Chatham House: Trump’s approach to Taiwan could jeopardize its future. Indo-Pacific allies are taking note

Posted on May 22, 2026 by michelleclarke2015

–17 June 2026 – Secure your place nowalert Sign in or create account Support us

Chatham House – International Affairs Think Tank

Main navigation

Search

Breadcrumb

  1. Home
  2. Topics/Regions

Trump’s approach to Taiwan could jeopardize its future. Indo-Pacific allies are taking note

Trump’s comments on Taiwan after his meeting with Xi and an apparent move towards ‘strategic stability’ with China could have consequences for Taiwan’s future and erode trust among US allies.

Expert comment

Published 19 May 2026 —4 minute READ

Image — A television news programme at a restaurant in Taipei on 14 May 2026 shows the meeting between the US President Donald Trump and China’s President Xi Jinping in Beijing. Photo by I-Hwa Cheng / AFP via Getty Images.

Kanishkh Kanodia

Academy Associate, US and the Americas Programme

When US President Donald Trump met with China’s President Xi Jinping in Beijing last week, there was concern that he might negotiate the future of Taiwan to strike a deal with China. For Beijing, Taiwan is the most important issue in the US-China bilateral relationship. Xi even warned that if the issue is mishandled, it could trigger ‘clashes and even conflicts’.

Reports in the run-up to the meeting suggested that China would seek a change in America’s long-standing position on Taiwanese independence. Rather than merely ‘not support’ it, China wants the US to ‘oppose’ Taiwan’s independence and to endorse Beijing’s goal of unification. Such a shift in US policy might appear symbolic, but it would be disastrous not only for the self-governing island, but also for America’s posture in the Indo-Pacific and the region’s security.

In the end, such a shift did not materialize. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio even asserted that America’s position remains unchanged. But the momentary respite has merely deferred the underlying anxiety.

Endangering Taiwan’s security

A better insight into Trump’s thinking on Taiwan comes from an interview with Fox News, that aired soon after he departed Beijing. Three things stood out. First, Trump said that he will use a $14bn weapons sales package to Taiwan that requires his approval as a ‘very good negotiating chip’ to deal with China. Earlier this year, the president deferred the multi-billion-dollar sale of missiles, anti-drone equipment and air-defence systems until after the summit to avoid derailing it. 

Trump also said he has consulted with Xi on the matter and seems willing to negotiate a future arms sale to Taiwan with Beijing. This runs against one of the 1982 US Six Assurances to Taiwan, which states that the United States will not consult with China on its arms transfers to Taiwan. The assurances serve to reassure Taipei to restrain it from provocations and bolster its defensive capabilities to deter Beijing. Further delaying arms deliveries could operationally weaken Taiwan’s defensive capabilities, upend the military deterrent – and make Taiwan more jittery.Related workThe Trump-Xi summit: What does the US want from China and will Trump get it? Independent Thinking podcast

With Trump and Xi reportedly set to meet at least three more times this year, the temptation to hold back US arms transfers in order to preserve the summit cadence will only grow. It could also tempt Beijing into asking for more concessions that weaken US security guarantees, such as restrictions on cabinet visits to Taiwan or curtailing US transits by the Taiwanese president.

Second, when asked about whether the United States would come to Taiwan’s aid in case of a conflict, Trump maintained the US line of strategic ambiguity. But he also said that the US was not looking to fight a war 9,500 miles away. Ambiguity only works as deterrence when underwritten by credible resolve – and Trump’s comments cast doubt over that. The statements also come as US military resources have been diverted from the Indo-Pacific to the Middle East and its munitions stockpiles are depleted. Beijing could read this as an opportunity to test American credibility, and slowly chip away at Taiwan’s resolve by ramping up its intimidation tactics.

Third, during the interview Trump parroted Beijing’s view of who is to blame for tensions in the Taiwan Strait. ‘We are not looking to have somebody say let’s go independent because the United States is backing us’, he said. Beijing has framed Taiwan’s desire for independence as the main reason for the deterioration of relations. Trump also failed to mention Beijing’s relentless coercive pressure on Taiwan and actions in the Taiwan Strait. His tacit endorsement could serve to legitimize Beijing’s narrative and tactics.

Taken together, Trump’s comments undercut the precarious balance that has characterized US policy on Taiwan for decades. It would sow doubt among the Taiwanese public about the credibility of the US security guarantee and their own ability to defend the island. They could also embolden Xi, who seeks a fourth term next year and has vowed to not let the Taiwan issue pass onto the next generation.

