His Own Ambassador to China Revealed on Fox News That Trump, Around Xi Jinping's State Visit, Offered to Sell U.S. Weapons to China — the Adversary the Entire American Defense Posture Is Built to Counter, and to Which Arms Sales Are Illegal Under a Ban in Place Since 1989 — a Casual "Would He Like to Buy Some" Pitch That the State Department Immediately Denied and That Analysts Called "Insane" and "Unsettling" to the Allies at "the Pointy Edge of China's Spear"
On September 28, 2026, the U.S. ambassador to China, David Perdue, told Fox News that President Trump had offered to sell American weapons to Chinese leader Xi Jinping. In Perdue's telling — offered admiringly, as evidence of Trump's dealmaking — the president "continues to say, 'Hey, we sell arms to other people around the world.' He actually asked President Xi, would he like to buy some, at one point." The remark came around Xi's state visit that week, reportedly amid Chinese complaints about U.S. arms sales to Taiwan. There are two problems, and both are large. First, selling arms to China is illegal: the United States has maintained an arms embargo on Beijing since the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, and after Perdue's comments the State Department flatly denied any such move, stating that "U.S. law prohibits arms sales to China and there is no offer or plan to sell arms to China." Second, and worse, is the strategic incoherence: China is the single adversary the entire American military posture, and its network of Indo-Pacific alliances, exists to deter. A president casually offering to arm it — in apparent counterpoint to the weapons the U.S. sells to Taiwan, which China threatens — is exactly the signal that alarms the allies depending on Washington. Whether the offer was a joke, a negotiating gambit, or serious, it was made, and disclosed by his own ambassador as a point of pride. One China scholar said it "will be unsettling to American partners at the pointy edge of China's spear"; a human-rights advocate put it more bluntly: "If the Ambassador is telling the truth, then this is insane."