TAIPEI — The morning after two presidents' readouts, the most useful question in Taipei was not what was said at the summit. It was what is now on the calendar.

That was the frame at the Institute for National Policy Research forum on Sept. 26, where Chang Wu-ueh steered the post-summit conversation away from podium fights and toward three clocks: arms notifications, transit stopovers, and senior-level visits. None of them run on a press-conference timetable. Each one moves when somebody with authority puts it on an agenda.

Three clocks, one committee

For the Legislative Yuan, the difference between the three is paper. An arms sale eventually becomes a notification and then a budget line with a ministry name on it. A transit stopover is a scheduling problem that never appears in a bill. A senior visit is somebody's travel request. Only one of those three lands in a committee room, which is why the legislature tends to matter less at the announcement and more at the funding stage.

The arms clock is the slowest

Analysts quoted by Focus Taiwan on Sept. 26 put the US$14 billion arms package on a longer fuse, with movement possibly slipping to 2027. That is not a collapse of the sale. It is a timing problem, and timing problems are what budget season is made of.

The mechanism matters here. Major arms sales travel through a congressional notification window that runs weeks before anything is final, and a package of this size means more than one committee gets a look. A 2027 timeline is not a rejection; it is a queue position.

Taipei's public posture has adjusted accordingly. Deputy Foreign Minister Francois Wu said Sept. 26 that arms sales and semiconductors are American interests, not a favor Taipei is asking for — a framing designed to survive a slow news cycle rather than win one.

In Washington, the Taiwan Relations Act remains the reference point. Former U.S. senator David Perdue said the law is unchanged, while Senate Democrats criticized the pressure on Taiwan that accompanied the summit. Both readings point the same direction: the legal floor has not moved, but the scheduling has.

Stopovers and senior visits: no paper trail

The second and third clocks are harder to score because they leave no legislative trace. A presidential transit stopover is negotiated quietly and announced, if at all, days ahead. Senior-level visits work the same way. Chang's point was that these are better indicators of the relationship's temperature than any communiqué language, precisely because they cost the other side something to allow.

The practical test in Taipei is whether a stopover appears on a published itinerary or a senior visitor appears on a ministry schedule. If neither shows up by the end of the year, the summit's restraint is doing real work.

What the readouts left out

The White House fact sheet after the summit did not list Taiwan, and China's foreign ministry readout emphasized reunification. Taiwan's foreign ministry and the Mainland Affairs Council had not yet been written into the fact sheet as of Sept. 26 — a reminder that the island's name is often the last item negotiated and the first omitted.

Neither agency has said much publicly about the gap, which is consistent with how Taipei handles summit aftermath: register the omission, avoid making it the story, and keep working the follow-up list.

That omission is also why the INPR forum's advice was procedural rather than declaratory. There is nothing for the legislature to vote on when a fact sheet stays silent. There is plenty to vote on when a notification arrives.

The vote that follows

Which puts the focus back on the chamber. The defense share of the annual budget is already among the most contested line items of the autumn session, and the whip count in committee will determine whether the package's local funding matches its Washington announcement. Members who want to be seen supporting the purchase and members who want to be seen scrutinizing it both need the same committee meeting.

So the calendar to watch is not the summit's. It is the legislative one: when the notification lands, which committee takes it, and who shows up with the votes. Everything else — the readouts, the fact sheets, the analysts' timelines — is a preview. The bill is the verdict.