If you're wondering how seriously President Donald Trump takes Taiwan's security, former national security adviser John Bolton has a memorable visual for you. Trump once held up a Sharpie pen in the Oval Office, pointed to the tip, and said "that's Taiwan." Then he gestured to the massive Resolute desk and added, "That's China."

The Ultimate Transactional President

Bolton, who worked in Trump's first administration before becoming one of his sharpest critics, isn't mincing words about what Taiwan should expect. In an interview with The Economist published Thursday, he warned that Trump would happily abandon the self-ruled island if it meant landing what he could sell as a historic trade agreement with Beijing. "They should be scared," Bolton said of Taiwan's leaders.

The former adviser's assessment is blunt: Trump's foreign policy is "purely transactional," driven less by strategic thinking than by the desire to look like a "brilliant dealmaker." Bolton believes Trump "would trade anything if need be" for something "astonishingly large and shiny" from Chinese President Xi Jinping. And for Xi, Taiwan's status isn't just important—it's the top priority.

When Geopolitics Gets Awkward

Bolton's warnings land at a particularly tense moment for the region. Washington is trying to navigate a fresh dispute between Japan and China over Taiwan's future. After Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi suggested that a Chinese attack on Taiwan could trigger Japanese military action, Xi reportedly spent about half of an hour-long call with Trump hammering home that Taiwan's "return to China" is central to Beijing's worldview.

Later that same day, Trump apparently called Takaichi and urged her not to anger Beijing over Taiwan's sovereignty, according to reports from Reuters and the Wall Street Journal. Japan's government quickly pushed back on that characterization. Chief Cabinet Secretary Minoru Kihara told reporters he firmly denied Trump had given such advice and said Japan had filed a complaint with the Wall Street Journal.

Still, the damage may be done. Al Jazeera reported Thursday that Trump's public silence on the Japan-China dispute has unnerved officials in Tokyo, who worry he might weaken support for Taiwan to secure a trade deal—exactly what Bolton is warning about. In an increasingly militarized region, that's the kind of uncertainty that keeps defense ministers up at night.

The question isn't really whether Trump sees foreign policy as transactional—everyone knows he does. The question is whether Taiwan, a thriving democracy of 24 million people and a critical link in global semiconductor supply chains, ends up as a bargaining chip in whatever "astonishingly large and shiny" deal Trump is chasing next.