Trump Offered Xi American Weapons, Says His Own Ambassador. Trump Says He Didn’t — But Maybe It’s a Good Idea.

In the space of two days, Washington produced three official positions on selling weapons to China. The US ambassador in Beijing said the president had offered some. The State Department said the law forbids it. And the president said it never happened, but that it might not be a bad idea. Diplomats call this strategic ambiguity. Everyone else calls it a normal week in Washington.

Version one: the ambassador

The story began on Fox News Sunday, where David Perdue, the US ambassador to China, was explaining American arms support for Taiwan. Along the way he shared a detail from Xi Jinping’s state visit to Washington: “He actually asked President Xi, would he like to buy some, at one point.” “He” was the president. “Some” were American weapons.

It was a bold sales pitch. The United States has not sold weapons to China since the 1980s, and Washington officially treats Beijing as a foreign adversary. Offering it the catalogue is a little like a bank inviting the burglar to open a savings account.

Version two: the State Department

On Monday, the State Department issued the kind of clarification usually reserved for a mislabelled cereal box: “U.S. law prohibits arms sales to China and there is no offer or plan to sell arms to China.” Another US official added that the government “has no plans to sell weapons to China.” Two denials in one day: the clearest possible sign that nothing whatsoever happened.

Version three: the president

Then the president weighed in himself. “I never heard of that one,” Trump said, before hearing of it almost immediately: “No, they’d probably like to buy it because we do make better equipment than that, so maybe it’s a good idea. But we didn’t discuss.” He also suggested that his ambassador had probably been talking about Taiwan.

That would be the same Taiwan whose $14 billion weapons package Trump put on hold in May, after Xi raised it with him. So the island that actually wants to buy American weapons is kept in the queue, while the country those weapons are meant to deter receives, at worst, a hypothetical offer and, at best, a compliment on its taste.

In Beijing, analysts are now studying the transcript to work out whether it was a joke, a gambit or a sales call. They can relax: Washington hasn’t decided either. For now, the official position of the United States is that it did not offer China weapons, cannot legally sell China weapons, and makes much better weapons than China does — in case anyone was asking.