Rubio: Taiwan arms sales constrained by US needs, industrial base

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Wednesday that U.S. arms sales to Taiwan are in part constrained by Washington’s potential military needs in other parts of the world and the industrial base.

“People think … we view arm sales through the limited vacuum of the one particular place. A lot of this also involves balancing our industrial capacity and our military industrial base,” Rubio, who also serves as President Trump’s national security adviser , told reporters at the UN General Assembly.

“This is not about Taiwan in specific, but when we sell something, that means we don’t have it anymore,” he continued. “We can get it in the future, but we don’t have it now.”

Rubio added, “So anytime we do any sales, not to Taiwan, to anybody, it is always balanced against what are our own needs in different parts of the world, and whether we can afford to sell something because we may need it for ourselves. So that’s going through that process.”

Earlier Wednesday, four GOP senators led by Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) called on Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to free up billions of dollars in stalled national security assistance for Taiwan, ahead of Trump’s summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping later this week.

The senators pointed in the letter to the State Department’s intention not to obligate $300 million in foreign military financing, the Pentagon’s failure to set aside $1 billion in funding for the Taiwan Security Cooperation Initiative and the Trump administration’s decision to, for now, withhold $14 billion in foreign military sales to Taipei.

“It is difficult to imagine how the United States might credibly project influence in the Indo-Pacific if the price of keeping up diplomatic appearances is denying our partners key deterrent capabilities,” the senators wrote in a 2-page letter.

Trump said he discussed the stalled $14 billion arms sale with Xi during their meeting in China in May, characterizing it as a point of leverage over Beijing.

“It’s a very good negotiating chip for us, frankly,” the president said in an interview with Fox News at the time. “It’s a lot of weapons.”

The sale , which was approved by Congress back in January, cannot move forward until the commander-in-chief formally transmits it to Congress.

The Trump administration did approve a $11 billion sale to Taiwan in December last year, which included HIMARS rocket systems, Javelin antitank missiles and howitzers.

Rubio asserted on Wednesday that the U.S. military has “plenty” of munitions to achieve its objectives against Iran but argued that Washington is active elsewhere as well.

“We have obligations in the Indo-Pacific. We have obligations increasingly in Southern Command. We have obligations and commitments to NATO and our partners there,” the secretary of state said.

“And any part of the world where you go and tell them there’s going to be five less American soldiers and two less planes, everybody freaks out,” he told reporters. “So, at the end of the day, you know that’s what this is all balanced by. And it’s not just about the current standing.”