Trump’s Taiwan retreat tests his chief China hawk’s influence
Ivan Kanapathy, a longtime China hawk, is a top Asia adviser at the National Security Council at a time when the Trump administration has been particularly conciliatory with Beijing.
By Phelim Kine
It’s a tough time to be a China hawk inside the White House. Ivan Kanapathy probably knows that better than most.
Kanapathy, the senior director for Asia at the National Security Council, has devoted his career in Washington to warning of China’s expanding military footprint and arguing for the U.S. to prioritize defending Taiwan. But halfway through Trump’s second term, that viewpoint is losing out.
Trump has upended decades of U.S. support for Taiwan during his second term, delaying $14 billion in arms sales to the self-governing island and throwing doubt on whether the U.S. would jump to Taiwan’s defense if China were to invade.
“The Taiwan policy that Trump is pursuing is not what Ivan would do,” said a person who has known Kanapathy professionally for years. “He’s probably the most influential Taiwan voice in the government besides [Secretary of State Marco] Rubio, but it’s just not being communicated.”
White House spokesperson Anna Kelly rejected any characterization of Kanapathy as on the sidelines or lacking influence.
“Ivan Kanapathy is responsible for ensuring that the interagency is advancing the foreign policy that the president was elected to implement. He is a crucial member of President Trump’s national security team,” Kelly said. The White House told POLITICO that Kanapathy declined to be interviewed.
As Trump hosts Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Washington this week, it is inevitable that the issue of China’s claim of sovereignty over Taiwan comes up. If Trump doesn’t raise it, Xi is expected to. How Trump responds is important for not just Taiwan but other regional powers — who are watching closely to see if they feel they can still count on the U.S. to defend the region against Beijing.
And if Trump isn’t listening to those inside of his administration who could help him navigate that tension, he could further antagonize Asian allies that are already reconsidering their longstanding security partnerships with the U.S. — including how much they’re willing to step into its shoes as a counterweight to Beijing’s increasingly aggressive military footprint in the region.
“The U.S. has been pushing its allies to be more explicit in articulating what role they would play during a Taiwan contingency,” said David Sacks, a former political-military official at the U.S. diplomatic outpost in Taiwan. “Muddled and inconsistent messaging will make allies much more reluctant to step up and play a larger role.”
The U.S. has also asked some of those same regional powers for assistance in its war in Iran, with mixed results.
In his role at the NSC, Kanapathy would generally be expected to be involved in helping Trump hit the right balance in his messaging on Taiwan. It’s unclear if — or how hard — Kanapathy is pushing, but Trump’s policy is sharply different from the views Kanapathy has expressed publicly in the past.
“There might be a little bit of Stockholm syndrome on Ivan’s part because he seems much more comfortable with things that I thought he would fundamentally object to,” said another person who has known Kanapathy for several years. The individual pointed to the delay in the Taiwan arms sale and the administration’s opposition to public appearances by Taiwan’s president in the U.S. as prime examples.
The first person who knows Kanapathy believes that his views haven’t changed, but that he’s sidelined.
“He briefs Trump on the importance of Taiwan, but he has zero influence on what Trump decides to do or says on Taiwan,” the person said. “He’s probably feeling like his opinion is not being heeded by Trump, so it’s got to be demoralizing.”
Another person, who is in touch with Kanapathy, said he hasn’t bought into the Trump administration’s Taiwan policy.
“Based on talking to Ivan and what he wrote when he was out of government, these are not the policies anyone would expect him to support, “ the person said.
The White House said in a statement that Kanapathy and other NSC officials’ role is to “provide options for the president’s consideration” but Trump “is the final decisionmaker and it is up to the foreign policy apparatus to implement his desired policies.” It added: “Unlike the Biden administration and others, the Trump administration maintains a top-down, not bottom-up approach.”
In one sense, Kanapathy is in a situation any adviser to any president has to deal with.
“Senior director at the NSC is an important job, but you’re a staffer — all you can do is give your best professional advice and your best professional judgment,” said Alexander Gray, who served with Kanapathy in the first Trump administration. “I don’t know what Ivan’s advocating, but I’m sure that he’s giving his unvarnished views and what the president ultimately does about that is the president’s call, and that’s the bargain we accept when we take the oath to serve in these roles.”
But this is a particularly sensitive moment in engagement with China and former government officials with deep expertise in diplomatic negotiations with Beijing say what they perceive as Kanapathy’s lack of input highlights the larger issue — that Trump isn’t taking counsel on his potentially explosive approach to China.
