The First 100 Day: Trump 2.0 and U.S.-Taiwan and Cross Strait Relations

About the Event

Since President Trump’s second inauguration, actions taken by the administration have already set new tones for U.S.-China-Taiwan relations. From Trump 2.0’s approach to the Ukraine war, to heightened rhetoric on tariffs and trade imbalances, to the pursuit of new investment opportunities in semiconductor manufacturing and energy security, the first 100 days of Trump’s second term provide a critical lens for analyzing the changes and continuities to U.S. foreign policy priorities. Taiwan remains central to this discourse: debates regarding U.S. support for Taiwan in the security, economic, and political domains reflect wider discussions on the Trump administration’s broader Indo-Pacific strategy. Cross-Strait relations are also experiencing new pressures, from increased military readiness on both sides to greater wariness of maligned influence across civil society. Domestic politics in all three contexts further add layers of complexity to these evolving dynamics. What might the first 100 days of Trump 2.0 augur for triangular relations in the near and long-term?

Join the Sigur Center for Asian Studies for a timely conversation with a group of multidisciplinary experts to unpack, explore, and assess the impacts of the first 100 days of Trump 2.0 on U.S.-Taiwan and cross-Strait relations!

Panel One: U.S.-Taiwan Relations (10:30am–12:00pm)

"US-Taiwan Relations have considerable potential in President Trump's Second Term," Rupert Hammond-Chambers, President, US-Taiwan Business Council & Senior Advisor, Bower Group Asia

John Tai, Senior Advisor, George Washington University

Tiffany Ma, Senior Vice President for Geopolitics and Research, The Asia Group

Lunch: With a keynote speech from Andrea Yang, Deputy Representative of the Taiwan Economic and Cultural Representation Office (12:00–12:30pm)

Panel Two: Cross-strait Relations (12:30–2:00pm)

"Trump's Unilateral Nationalism and the Changing Techno-Security Structure across the Taiwan Strait: A Statist Analysis," Dean Chen, Professor of Political Science, Ramapo College

Kitsch Liao, Associate Director of the China Hub, Atlantic Council

"CCP Covert Operations in Taiwan and the Dynamics of Democratic Resilience," Cheryl Yu, China Studies Fellow, The Jamestown Foundation

About the Panel Speakers

Dr. John W. Tai

Dr. John W. Tai is Senior Advisor, Pamir Consulting LLC. He is also a Course Coordinator (McColm consultant) at the Foreign Service Institute of the U.S. Department of State, where he teaches courses on China and Taiwan. For nearly 12 years, he supported the U.S. intelligence community as an open-source analyst. Earlier in his career, John had served as an East Asia analyst at the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. He had also advised the Foreign Military Studies Office at Fort Leavenworth. He is the author of Building Civil Society in Authoritarian China (Springer, 2015) and has written on China’s technological, political, and economic developments, China's maritime strategy, Taiwan’s military diplomacy and its external relations, and South Korea's relations with the United States and China.

Rupert Hammond-Chambers

Mr. Hammond-Chambers was born and raised in Scotland before emigrating to the United States in 1987 and earning a Bachelor of Arts degree at Denison University. As a new graduate in 1991, he worked for Advanced Telecommunication Corporation (ATC), managing a variety of clients with business interests in the Caribbean and Latin America.

In April 1993, he joined The Center for Security Policy, a defense and foreign policy think tank in Washington, D.C., as the Associate for Development.

He began working for the US-Taiwan Business Council in October 1994. In March of 1998, he was promoted to Vice President of the Council. Mr. Hammond-Chamberswas elected President of the Council in November 2000.

Mr. Hammond-Chambers is also a Senior Advisor at Bower Group Asia overseeing the Taiwan practice – a strategic consultancy. He is also responsible for Bower Group Asia’s defense and security practice.

He sits on the Board of The Project 2049 Institute. He is a Trustee of Friends of Fettes College and is a member of the National Committee on United States-China Relations. He has two daughters.

Tiffany Ma

Tiffany Ma is a Senior Vice President and Director for Geopolitics and Communications at The Asia Group (TAG), where she leads the Research & Analytics Team and Geopolitics practice. At TAG, Tiffany advises multinational clients on geopolitical developments and strategic risks in the Indo-Pacific, leveraging her extensive background in client service and policy analysis.

A recognized thought leader, Tiffany regularly contributes to discussions on China-Taiwan relations, U.S.-China dynamics, and Asia-Pacific maritime security. She has testified before the House Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific on U.S.-Taiwan relations, and is frequently featured in U.S. and international media outlets.

Prior to joining TAG, Tiffany was a Senior Director at BowerGroupAsia, where she provided strategic support to Fortune 500 companies in the healthcare, defense and aerospace, and consumer goods sectors. She was responsible for managing client and stakeholder relationships as well as supporting efforts to address market access as well as policy and regulatory challenges.

Tiffany previously served as the Senior Director for Political and Security Affairs at the National Bureau of Asian Research (NBR) in Washington, D.C. In that role, she led key initiatives on geopolitical and international security issues in the Asia-Pacific, facilitating high-level discussions with senior government officials and experts. Following her tenure, she remains a non-resident fellow at NBR. She began her career as a research associate at the Project 2049 Institute in Arlington, Virginia, and has previously worked at the International Crisis Group in Beijing, the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, and the Lowy Institute in Sydney.

