Trump PAUSES Taiwan Arm Sales As Asia Abandoned By US

本站添加: 2026-05-27

[00:00:00]Turning now to Taiwan. On the heels of the Trump summit, it appears now the United States will pause weapon sales to Taiwan, blaming the situation on the war with Iran and the need to conserve ammunition. Let's take a listen to the acting Navy Secretary Hunga under questioning from the Senator Mitch McConnell or what's left of him. Let's take a listen.

[00:00:18]>> To buy arms from us and all of a sudden there's a pause.

[00:00:24]What are you hearing from the Taiwanese about the pause?

[00:00:32]Chairman, I have not heard I have not spoken to the Taiwanese. However, we are we have done some military uh foreign military sales to them in the P. It's just right now we're doing a pause in order to to make sure we have the uh munitions we need for Epic Fury, which we have plenty, but we're just making making sure we have everything. But then the foreign military sales will continue uh when the administration deems uh necessary.

[00:00:57]I'm just going to put McConnell's health to the side and we'll focus on the Yeah, good >> political class just rotting and decomposing before our eyes.

[00:01:03]>> So, first and foremost, that's important. So, when we're talking about declining empire, that's a significant part of it. But, let's focus on the substance, shall we? Let's put the next one up here on the screen. The Iran war and China thaw complicate US support for Taiwan. A 14 billion dollar Taiwan arm sale is now on hold amid the strain of the Middle East conflict and Trump's reconciliation with Beijing. So this was confirmed by Hungao, the acting Navy secretary before the Senate committee on Thursday. It has now been confirmed officially by the Pentagon of this quote pause fueling concern among lawmakers and Taiwanese officials for president's support, President Trump's support of the island nation as he juggles the Middle East war and the desire for Dayton with Beijing. And the reason why that we are sitting with this, it is the single most important part of this entire strategic defeat that we have now suffered with Iran. No matter which way the ceasefire goes, this was the inevitable consequence. And I think it was inevitable from day one, but especially some 2 to 3 weeks into the conflict when we started to see the munitions math begin to dwindle. It just became mathematically impossible to seek a different solution. And then second, Trump by getting into this disastrous situation, by removing almost unilaterally himself some sort of military option on the table, reducing deterrence, you now have a situation where you have no choice but to seek data with Beijing. You genuinely don't.

[00:02:24]You need Beijing to bail you out of this global crisis. One of the reasons, this is fascinating to me, the one of the reasons why oil is only $100 a barrel, China is importing less oil today than it ever has in modern history. And it is doing so as a favor to the global economy, saying, "Hey, we have a huge strategic petroleum reserve. What we're going to do is we're going to import less, so we're going to keep the oil price down." If they were importing at normal levels, it'd be $150 a barrel, something like that, based upon the analysis that I've seen, which means it would be $6 a gallon here in the United States. You think that there's not some back and forth give and take between the United States? It's like it's obviously not just gift to Trump, it's a gift really to all of the other as nations uh in Asia who are very reliant here on the US. And what we're seeing here is that Taiwan is the tip of the spear because Taiwan, if you were to compare Taiwan and Israel, let's say one country now as of this morning just surpassed the entire GDP of India. Taiwan, India, all of Taiwan just tied in little island nation based on semiconductors for all the electronics and you know it's been reasonable ally over the years with the United States. Israel causing problem after problem after problem after problem with a GDP of like or bilateral trade between the US of like 50 something billion which ranks along like Chile. All right, Taiwan is in the top 10. Which would you choose to defend?

[00:03:42]You could ask me or anybody else. I think it's a pretty obvious answer. We have chosen instead to throw the full force of the empire behind Israel and by doing so have sacrificed even the ability if you wanted to to do so with Taiwan and possibly even with South Korea and Japan which I'll get to here in a moment. But >> I mean this is it. This is it. And I mean I thought it probably always was but there was at least >> 10% deterrent I would say.

[00:04:08]>> I don't even know. It's gone. It's gone.

[00:04:10]And Trump is Trump has evaporated it as a result of this war.

[00:04:13]>> Yeah. I mean, $14 billion weapon sale or not, it's it's over. It's over.

[00:04:18]>> What? We can't we can't defeat this, you know, middle income at best regional power of Iran and we're going to go up against China for Taiwan. No, we're not going to do that. I mean, we can say whatever we want, maintain ambiguity, blah blah blah. The reality is clear to everyone. It's certainly clear to the Chinese. And this decision to pause the weapon sale is also, you know, this is a direct result of this meeting and of this uh trip to uh to China that Trump just went on. Just to to recall how this all went down, you know, the public statements from Trump were completely syphantic towards Xi, very praiseful, worshipful. She was much of sort of more hardline and clear-cut about hey we are going to try to avoid the Thusidities trap which means we don't want as you are a declining empire we don't want to go to war with you and they expressed upset over this weapon sale and lo and behold we said okay like we we'll do what you want because we are not in a position to do otherwise at this point.

