Rubio says U.S. Taiwan policy unchanged after Trump-Xi summit

Rubio used a pair of terse answers to draw a clear line on the administration’s priorities as Donald Trump met Xi Jinping in Beijing: Taiwan policy was “unchanged,” and the United States was “not asking for China’s help” with Iran.

The comments came during a May 14 NBC News interview with Tom Llamas while Trump was in Beijing for a two-day summit focused on trade, the war with Iran and Taiwan. NBC reported that Xi warned Trump that tensions over Taiwan could lead to “clashes and even conflicts” if the issue was not handled carefully, underscoring how central the island remains to the relationship between Washington and Beijing.

The summit unfolded against a fragile U.S.-China trade truce and drew an unusually large traveling entourage. Along with Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Trump brought Eric Trump, Lara Trump, Elon Musk, Tim Cook and Jensen Huang to Beijing, a signal of how trade, technology and security interests were being stitched together around the talks. Rubio’s language suggested the administration was trying to keep those tracks separate even as the agenda overlapped.

Rubio framed direct engagement with China as unavoidable. He told Llamas that China had sanctioned him in the past over his criticism of its human-rights record, but said his job as secretary of state was to carry out the president’s foreign policy and keep talking to Beijing because the United States and China are the world’s two largest economies and likely their two most powerful militaries. That argument put diplomacy ahead of personal grievance, while leaving the White House’s China line centered on strategic management rather than any broader reset.

Rubio’s interview also showed how quickly the administration’s attention moved from great-power politics to a separate crisis in the Western Hemisphere. In a second NBC segment the same day, Llamas pressed Rubio about a proposed $100 million U.S. aid package for Cuba, where NBC described the island as facing its worst electricity blackouts in decades and escalating poverty. Taken together, the exchanges pointed to a foreign-policy hierarchy built around China and Taiwan at the top, Iran as an urgent but separate conflict, and Cuba as a humanitarian test of U.S. commitments.