Tiffany holds a master’s degree in public policy from the Harvard Kennedy School, where she was a public service fellow and a Belfer student fellow. She earned bachelor’s degrees in international relations and psychology from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. She is a native Mandarin Chinese speaker. Outside of her professional endeavors, Tiffany is an avid runner and marathoner.

Dean P. Chen

Dean P. Chen (Ph.D., University of California Santa Barbara) is a professor of Political Science at Ramapo College of New Jersey. He is the author of three books: U.S.-China-Taiwan in the Age of Trump and Biden: Towards a Nationalist Strategy (New York: Routledge, 2022), U.S.-China Rivalry and Taiwan’s Mainland Policy: Security, Nationalism, and the 1992 Consensus (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), and U.S.-Taiwan Strait Policy: The Origins of Strategic Ambiguity (Lynne Rienner, 2012). His articles have appeared in Asian Survey, Asian security, Asian Politics & Policy, Pacific Focus, and International Relations of the Asia-Pacific, The Diplomat, The National Interest, Global Taiwan Brief, and East-West Center Occasional Papers. In 2014-16, Chen served as coordinator of the Conference Group on Taiwan Studies of the American Political Science Association (APSA). He was a Taiwan Fellow of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the ROC (Taiwan) in 2014 and a Fulbright U.S. Scholar in the PRC in 2017-18. He is a member of the National Committee on American Foreign Policy and a board member of the American Association for Chinese Studies. He is visiting scholar at National Taiwan University in Spring 2025 for his sabbatical and archival research at the Academia Historica.

Kitsch Liao

Kitsch Liao is an associate director of the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub. Prior to joining the Atlantic Council, Liao worked in the US Congress, in diplomatic postings, and as a cyber intelligence analyst for the private sector. He is also the cyber and military affairs consultant for Taiwan’s Doublethink Lab. He has worked on various projects with the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Institute of National Defense and Security Research, the US Department of Defense, and Janes on topics including Taiwan’s order of battle; China’s chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear capability; and Chinese disinformation and cyber espionage operations.

Liao has also published with various journals and media outlets including the Diplomat, Jamestown China Brief, National Interest, among others. Liao has also provided commentary for media outlets such as the New York Times, Financial Times, Deutsch Welle, and Al Jazeera.

He received an MA in international affairs from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and a BSc from Taiwan’s National Chengchi University.

Cheryl Yu

Cheryl Yu is a Fellow in China Studies at The Jamestown Foundation and the co-author of the recently published Global Taiwan Institute report “Chinese Communist Party Covert Operations Against Taiwan.” Her research on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its operations has been published by think tanks and global media. Previously, she was the China Programs and Research Manager at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation and a research and outreach consultant for Freedom House’s China analysis team. She has a Master’s degree in public administration from the University of Washington’s Evans School of Public Policy and Governance, where she produced an independent research project on the impact of the CCP’s surveillance of Chinese students in the United States. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Taiwan’s National Chengchi University.

About the Moderators

Richard Haddock

Richard J. Haddock is the Assistant Director of the Sigur Center for Asian Studies at the George Washington University, where he leads the Center’s robust Taiwan affairs programming, outreach, and curriculum development. He is also a member of the UC Berkeley U.S.-Taiwan Next Generation Working Group, where his research focuses on U.S.-Taiwan education diplomacy and exchange. Previously, he has held positions at the GW East Asia National Resource Center, the National Democratic Institute’s Asia team, the American Institute in Taiwan’s Public Diplomacy Section, and the U.S. Department of State. Mr. Haddock is currently pursuing a PhD in Public Policy and Public Administration at The George Washington University, focusing on digital democracy and e-governance development in the Asia-Pacific. He holds an MA in Asian Studies from the Elliott School, with a concentration on domestic politics and foreign policy of East Asia. He graduated from the University of Central Florida with a BA in Political Science and minors in Asian Studies and Diplomacy.

Eric Schluessel

Eric Schluessel is a social historian of China and Central Asia, and his work focuses on Xinjiang (East Turkestan) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Land of Strangers, his first monograph, uses local archival and manuscript sources in Chinese and Chaghatay Turkic to explore the ramifications of a project undertaken in the last decades of the Qing empire to transform Xinjiang’s Turkic-speaking Muslims into Chinese-speaking Confucians. It won the 2021 John K. Fairbank Prize from the American Historical Association.

Schluessel is currently pursuing two research projects: Saints and Sojourners explores the economic history of the Uyghur region from the 1750s through the 1950s as seen from below, through the records of merchants, farmers, and managers of pious endowments. It ties changes at the village level to shifts in the global economy in places as far away as Manchester and Tianjin. Exiled Gods delves into Han Chinese settler culture and religion to illuminate the history of a diasporic community of demobilized soldiers and their descendants that spanned the Qing empire.

Thanks to grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies, Schluessel has also completed a translation and critical edition of the Tārīkh-i Ḥamīdī of Mullah Mūsa Sayrāmī, which is an important Chaghatay-language chronicle of nineteenth-century Xinjiang.

Schluessel previously taught at the University of Montana in Missoula and spent the 2018–2019 academic year at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. Schluessel has also completed a translation and critical edition of the Tārīkh-i Ḥamīdī of Mullah Mūsa Sayrāmī, which is an important Chaghatay-language chronicle of nineteenth-century Xinjiang.

Host or Publisher Sigur Center for Asian Studies at GW