Secretary of State Marco Rubio confirmed this week that the Trump administration is holding up a $14 billion arms package for Taiwan, telling Congress the deal remains under review and has not been canceled.
The admission came across back-to-back hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a House appropriations subcommittee. It landed alongside a far broader message: Rubio's clearest public articulation yet of the strategic doctrine driving what he and others in the administration now openly call "Trump 2.0."
Rubio appeared before lawmakers to defend the State Department's fiscal year 2027 budget request. He faced pointed questions on two fronts that, taken together, sketch the outline of an administration recalibrating around raw national advantage rather than the postwar liberal order Washington built and defended for eight decades.
A War Washington Calls Over, But Hasn't Ended
Rubio's Capitol Hill appearance in early June marked his first testimony since the United States entered its war with Iran in late February.
He arrived intending to frame the session as routine budget business. Lawmakers from both parties had other plans.
They pressed him on the legal basis for the military campaign against Iran, on whether the State Department was simply providing diplomatic cover for decisions already made by the Pentagon, and on why formal testimony had taken so long. Democrats had first demanded it back in March, arguing that public hearings were a constitutional obligation the administration was avoiding.
Rubio told the committees that the war had "ended." He acknowledged, though, that the ceasefire remains fragile.
Strikes have continued intermittently in the region. The Strait of Hormuz has alternated between closure and limited passage — a gap between the administration's declared endpoint and the situation on the ground that has fueled skepticism in Congress.
Rubio's own explanation narrowed the claim considerably. Large-scale, coordinated strikes against Iranian military capacity have stopped, he said, but the U.S. retains the ability to strike again "if necessary." What he calls the war's end, in other words, is closer to the end of major combat operations than a declaration that hostilities have stopped altogether.
That ambiguity carries a price tag. Analysts at the Center for Strategic and International Studies put the direct cost of the campaign, code-named Operation Epic Fury, at roughly $40 billion, with munitions accounting for the largest single share — including well over 1,000 Tomahawk cruise missiles fired at roughly $3.5 million apiece.
Congress has yet to appropriate funds to cover a bill that fell outside the regular defense budget. That has set up a fight over supplemental spending likely to intensify, since replenishing depleted stockpiles could take years, according to defense officials.
On the nuclear track, Rubio struck a more optimistic note. He told lawmakers Iran had agreed to negotiate aspects of its nuclear program it had previously refused to discuss, and that Iran's new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, appeared to be taking a more active role in decision-making through written communications and intermediaries.
He was careful to draw a line, however. Any sanctions relief for Tehran, he said, would have to be tied to verifiable steps on its nuclear program, not offered as a "signing bonus" for reopening Hormuz.
Taiwan's Arms Package Caught In The Machinery
It was in this same setting that Rubio confirmed what Taiwan's defense establishment had suspected for weeks: a roughly $14 billion arms sale is being held up inside the administration.
He was emphatic that the package remains under active consideration and will not be scrapped. He also reminded lawmakers that Washington approved an $11 billion sale to Taiwan just last December — one of the largest in U.S. history.
Where Rubio drew a firmer line was on motive. Pressed on whether Beijing's objections were shaping the delay, he told the committee that China raises the issue constantly in discussions with U.S. officials — but that this "in no way" determines the administration's timing.
The decision, he said, belongs to President Trump alone, who has previously described the pending sale as leverage in dealings with Beijing.
Members of the bipartisan Congressional Taiwan Caucus said afterward they were encouraged that Rubio reaffirmed the arms-sales process is not something Washington negotiates with China. That, they noted, is consistent with the Taiwan Relations Act and the Six Assurances that have underpinned the relationship for nearly five decades.
The explanation has not fully settled the matter in Taipei or on Capitol Hill. Reporting earlier this year suggested a competing rationale — that the Navy was withholding munitions destined for Taiwan to ensure adequate supply for the Iran campaign. If accurate, that version of events would tie the island's defense procurement directly to the demands of a Middle East war rather than to any China-specific calculation.
"We Are Not Here To Be Social Workers"
Rubio used his opening remarks to lay out what amounts to a mission statement for the administration's foreign policy.
The United States government, he told lawmakers, is not a charity and does not exist to act as the world's social worker. It exists to win — for the American people, for the national interest, and for the country's future. Every dollar spent and every action taken, he has said elsewhere, must produce a measurable result that makes the nation safer, stronger or more prosperous.
That framework extends well past the Middle East.
Rubio told the committees that Latin America — long treated in Washington policy circles as a region requiring aid and patience — has undergone what he described as a fundamental reversal. More than a dozen countries in the Western Hemisphere, he said, now stand aligned with Washington on both security and economic matters.
He called the shift remarkable, given that outside powers had been gaining footholds there for years. With the exception of Nicaragua, Cuba and a Venezuela still working through internal turmoil, he characterized the region as now populated by U.S. allies or governments trending in that direction.
The language matters because it reframes the purpose of foreign assistance itself. Rubio told Congress that remaining aid dollars are being folded into State Department strategy rather than distributed as open-ended goodwill. The test going forward, he said, is not how much money goes into a program but what concrete outcome comes out of it.
Rethinking The Foundations Of National Power
Rubio's broader case — echoed in earlier remarks at the Munich Security Conference — is that a country unable to build its own ships, manufacture its own medicines, control its own borders or secure critical resources cannot protect its people or defend its interests.
Foreign policy, in his telling, is no longer a distinct lane run out of the State Department. It now has to account for shipbuilding capacity, pharmaceutical production, immigration enforcement and access to energy and critical minerals as matters of national strategy.
He has also described the current period as the first time since the end of the Cold War that the United States faces a rival, China, that approaches genuine parity in national power. That framing has been central to his argument for discarding what he calls Washington's decades-long faith in globalization and free trade as tools for spreading prosperity and freedom.
He has previously dismissed that older assumption as a "dangerous delusion," arguing that open markets allowed rivals to hollow out American manufacturing and seize control of critical supply chains.
The throughline in Rubio's testimony was a blunt definition of what the military is for. Armies, he told lawmakers, do not fight for abstractions; they fight for a people, a nation and a way of life. In his framing, the ultimate purpose of American power is the defense of Western civilization — a mission that leaves no room, in his view, for the State Department to function as a global aid agency rather than an instrument built to serve U.S. interests.
Divergent Goals Cloud The Endgame
Democrats used the hearings to challenge the administration's account of how the Iran war began and where it is headed.
Senator Chris Van Hollen accused Trump of entering the conflict on behalf of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, calling the administration's foreign policy a disaster of the president's own making.
Independent analysis suggests the underlying strategic goals of Washington and its ally may not fully align.
CSIS national security analyst Emily Harding has written that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has described the military objective as the destruction of Iran's missile stockpiles and naval forces. Trump himself, though, has shown interest in a Venezuela-style internal change of government that would install a more pliable leadership in Tehran.
Israel's aims, in her assessment, run further still — toward the dismantling of Iran's Islamic Republic altogether, even at the risk of fragmenting the country into competing factions. That gap between allied objectives, Harding has argued, could shape the region's trajectory for years regardless of how the current ceasefire holds.
For Taiwan, the immediate takeaway from Rubio's testimony is narrower but no less consequential. The island's largest pending arms request is tangled in the same bureaucratic and strategic machinery as a war half a world away. Its resolution now depends less on the state of the U.S.-Taiwan relationship than on how Washington chooses to spend its finite stock of munitions, money and attention.
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