Implications of US–China ‘strategic stability’

Another concern arising from the summit is Beijing’s new framing of the US-China bilateral relationship as pursuing ‘constructive strategic stability’. Marco Rubio also echoed this phrase in his interview with NBC News during the summit, implying Washington has endorsed this idea, at least rhetorically. What it actually means is unclear. Beijing has long preferred vague formulations because it can change their substance based on its interest. This could have implications for Taiwan. Any US action contrary to Beijing’s core interests on the issue could be framed as a violation of this strategic stability, with Washington cast as the disruptive party. How much the Trump administration cares about the framing is unclear. But if it does, the pattern of withholding assistance to Taiwan as leverage could harden into the new baseline.

Topics

Regions

Departments

Subscribe to our weekly newsletter

Our flagship email provides a round-up of content, plus the latest on events and how to connect with the institute.Enter emailSubscribe

content

The implications of this send ripples beyond the Taiwan Strait. America’s allies in the region depend on treaty commitments that, however formal, ultimately rest on the willingness of a US president to honour them. There are already growing concerns among allies about US reliability under the Trump administration. Now there is the added worry that a US-China relationship based on strategic stability could see Washington, either explicitly or tacitly, fold the interests of its allies into a bilateral framework with China, rather than deal with them on their own terms. Related workUS Indo-Pacific allies are unhappy about Trump’s defence demands. But they have to comply

If US allies in the region grow more anxious about being managed rather than defended they may begin pursuing more aggressive measures for their own security, including nuclearization. Two key allies, Japan and South Korea, are already ramping up their defence spending and strengthening their domestic defence industries, as well as bolstering security partnerships with other regional partners. Japan also recently overhauled its decades-old ban on defence equipment exports. But nothing can replace American security guarantees.

It also further complicates any discussions of burden-sharing between the Trump administration and Asian allies. The US is already pressing South Korea to allow US Forces Korea to be re-oriented away from North Korea and towards China and should open negotiations with Japan later this year on the renewal of the Special Measures Agreement, due to expire in March 2027, which determines the financial and logistical burdens of the US–Japan alliance. After the Trump–Xi summit, such conversations may sit within a broader discussion about whether American alliances are strategic assets or bargaining chips.

For decades, peace in the Indo-Pacific has rested on the consistency of US policy towards the Taiwan Strait and a belief in America’s willingness to honour its commitments. Absent that, the region would enter uncharted and dangerous waters. Even without a ‘grand bargain’ on Taiwan, Trump’s Beijing visit may have left the US with a weaker hand, Taiwan’s security more precarious, and the region more volatile.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

The Harvard Gazette: Who joined the Nazi party?

Posted on May 22, 2026 by michelleclarke2015
  • OpenMenu
  • SearchSearch
A composite image featuring an archival photograph of Nazis saluting and a Nazi membership card and photo.
National Archives and Records Administration

Nation & World

Who joined the Nazi Party

‘Ordinary men’ were at the heart of genocidal movement as it grew, research says

Sy Boles

Harvard Staff Writer

May 15, 2026 5 min read

The first Germans to become Nazis during Hitler’s rise to power may have been ideological zealots, but later members were largely “ordinary men” drawn into the movement by propaganda and social pressure.

That’s one of several key findings in a new paper from Harvard researchers affiliated with the Economics Department and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. 

The researchers used vision-language artificial intelligence to digitize membership cards for more than 10 million members of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, expanding on an existing database of 55,000, to illuminate who joined the fascist movement, when, and in what communities. Their findings were published in April by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Luis Bosshart and Matthias Weigand.
Luis Bosshart (left) and Matthias Weigand.Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer

“What we can do with this new resolution is zoom in much more fine-grained, temporally speaking, but also geographically speaking,” said Luis Bosshart, a co-author of the paper and a researcher at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies at the Weatherhead Center. “What we find is that mass entry occurred in discontinuous waves and that representativeness increased over time. By the end of the regime, the joiners looked much more like the population at large.”

Led by Adolph Hitler, the Nazi Party, officially the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, established a totalitarian regime in Germany that triggered World War II and carried out the murder of 6 million Jews in the Holocaust. At its height, one in six German adults was a registered member of the movement.

Nazi functionaries tracked information about members’ ages, occupations, addresses, and dates of party entry. Microfilm images of the cards, many of which were handwritten, are held by the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration and open to researchers — but efforts have been stymied by the laborious task of manual transcription.

