The much-heralded China-U.S. summit is now behind us, and the consensus is that it produced nothing of substance. President Donald Trump and Xi Jinping extended their trade truce, talked about artificial intelligence, and agreed on little else. 

Many have applied the same measure to Taiwan: Xi pressed Trump to shift American policy on the island, the American leader appears not to have obliged, and so, the reasoning goes, the U.S. position held and nothing happened. That reading is wrong. What looks like nothing is the clearest sign yet of how far the U.S. position on Taiwan has shifted. And Trump is solely responsible for such a change.

Consider how the island came to be on the negotiating table in the first place: Trump placed it there. Back in February he told reporters he was discussing U.S. arms sales to Taiwan with Xi, something no president had done since 1982, when President Ronald Reagan promised Taipei that Washington would not consult Beijing on such matters. In May, in an interview taped just after the Beijing summit, Trump called a $14 billion arms package for Taiwan a “negotiating chip.” Then, on his flight home, he confirmed that he and Xi had again discussed the sales. Reminded of Reagan’s commitment, Trump dismissed it as ancient history. The package, ready for his signature since March, is still unsigned. 

Each of these points marked a unilateral concession on Taiwan, made without receiving anything durable in return. 

Trump went into the summit last week needing an agreement with Xi even more than he had in the spring. Inflation had risen, the war with Iran had dragged on, and his approval stood at or near the lows of his presidency weeks before the midterms. A meeting that produced a “win” of any kind would have allowed him to claim a much sought after victory. The concern was that he would further sacrifice Taiwan to achieve it.

That he appears not to have taken this route, while not to be overlooked, is almost beside the point. Before the curtains rose on the Trump-Xi summit, Trump had already moved the U.S. position on Taiwan toward China, and as a result Xi arrived in a position where he simply could not lose. Had Trump conceded further, it would have been a ground-changing win for China. When Trump instead lavished praise on his guest and declined to give more, it was still a win, only a quieter one: Beijing banked the new status quo, the one Trump created this year, in which merely holding the line counts as U.S. firmness.

Such a prospect is compounded by two further issues. First, it is not known what Trump said to Xi in private; public silence is reassuring only if it matches what passed behind closed doors. And just after the summit, he did little to quell concerns on this score. Instead, on his way to a college football game, he responded enigmatically to a question about Taiwan: “We didn’t talk about it too much.” He added, “Right now, it’s fine. It’s just moving along,” and then, referring specifically to Xi, Trump said: “He understands very much how I feel.” His comments served to suggest that some private understanding with Xi on Taiwan has been reached but not disclosed. 

Second, Trump has confirmed that he and Xi will meet twice more before the year is out, at the APEC summit in Shenzhen in November and the G20 in Miami in December. That will make for an unprecedented four encounters between the Chinese and U.S. presidents in a single year. Each is another occasion for Beijing to test Trump’s resolve, now from the easier starting point of pressing him merely to hold a line he has already let slip, while angling for more.

Such waffling has real costs for the United States and Taiwan. For the U.S., the price is to the country’s reputation. A security commitment held by every administration for nearly 50 years, now treated as a “negotiating chip,” is proof to the world that no U.S. promise is safe from the next bargain. In Japan, and even more in South Korea, security rests on precisely the kind of promise Washington has just shown it will treat as negotiable. Once other governments conclude that U.S. assurances are only as good as the next election cycle, they hedge, and hedging is how the existing U.S.-led international order has already begun to come apart at the seams. 

In Taiwan itself, a large majority of Taiwanese – 85 percent in one recent poll – favor the status quo, which in practice means the island’s de facto independence. What they ask of Washington is not a harder line toward Beijing but the assurance that the United States will keep the commitments it has already made. Now simply standing by those commitments is cast as a provocation to China, rather than a continuation of existing policy. This cuts away at Taiwan’s security – a heavy cost to bear indeed.

The needed corrective is not to provoke Beijing or manufacture a confrontation over Taiwan. It is the opposite. The president himself, not an aide and not the secretary of state, should state plainly that Washington’s Taiwan policy has not changed. And he should sign the arms package, because it was never Beijing’s to veto. The Taiwan Relations Act directs that such sales be decided “based solely upon” Taiwan’s needs; on a fair reading of that language, consulting Beijing about them is difficult to square with the law in the first place. This is not about goading China. It is about standing on American law, American interest, and the near-universal wish of the people on Taiwan that the status quo endure. 

Taiwan was not bargained away at the Trump-Xi summit. But it was left on the table, within reach, and it will stay there for as long as an American president treats Taiwan as something he might one day be willing to sell.