Takaichi Meets Trump Day Before Xi Summit on Taiwan — SkimNews
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- Takaichi Sanae met Trump in New York on September 22, one day before Xi Jinping arrived in Washington for his second U.S. summit with Trump this year; she said afterward that the timing itself demonstrated the strength of the Japan-U.S. alliance.
- Washington and Beijing agreed to extend their trade truce by two months, until January 10, postponing additional tariffs and export restrictions and reducing the immediate risk of renewed confrontation.
- Xi received an unusually warm welcome at Joint Base Andrews, where Trump greeted him on the tarmac, and declared in a written statement that China and the United States "should be partners, not rivals."
- The core concern for Tokyo is Taiwan: Trump has described U.S. arms sales to Taiwan as a bargaining chip, and Japan fears a deal that weakens those sales would directly affect its security, given the proximity of its southwestern islands.
- Motegi Toshimitsu, who attended the Takaichi-Trump meeting, told NHK he believed Washington's Taiwan position remained unchanged from the leaders' May summit and that Japan and the United States share an understanding on the issue.
- At the UN General Assembly the same day, Takaichi named Russia over Ukraine and North Korea over its nuclear programs but conspicuously omitted China by name, despite months of deteriorating China-Japan relations.
Why it matters: Japan's southwestern islands sit close enough to Taiwan that any U.S. concession on arms sales would directly reshape Tokyo's deterrence calculus. With Trump eager for economic deliverables before midterm elections six weeks away and Xi arriving to press exactly that trade-off, Takaichi's day-before meeting is a preemptive bid to keep Taiwan out of the deal.
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