“Entries are edited. Someone moves, so an address gets crossed out. Some cards are written all over,” said co-author Matthias Weigand, an econ graduate student and an affiliate at the Harvard Center for International Development. “Thus, people have been taking random samples for their purposes, transcribing them, and trying to work with that. We now observe the near-universe of membership cards, including features such as membership portraits.”

The team used Google Gemini’s vision-language AI model to extract and standardize the data. The development of their algorithm occurred over a long process in collaboration with the German Federal Archives. They then conducted manual checks to validate the model’s accuracy. 

After a gradual buildup that ran into the early 1930s, the first sharp wave of entry into the Nazi Party occurred in 1933 after Hitler became chancellor of Germany; the second in 1937 after a nearly four-year membership ban was lifted. Early joiners, the researchers found, were predominantly middle-class, male, and from non-agricultural industries. But those differences narrowed over time. When the party dissolved in 1945, new members closely resembled their county demographics.

https://flo.uri.sh/visualisation/28887631/embed?auto=1

Much of the existing literature, in line with data constraints, has focused on differences between counties. But by linking the millions of membership cards to census data, the researchers have revealed that 95 percent of variation in Nazi Party membership occurred within counties, not between them. 

Even within the same county, municipalities differed drastically in their party membership share, with no clear differences in population density, demographic composition, or dominant industries. 

Municipalities that were early Nazi strongholds remained so — and municipalities with no early membership were unlikely to develop it later on. In fact, they found that 40 percent of municipalities recorded no Nazi Party members at all. 

The findings suggest that those who joined the party before 1933 were more committed ideologically, but those who joined later were likely responding to social pressures and to changes in the political winds. 

“Historical research suggests this is working through social pressure, social norms, local spearheads flipping,” Weigand said, noting parallels in sociological models of riots. “The first person throwing the stone is always the radical, but the last person maybe not.”

The research does not explore joiners’ ideological beliefs, Bosshart said, but sets out parameters for future explanations.

“Any explanation needs to be able to explain the very different trajectories among neighboring and seemingly similar municipalities,” he said, “and it needs to be able to explain the nonlinear mass entry dynamics.” 

An analysis of hundreds of first-person accounts, collected in 1934 by U.S. sociologist Theodore Abel, shows that “national renewal/order” and “social belonging” were the top two reasons given for joining the Nazis, ranking above anti-communism, economic hardship, and antisemitism. 

https://flo.uri.sh/visualisation/28838059/embed?auto=1

“Our research points to coordination as a central force in institutional change,” Bosshart said. “Regime transitions are moments of fundamental political uncertainty, and what people believe about the new equilibrium matters. We see this in the cascade dynamics around 1933. One might also say that similar dynamics were at play after 1945, when former party members rapidly accommodated the new democratic order. There’s a cost of not being aligned. You don’t want to be in favor of the old regime in a stable new democratic equilibrium, just as you don’t want to be the big democrat in a new autocratic equilibrium. 

“These patterns are consistent with an Arendtian point of view,” Bosshart continued, referencing philosopher Hannah Arendt’s argument that mass political violence can be sustained by ordinary people conforming to a dominant order. “If that view is right, the mechanism is general and might not be limited to interwar Germany.”

Share this article

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Massimo: While the United States continues to lead the world in oil production with a record 13.6 million barrels per day in 2025, China is making significant advances in deepwater exploration. China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) has announced a major discovery: the Huizhou 19-6 oil field, located approximately 106 miles off the coast of Shenzhen.

Posted on May 22, 2026 by michelleclarke2015

Massimo

@Rainmaker1973

·

While the United States continues to lead the world in oil production with a record 13.6 million barrels per day in 2025, China is making significant advances in deepwater exploration. China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) has announced a major discovery: the Huizhou 19-6 oil field, located approximately 106 miles off the coast of Shenzhen. The reservoir is estimated to hold about 110 million tons of oil, marking China’s first large-scale integrated clastic oilfield in ultra-deep geological formations.

Initial testing has already produced hundreds of barrels of crude oil and tens of thousands of cubic meters of natural gas per day, demonstrating the field’s strong potential. This breakthrough reflects a broader global shift toward extreme-depth drilling as conventional shallow-water reserves continue to decline.

Experts estimate that up to 60% of the world’s remaining oil and gas resources lie in deep and ultra-deep layers. China has been particularly aggressive in this frontier, recently surpassing the United States in the number of wells drilled deeper than 26,000 feet.

