In February, The Economist published the results of a stunning survey of China’s diplomatic aggression against Taiwan around the world. The results should serve as a wakeup call to Taipei: as of 2025, a decisive majority of internationally recognized sovereign states accept China’s fiction that Taiwan is a part of its territory. Of these, 70 fully endorse the Chinese regime’s threat of war to seize the island nation, including essentially every country in Africa. A majority of the “Global South” now subscribes to Beijing’s views—very much shredding the fiction that the Third World will be “non-aligned” in this century’s superpower competition.
The threat posed by this trend in global alignment could not be more dire. This is not a question of esoteric diplomatic phrasing; rather, it is a question of Taiwan’s very legitimacy as a nation. China hopes and fully intends to have the entire world believe it has a legitimate right to conquer Taiwan—such that the world will stand by as China swallows up a democratic, sovereign, and independent neighbor, leaving the Taiwanese to suffer the same fate as the Uyghurs and Tibetans.
In the face of such a serious threat, Taiwanese must ask their leaders why they are not doing more to fight back. Taiwan’s foreign ministry will protest that they have preserved a dozen “diplomatic allies” and maintain strong “unofficial” relationships with the West, but otherwise cannot compete with China’s checkbook diplomacy around the world. It is not that these current efforts are insufficient—rather, it indicates that the current strategy has failed.
Taiwan’s excessive focus on diplomatic “Allies”
Why has this strategy failed so spectacularly? Burdened by the inertial energy of the Republic of China (ROC) legacy, Taiwan has relied too much on “diplomatic allies”—the few nations, predominantly microstates, with whom Taiwan maintains official diplomatic relations. Despite the foreign ministry’s insistence on calling these nations “allies,” Taiwan has little to show for its exorbitant efforts at courting them. Once or twice a year, the UN envoys of Saint Lucia or Tuvalu will mumble out some phrase about the importance of the Republic of China (Taiwan) being allowed to observe meetings of the World Health Assembly—utterances made before a largely indifferent crowd of ambassadors, who have absolutely no intention of giving such messages the slightest of thoughts. Taiwan’s diplomats will then dutifully clip these uninspiring messages for social media and declare victory.
Taiwanese officials also claim that maintaining allies in the Pacific and Caribbean is necessary to facilitate “transit visits” whereby the Taiwanese president stops in the United States en route. Despite the indignities Taiwanese presidents are routinely forced to suffer on such transits, if such visits really are important to the bilateral relationship with the United States, a transit is not necessary: a US law passed in 1994 unambiguously states that “whenever the President of Taiwan… shall apply to visit the United States… the official shall be admitted to the United States.”
These diplomatic relations are in practice counterproductive, for these “allies” do not actually recognize Taiwan as a sovereign state. When Guatemala’s foreign minister visited Taiwan in 2023, he claimed Guatemala would “always support Taiwan” because it had supported Taiwan since establishing diplomatic relations in 1933. This is complete nonsense, because in 1933 Taiwan was a province of Japan and the Republic of China neither controlled nor even claimed Taiwan. These anachronisms only serve to further China’s goals by promoting the fiction that Taiwan belongs to China, or that Taiwan’s people desire to join it.
Taiwan insists on calling these nations “allies,” even as it knows full well that it receives little from them in return. In the event of a crisis, the only Palauans coming to Taiwan’s defense would be the 500 Palauans serving in the US military, who serve under the US flag (alongside their Marshallese cousins), because their countries are functionally overseas territories of the United States. Taiwan, with its globally interconnected economy, powerful passport, and large armed forces, stands as a more credible sovereign state. It is noble for Taiwan to respect its Polynesian brother nations, but to equate Taiwan’s sovereignty with microstates who themselves have little functional independence only serves to debase Taiwan’s own legitimate claims to sovereignty.
The altruistic argument to supporting such brotherly nations is also diminished by Taiwan’s diplomatic partnership with the authoritarian state of Eswatini. Eswatini’s king Mswati III oppresses his own people, kidnaps young girls for forced “marriages,” and robs his already impoverished countrymen. With “allies” such as this, it is no wonder that the entire continent of Africa has soured on Taiwan, whose presidents have turned a blind eye to Eswatini’s internal repression in the name of maintaining official relations. Meanwhile, Taiwan’s relations with South Africa have reached a near breaking point as South Africa’s government seeks to downgrade ties, whereas 30 years ago Nelson Mandela himself made a groundbreaking visit to Taiwan.
Moving past the problem of derecognition
In the face of such an obviously failed strategy, why has Taiwan’s diplomacy been burdened by inaction? Insiders frequently point to Taiwan’s lack of an internal consensus on key issues of national identity. This excuse belies the stable ROC (Taiwan) “non-consensus consensus identity” around which both mainstream political camps have coalesced.
The lack of complete derecognition of the ROC has also prevented the precipitation of a crisis moment to propel Taiwan in a new direction. Instead of prompting a new strategy, Taiwan remains paralyzed by dealing with the perennially looming crisis of derecognition, rather than moving past derecognition into a more positive direction.
There is nothing to be feared from derecognition: instead, Taiwan can only gain from putting to bed the myth of “one China” kept alive by the competition in recognition between the PRC and ROC. This was a propagandistic narrative developed by the Kuomintang (KMT, 國民黨) when it colonized Taiwan without the consent of its people, pushing a global narrative of competition between the ROC and PRC for “one China” that linked Taiwan with China—a neighbouring country of which Taiwan has never been a part.
This battle was won decisively by the Chinese Communist Party half a century ago, and maintaining the fiction invented by two Leninist authoritarian parties with imperial designs is no way for Taiwan to win hearts and minds around the world. By shedding itself of these narratives, Taiwan can tell its true story: that of a tiny but valiant island once again resisting the many empires who have tried to control it over the centuries.
Taiwan must pursue a new strategic diplomacy focused on its own national interests, and begin to treat its so-called “allies” the same as any country. Taiwanese foreign policy must be “Taiwan First”—focused narrowly on achieving specific gains for Taiwan’s survival and the advancement of Taiwanese interests. Critical to effectuating this new foreign policy will be advancing its message globally on modern platforms and media, rather than trying to play byzantine diplomatic games of inside baseball.
Taiwan needs to focus more on understanding the peoples and politics of its true allies: the United States and other democratic countries in East Asia and Europe. Taiwan’s reliance on elite capture has left it vulnerable on all fronts. Elite capture served as a stabilizer in a time when China was weak and less aggressive, but it has now backfired spectacularly as new leaders are bought off in the Solomon Islands, elections are won and lost in Latin America, and new populist currents drive American politics.
Taiwan’s failed foreign policies have left its politicians panicked by the return of Trump, as they find that their strategy of cultivating bygone Republican political figures from the neoconservative wing such as Mike Pompeo and Nikki Haley has left them with few allies in the second Trump Administration. Similarly, heaping hundreds of thousands of dollars on the United Kingdom’s shortest ever serving prime minister (and erstwhile pro-China lobbyist) Liz Truss has only resulted in the indignity of Britain preventing former president Tsai Ing-wen from entering the country.
Taiwan has already lost its diplomatic “allies,” but now runs the serious risk of alienation from its actual allies. Without a new strategy designed to reach outside the failed thinking of the neocon and liberal internationalist think tank community whose influence is in its modern nadir, Taiwan is slowly conceding the fight before the first shot has been fired.
The main point: Taiwan is rapidly losing support around the globe, and must strategically focus its foreign policy efforts on building genuine support among true allies through public campaigns—rather than diplomatic jockeying to maintain official recognition with a dwindling number of small states.
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