a very good negotiating chip for us, frankly. It’s a lot of weapons. It’s $ 12 billion. It’s a lot of weapons. But, you know, when you look at the odds, China’s a very, very powerful big country. That’s a very small island. It’s you think of it, it’s 59 miles away, 59 miles. We’re 9,500 miles away. That’s a little bit of a difficult problem. With all of that being said, you know, if you look at the history of Taiwan, Taiwan was developed because we had presidents that didn’t know what the hell they were doing, because if they were to put tariffs on chips coming in, they would have never left. Everything was about Intel and everything was about our chip companies. They stole our chip industry. So I’ve said that for years. I said, you know, for years they stole our chip. If we would have had one of our presidents just say, we’re going to say we’re going to put 100 percent chip. You can leave. You can build in Taiwan, but we’re going to you sell it back into the United States. We’re going to put 100 percent or 200 percent tariff. We would have never lost a chip. We lost a chip industry. It’s all coming back. And I do say this. Taiwan would be very smart to cool it a little bit. China would be very smart to cool it a little bit. They ought to both cool it. <\/p>\n