“The circle around Trump has really tightened and they’re so worried about leaks and determined to try to own the message that they’re just really not into letting the hired help sit in at the dinner party,” said a former senior government official with ties to people within the administration, referring to Kanapathy.
“This is false,” the White House said in its statement. “President Trump takes all views into account.” The administration also noted that Kanapathy attended Trump’s previous meeting with Xi in Beijing in May, and said Kanapathy was the White House representative for negotiations with Chinese officials in New York this weekend.
Trump has made White House policy on China a personalized approach based on what he calls “a good relationship” with Xi with little input from people with longtime China policy expertise.
“The China/Taiwan Desk officer for the U.S. government is Donald J. Trump,” said Randy Shriver, who was assistant secretary of Defense in the first Trump administration. “The decision as to whether or not to move forward on arms sales rests solely with the president.”
That disconnect could play to Xi’s advantage if he pushes for more U.S. concessions on Taiwan when he meets with Trump on Thursday.
“I fully expect Xi Jinping to raise Taiwan and push for a further delay in the arms sale and for a statement that the U.S. opposes Taiwan independence or supports Taiwan’s ‘reunification’ with China,” Sacks said.
The Chinese Embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment.
Kanapathy previously served as NSC director for China, Taiwan and Mongolia in the first Trump administration, which had a much more aggressively hawkish posture toward Beijing and repeatedly urged closer U.S. ties to Taiwan in the face of a rising Chinese threat to the island.
He declared “historical U.S. resistance to offering Taiwan security assistance” to curry favor with Beijing as “unjustified and unproductive” ina Foreign Policy article in 2022. In 2023 he co-wrotea Foreign Affairs article calling for the U.S. “to intervene militarily on Taiwan’s behalf” in the face of potential Chinese aggression. A year later he urged the president to use his “bully pulpit” to persuade Congress and the U.S. public that Taiwan is “a vital U.S. interest” ina Brookings Institution report.
While the Trump administration has challenged China economically with a trade war that pushed tariffs on imports to triple digit levels before Beijing and Washingtonsealed a truce in October, it has signaled a backpedal from longstanding security commitments in the Indo-Pacific.
The National Defense Strategyreleased in January omitted mention of Taiwan in favor of a more ambiguous reference to the “First Island Chain.” That’s a string of islands between China and the open Pacific that includes Taiwan, Japan and the Philippines.
Trump‘s assessment in early January of whether Xi might attempt a “decapitation” strike on Taiwan’s leadership deepened that official ambivalence. “He considers it to be a part of China, and that’s up to him what he’s going to be doing,”Trump told The New York Times.
Senior administration officials appear to have gotten the message.
Pentagon policy chief and fellow China hawk Elbridge Colby sidestepped referring to Taiwan in a speech on U.S. Indo-Pacific defense priorities in South Korea in January and instead reassured Beijing that the U.S doesn’t seek “regime change” and saluted “China’s proud history.”
Kanapathy isn’t the first senior Trump administration official to go along with a policy that conflicts with that official’s long-held position. Secretary of State Marco Rubio was astrong supporter of USAID before he helped dismantle it last year.
Those reversals boost survival in an administration in which officials deemed insufficiently supportive of the president’s agenda face summary dismissal. The far-right activist Laura Loomer suggested that Kanapathy should have been fired for alleged insufficient loyalty last year.
The Trump administration has taken some actions to support Taiwan while Kanapathy has been at the NSC. It approved a record $11 billion arms sale to Taipei in December and has pushed initiatives aimed to boost the island’s deterrence against possible Chinese aggression, including at U.S. Pacific Command.
“In the first year of his second term, Trump approved more arms sales to Taiwan than [President Joe] Biden did in four years, including the largest single arms package for Taiwan ever,” the White House said.
A person familiar with Kanapathy’s work on Taiwan argued that a number of wins for Taipei are likely due to Kanapathy’s influence.
“If you look at what is happening at the operational level – more attention toTaiwan at PACOM, all thosespecial forces ‘English teachers’ in Taiwan, more visiblenational guard training in Michigan — they aren’t happening organically, they’re happening because Ivan’s pushing them,” the person said.
It’s also possible that Kanapathy is having sway over U.S.-China policy being implemented out of public view.
“There’s lots of parts of U.S. Taiwan policy that are so highly classified we have no idea what actually is being implemented in those areas,” Gray said. “Ivan probably feels like he is accomplishing a great deal of good in the role that he’s in, and that resigning would either not do any good or would be counterproductive.”