However, developing these resources remains a formidable technical challenge due to extreme temperatures and high pressure thousands of feet below the seafloor. As countries compete for long-term energy security, mastery of ultra-deep drilling technology is likely to play a defining role in the future of the global energy industry.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Massimo on X: In Finland, a new generation of energy-efficient data centers is transforming how cities manage heat …

Posted on May 20, 2026 by michelleclarke2015
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Judging Freedom Podcast: Professor Jeffrey Sachs : Israel On the Brink

Posted on May 20, 2026 by michelleclarke2015
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

GZERO Media … A “Mesican stanoff” in Hormuz

Posted on May 20, 2026 by michelleclarke2015

https://www.gzeromedia.com/video/gzero-world-clips/a-mexican-standoff-in-hormuz

A “Mexican standoff” in Hormuz?

GZERO Staff

May 18, 2026

Make us preferred on Google

According to American Enterprise Institute’s Kori Schake, when the US struck Iran, it was easily foreseeable that Tehran would move against the Strait of Hormuz. Washington failed to predeploy forces to counter that, and now the US is paying for it. The distant blockade prevents Iran from fully profiting from its position, but it doesn’t reopen the waterway. Commercial shipping won’t run the risk of a potentially mined strait, and the US isn’t willing to force the issue.

That leaves two options, neither good, Shake says. Dramatic escalation, after 37 days of intensive military operations failed to produce Iranian capitulation, or accepting that Iran controls one of the world’s most critical chokepoints. As she puts it: “We’re at a Mexican standoff with the Iranians, which means we’re gonna have to negotiate some kind of arrangement that’s not just in our interests but also in their interests to get them to release the chokehold on the strait.”

The most likely path forward is a drawn-out negotiation, with Washington hoping economic pressure on Tehran outlasts economic pressure on everyone else. But that is a bet, not a strategy, and every week the Strait stays closed, the costs mount for US allies, global markets, and the credibility of American military power.

hormuztehrantrumpwarwashingtonira

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Vance takes the podium

Posted on May 20, 2026 by michelleclarke2015
Vance takes the podium
 
Vice President JD Vance takes questions during a White House press briefing today. Photo: Kent Nishimura/AFP via Getty Images

Vice President JD Vance told reporters today that the Trump administration’s main goal in Iran is preventing nuclear proliferation in the Middle East and beyond, Alex Fitzpatrick and Avery Lotz report.

Vance, taking questions in a jam-packed and sometimes raucous Brady Press Briefing Room: “Iran would really be the first domino, and that would set off a nuclear arms race all over the world. That’s very, very bad for the safety of our country.” 

Vance added: “We are not going to have a deal that allows the Iranians to have a nuclear weapon, so as the president just told me, we’re locked and loaded.”

“We don’t want to go down that pathway, but the president is willing and able to go down that pathway if we have to.

“President Trump convened a meeting on Iran with his top national security team last night that included a briefing on military options, Axios’ Barak Ravid reports.

 Go deeper.Photo: Kent Nishimura/AFP via Getty Images 

Vance, using a “cheat sheet” to call on reporters while subbing for White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, also took questions on the DOJ’s controversial new “anti-weaponization fund,” President Trump’s surprise endorsement of Texas AG Ken Paxton over Sen. John Cornyn and more.

On the taxpayer-funded $1.776 billionIRS fund, and the possibility that some of that money could go to Jan. 6 defendants: “You’ve got to actually look at this stuff and figure out what were they accused of. … Maybe they had their entire lives ruined in a totally disproportionate way. That’s fundamentally illegitimate and political.

“On Trump’s endorsement: “I’ve known John Cornyn for a long time, but unfortunately, when it really counted, Ken Paxton was there for the country, was there for the president, and that’s why he ultimately earned the president’s endorsement.”Watch Vance’s briefing.
 
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Massimo: An NVIDIA powered farming machine uses AI vision and precision lasers to eliminate weeds in milliseconds without herbicides …

Posted on May 19, 2026 by michelleclarke2015
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Chay Bowes: “As Presidents Putin and Xi Jinping meet to reassert their “Power friendship” in Beijing – …

Posted on May 19, 2026 by michelleclarke2015
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Mario Nawfal on X: Putin arrives in Beijing. Foreign Minister Wang Yi personally waiting on the runway. “Multi-Polar World joint declaration to be signed tomorrow”

Posted on May 19, 2026 by michelleclarke2015
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment