China's Price for Iran Help: Cancel the Taiwan Arms Deal

As Day 2 of the Trump-Xi summit opened in Beijing on Wednesday, the contours of China’s asking price for helping stabilize the Iran crisis came into sharp relief: Beijing wants the United States to cancel a $14 billion congressional arms package for Taiwan that has been sitting unsigned on President Trump’s desk — and it wants that answer before it will seriously pressure Tehran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

The demand places Trump inside a diplomatic trilemma with no clean exit. He can yield on Taiwan and bank Chinese pressure on Iran, at the cost of a historic break with America’s longstanding defense commitments. He can hold the line on Taiwan and accept that Beijing will not move against Tehran, leaving the ceasefire — which Trump himself called on “massive life support” with roughly “a 1 percent chance of living” — to collapse on its own. Or he can find some third offer that satisfies neither side fully but buys time, which is increasingly the rarest currency in this crisis.

What Beijing Is Asking

China has not publicly named its terms. But analysts and pre-summit briefings make the structure plain. Xi is expected to press Trump to scale back, if not entirely shelve, the Taiwan arms agreement that Congress approved earlier this year. Analyst William Yang told Al Jazeera that Xi would “influence and potentially convince Trump to agree to scale back, if not completely suspend, sales to Taiwan.”

The package covers advanced air defense components, precision munitions, and command-and-control systems. Taiwan’s defense planners view it as essential to sustaining deterrence across the strait. From Beijing’s perspective, the sale is an act of interference in what China describes as a core internal matter — one of four explicit “red lines” Xi is known to press in bilateral meetings.

In exchange, China’s leverage over Iran is real. Beijing purchases more than 80 percent of Iran’s shipped crude exports, making it by far Tehran’s most important economic patron. A credible Chinese signal to Iran — even a private one — that the Hormuz blockade is costing the relationship could shift Iranian calculations in ways that no amount of American military pressure has managed. Beijing has historically refused to weaponize that relationship. The question now is whether it is prepared to use it as a bargaining chip, and at what price.

The Trilemma

Trump’s diplomatic position in Beijing is more constrained than his pre-departure remarks suggested. Before leaving Washington he told reporters he did “not need” Xi’s help on Iran and that the conflict was “very much under control” — a statement that contradicted Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who had publicly urged China to “step up with some diplomacy and get the Iranians to open the strait.”

That contradiction reflects the internal tension inside the administration between hawks who view any concession on Taiwan as a strategic catastrophe and dealmakers who see the Beijing summit as an opportunity to trade one problem for another.

Former officials are not subtle about the stakes. Daniel Blumenthal, a longtime China hand, warned that “even slight changes to U.S. policy on Taiwan at the moment would be a blow to deterrence and would undermine morale in Taiwan and Japan at a critical time.” Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo argued Trump should make clear that America’s commitment to Taiwan’s defense is “nonnegotiable.”

An unnamed administration official offered a careful hedge when asked about concessions before the summit: “We don’t expect to see any changes in U.S. policy going forward, and I’ll just leave it at that.” The phrasing — forward-looking and conditional — was notable for what it did not rule out.

Iran’s Rejected Terms Make Chinese Help More Urgent

The pressure on Trump to find some resolution through Beijing intensified after Pakistan’s mediation effort effectively collapsed. Tehran rejected all U.S. terms as “TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE,” demanding war reparations, full Iranian sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz, and an end to all sanctions before any nuclear discussions could begin. Iran’s Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf declared that Iranian armed forces were “prepared to deliver a lesson-giving response to any aggression.”

Pakistan has carried proposals between the non-communicating parties since April 12, but the gap between the positions is now wide enough that diplomats in Islamabad privately describe the channel as dormant rather than active.

With the direct route blocked, Beijing becomes the only plausible back channel. That is a structural advantage Xi is unlikely to leave on the table without extracting something substantial.

The War Powers Clock

The stakes of a ceasefire collapse are not merely diplomatic. The Pentagon is considering renaming the current Iran operation “Operation Sledgehammer,” a procedural step that would reset the 60-day War Powers Resolution clock and give the administration legal room to resume large-scale strikes without returning to Congress for authorization. The Senate voted 50-49 to put pressure on the White House over the existing operation, a margin thin enough that another reset could produce a genuine constitutional confrontation.

A ceasefire collapse while Trump is physically seated across a table from Xi in Beijing would be among the more damaging diplomatic optics of the modern era. That reality gives Beijing additional leverage, and Xi’s negotiators are professionals who understand it.

Reagan’s Six Assurances in Play

The specific concern among Taiwan’s backers in Washington is not simply whether Trump withholds the $14 billion package — it is whether he agrees to a broader formula that limits future arms sales as a condition of the relationship. That would implicate the Six Assurances that President Reagan gave Taiwan in 1982, committing the United States not to set a date for ending arms sales and not to consult Beijing before approving them.

Any deviation from that framework — even informal, even undocumented — would reorder the security architecture that Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea have planned around for four decades. That is why analysts are focused less on the specific package than on the “precise wording” of any joint communiqué that emerges from the summit, as one analyst put it to Al Jazeera.

What Comes Next

The summit runs through May 15. A joint statement — if one is issued — will be the primary text to watch. Trump has historically preferred transactional agreements over formal diplomatic language, which creates space for ambiguity that both sides can interpret in their favor.

But ambiguity has its limits. The Strait of Hormuz is closed. Oil markets are pricing in a protracted blockade. Eleven million barrels a day that once flowed through the strait are not flowing. The economic cost is mounting for everyone, including China, which depends on Gulf crude flowing through Hormuz and is watching global energy markets strain under the disruption.

That shared economic pain is the only structural incentive pushing both leaders toward a deal that neither wants to be seen making. Whether Trump’s first Beijing visit since 2017 produces one, and at what cost to Taiwan, is the central question of the next 48 hours.

Against a worsening GCC security picture — including Iran’s reported Bubiyan Island infiltration threatening Kuwait’s northern shore — the window for a negotiated outcome is narrowing faster than either summit schedule allows for.

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This is a developing situation. America Strikes will update as Day 2 proceedings continue.