[00:05:22]That's the reality. And you know this this has been made manifest by the Iran war. Now it is undeniable as Sager is pointing out. Whatever sort of imaginary deterrent there was previously is now wiped clean. So when China says, "Hey, I don't really like the fact that you're doing this 14 billion weapon sale right now." Guess what? Our best course of action is to say okay we won't do it then because we need to have good relations with you so that you do not cut us off from not only you know what we need in terms of semiconductors in Taiwan but other various rare earth minerals and other supply lines that we are completely dependent on China for.

[00:06:00]So that is just an acknowledgment of the reality of the world that we live in now. It is a different day. Regardless of how the Iran war concludes and what the contours of a deal are, blah blah blah, and when that comes, whether it's this week or two months from now or a year from now, the world has changed and everybody's opened their eyes to the fact that we are no longer in any position to throw our weight around in the world in the same way, >> right? And this is a disaster really for the United States because the entire but the entire basis of the American Empire especially in Asia was built upon the security guarantee not just for Taiwan but for Japan for South Korea and in exchange what that means is that there is open and navigable trade waters for cheap to flow to the US. I'm not saying this is a good thing. I'm saying this just is the basis for the US. I personally would like to change some of that. However, if we were going to say, who are the best allies? I would say Japan and South Korea, especially when you compare them to a lot of these European nations. Well, what's going to happen now? C3, please, let's put it up here on the screen. Just yesterday, the US has now warned Japan of a severe delay in tomahawk deliveries due to the Iran war. The missiles will come 2 years late as the Pentagon now has to replenish its own stocks depleted in the Middle East military campaign. So remember, we went to Japan and we said, "Hey, you guys have to buy tomahawk missiles." They were like, "Okay, let's do it." So then they we took their money and now we're like, "Just so you know, we're going to have to wait a few years to give it to you because we blew it all with the Iran war." This was the interruption is the big blow to Japan.

[00:07:36]Ordered Tomahawks again for the first time in 2024 at the insistence of the US to enhance its deterrence against China.

[00:07:42]The missiles have now would have given Japan a quote counter strike capability to hit coastal China. And it was a 2.3 bill.5 billion deal after Washington urged Japan to increase its defense spending. So Japan does it and they give us the money. They're like, "All right, so give us the missiles." Nope. We can't even turn those missiles over right now.

[00:08:02]This comes on the heels of this, you know, increasingly uh all of these reports that are coming out, which, you know, you don't need a report necessarily for the obvious, but let's put this Washington Post piece that I sent in post-prouction. US allies in Asia are now trying to shield themselves from Trump's unpredictability. And what they say is that Trump's seeming ambivalence about the value of allies has created a sense of urgency among nations with close US ties. As China now shows greater willingness to strongarm its neighbors and Trump injects waves of unpredictability, Japan and South Korea are banding together as smaller nations redraw the geostrategic balance in Asia despite their complicated history. So to get Japan and South Korea to work together, uh that takes a titanic feat from the United States, two countries which hate each other for good reason.

[00:08:46]Yeah, I don't blame it. But uh you know not my not my place to judge about who was comforting women who. But uh just saying in I don't blame the South Koreans for still being upset.

[00:08:55]>> Trump is uniting the globe in ways we never could we never could have imagined. But what what they're pointing out is this quote growing urgency was felt from the big powers from the South Korean president hosting the Japanese prime minister for a two-day summit including a banquet and traditional fireworks show something that you know rare generally. And what they're doing is they're pushing them together to say, okay, we have these two great nations, you know, the giant economies. However, both are have total security guarantees previously thought ironclad from the United States, not so ironclad anymore.

[00:09:28]You take those thads out, take those tomahawks away, you have Trump, you know, saying, "Oh, we're going to pause weapon sales to Taiwan." They're like, "Well, remember for Japan and South Korea, they have two twin problems. They don't just have China. They've got North Korea which can fire which literally fires missiles over Japan and you know near South Korea all the time who it's a sworn enemy. So for them what they need to do is they need some sort of guarantee and look some of this is healthy like in the long run because it gives them strategic independence but it will come as health for the globe and detriment to the US dollar and to our own security guarantee. our ability to buy cheap goods, our ability to have good relations with these nations and and again like just just be very clear like who is more important to the United States of America, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan or Israel, the UAE and Saudi Arabia? Like it's a joke compared to their actual economic importance especially in the future when we transition generally fossil fuel. How many Trump Kushner and Witoff properties though exist if the Gulf region is the I guess the more important question to ask here in terms of the type of decision-m that is is being made and look also you know the same logic that we apply for the US bases in the Middle East where now the you know many of them have been destroyed countries are realizing hey we thought having these bases on our soil would help protect us instead it made us a target that logic applies to a certain extent And in places like South Korea too, in places like Japan as well, where they're saying, you know, this whole idea that this was really going to protect us as you're pulling weapon systems from our soil and sending them to the Middle East, not sure that this fully adds up for us anymore. So, I'm not saying that that change will happen overnight. But again, the logic and the calculus has completely completely changed. you know, Trump threatened to pull our um you know, our military out of Germany and there was a significant part uh number of Germans on sort of like the far right and the far left, but we're like, "Okay, good."

[00:11:33]>> By the way, that actually would be a great thing.

[00:11:36]>> Please go ahead and do that. I mean, that sentiment exists in in South Korea, especially among young South Koreans as well. That sentiment exists around the world and the logic of it has also changed since the you know demonstration of our weakness in the the Middle East and in the Iran war.

[00:11:52]>> You know I know you guys covered this but C4 I cannot emphasize enough how ass backwards this whole thing is from John Hudson. The US bore the brunt of Israel's missile defense. Which means that while Iran was shooting at Israel, the United States military expended far more of its own interceptors to protect Israel than Israeli forces did. Let me sink that in as deep as we possibly can.

[00:12:21]We have a very limited amount of these advanced interceptors. As I've emphasized over and over and over and over again on the show, they take years to rebuild. They're highly, you know, high precision, ridiculously million, multi-million dollars expensive. One of the reasons we give money to Israel is so that they can have the weapons to defend themselves. This is the logic.

[00:12:38]Then when it came time to defend themselves, the United States stepped in and we defended them. We expel expended many of the stocks that we have so that Israel could conserve theirs. Why? Oh, because Oh, but Israel might need them in the future. Then why did we do it in the first place? And so we are now dramatically less safe because we protected Israel from Iranian missiles in a war, by the way, which they got us into and which they started. Remember day one of the war, the United States Secretary of State, one of the most historic statements ever uttered by a chief diplomat. We had to do it because Israel was going to attack them and that we knew Iran would attack back and that's why the United States had to get involved. That was his reasoning. The US Secretary of State, he said it, not me.

[00:13:20]And so here we are some several months later. The United States has expended the vast vast array of its advanced interceptors costing some hundreds of millions of dollars on behalf of this tiny little nation while Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, they go dry. How does that make any sense? I'm losing like it genuinely this demonstrates to me the level of which there has been a complete strategic inversion in the Trump administration. This will go down as one of the greatest follys in US history. I I really like I it's not even hyperbolic now at this point. This is it. This is the big one in terms of the turning point. Yes. I Oh, everyone. Oh, you're just saying that. Listen, like I I don't just say these things willy-nilly because when you stack up the balance sheet and you look here at Japan, a G7 nation, South Korea, same thing. Top trading partner of the United States.

[00:14:10]Taiwan, I just described three nations which are in the top 10 trading partners of the United States who are like, I don't know. I don't know about this >> and sucker I don't even I don't see anyone really disagreeing even the neocons now the ones who are like oh we got to do more war um you know Lindsey Graham in that that tweet that we talked about with Tita Parsy on uh whatever day that was on Sunday um >> he said if if this concludes with the deal right now I don't know why we went into this war to start with because even them or you know the Robert Kagan piece that we talked about in the Atlantic where he says it's checkmate. Like we lost in Iran. I don't think that there's really anyone who can disagree with that at this point. Now, some of those people use that as a justification to say that's why we need a ground invasion.

[00:14:57]That's why we need to nuke them or whatever insane plans they have. But it's pretty undeniable at this point unless you are the just most blinded mega sickopant loyalist you could possibly imagine who just hears Trump go, "We won." And are like, "I guess we won. outside of those people. It's pretty undeniable. It's really undeniable. And that's actually one of the obstacles to being able to secure some sort of a deal at this point because even Trump knows he's not going to be able to sell this as a win. Even he knows with all of his powers of persuasion and reality distortion and all, you know, something that he's very talented as the probably greatest artist in American history.

[00:15:39]even he knows people are going to see this as a loss as nothing more than a devastating strategic loss and one of the greatest blunders in history. So, um you know, I I think it's fairly undeniable and this latest, you know, okay, well, we're not going to do the weapon sales to Taiwan at China's request. By the way, we're just got to go along with what they want at this point because we're in such a position of weakness. It's just a sign of the new reality.

[00:16:04]>> Iran is the excuse, but it's also the truth. Like, it just is. There's and is there something we'd do about it? Yeah, we would have to basically Manhattan project our defense industrial base.

[00:16:13]Here's the problem. It's not a horrible idea, but it would be a horrible idea under the current political regime because, and I'm not just talking about Trump. I'm talking about both of them because under the current political regime, what we know is that let's say some neo liberal Democrat or ne Trump the neocon Republican, if you give them more weapons, they're going to use it for more like Iran and Israel. The whole point would be to have a sensible strategic defense and say we're going to use this to protect us and to protect Japan and to protect South Korea and maybe Taiwan maybe. Right. Which even then this is like a a long is basically a dream. But we want to make sure that it doesn't get invaded or at least we maintain some strategic connection to make sure we can get all these chips which are deeply valuable. All this democracies it's and everybody knows it. But even that, under the current regime, like we know that if we put $ 1.5 billion into our Pentagon budget, the vast majority of it will be squandered into the mansions of Northern Virginia. And for more high-tech weapon systems, which either don't work or are easily defeated or penetrated by a $20,000 drone, we have no creativity. We have no wartime mindset. Then the people at the top who talk the way that I do are like the CEO of Palunteer, right?

[00:17:25]who have a ton to gain from some more defense spending at, you know, some very dubious and problematic expense.

[00:17:32]So, I don't even see a political constituency which is capable of solving this question like period without a dramatic rewriting of the entire like global foreign policy elite. And it's terrifying honestly because >> it's not it's it's theoretical. We're just talking about it. But the realities of what this means in the future are going to be, you know, serious humiliations abroad. Being at the genuine like at the really being at the mercy of other great powers. Nobody alive in the United States today has ever lived under a cons under a regime like that. It has not. We have not lived that way in almost 100 years. And it's I mean, look, you know, you can read books. It usually leads to clashes and fires and genocides and death and destruction. It's It's not good.

[00:18:20]>> Well, and this is why I continue to be concerned about nuclear weapons because we haven't experienced a hegemonic decline in the nuclear age.

[00:18:28]>> No, we haven't.

[00:18:29]>> And Trump's Trump's psychotic. Like you don't have any idea what this guy will do. It's impossible to predict, you know, what insane maneuvers he will take next. And so, you know, is it possible that he breaks the nuclear taboo in order to protect his fragile ego and avoid try, you know, in his mind avoid holding the L that he has to hold because of this Iran war. Like, I don't think that that's preposterous. That's why that's so and Israel obviously nuclear armed as well and completely psychotic. So, it's a very dangerous world um that we live in and multipolarity was coming regardless of whether it was going to be Trump or Kamla or whoever else comes after them.

[00:19:08]Um, but there could have been a transition that did not work.

[00:19:12]>> Circumstances matter.

[00:19:13]>> Yeah, absolutely. And you know what we're risking is is a complete collapse.

[00:19:18]I had someone say to me, you know, we're we're flirting with a potential like Soviet Union collapse level of degradation. Um, you know, is that guaranteed? No. But that's the sort of level of catastrophe and decline in obvious decline in living standards that we could be facing here in the US because of the way that we are crashing into multipolarity versus having some of sort of negotiated transition that would you know result in a lot less chaos and pain.

[00:19:45]>> And when I say this is the big one, you won't see it right now. What you're going to see is the ground for when the next big one happens and people are like holy It's like the Suez moment, right? That's why the what happened with Suez, it was the it happened after nearly a decade of the postw World War II era where the UK was, you know, generally declining in power and the empire was collapsing and everybody including the UK was like, "Oh my god, like we have no power anymore." But the signs were all there. I mean, what we're saying is that it's all right here. Like it has been laid out and then either a Taiwan crisis, which crisis, I mean, what would it look like? We don't really know. a vote for reunification or some sort of pressuring sanctions regime. Who who knows? Some sort of crisis in uh between Japan and South could be North Korea. I've always thought North Korea is like the sleeping giant in this one and some sort of global rewriting event just because of the nuclear problem and now these problems with the United States of security guarantee and China is some sort of a guaranter. But that's when everybody everybody will wake up to that one. As of right now, you know, most people are just going to the store 450 450 a gallon. Oh, that sucks. It's like, you know, if if you open your eyes to to how it is, it's really, really, really bad. All right, let's get to the prediction markets. Hey, if you like that video, hit the like button or leave a comment below. It really helps get the show to more people.

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