Among Taiwan’s 23 diplomatic allies, six are located in the South Pacific, and four of those six are concentrated in the northern Micronesian region.
It would be no exaggeration to call this a major diplomatic base for Taiwan.
In the past, Taiwan has always paid great attention to its diplomatic allies in this region, even setting up a multilateral Taiwan-South Pacific summit process in 2006, thus upgrading the approach of bilateral contacts with individual countries. This process implied a more systematic and transparent approach to Taiwan’s relations with its South Pacific allies.
Why the development from bilateral to multilateral relations?
Because a multilateral summit involves not only talks between heads of state, but also promotes cooperation in agricultural, health, educational, cultural and other sectors.
The result is that the multilateral summit frequently leads to smaller multilateral meetings between government ministries and agencies, and this will further deepen cooperation and relations with the region. These multilateral summits also have a tendency to expand and generate further contacts, none of which can be achieved by bilateral contacts.
Throughout President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) current visit to the region, he has been holding individual meetings, rather than organizing a multilateral summit. The visit was necessitated by Ma twice canceling the Taiwan-South Pacific Summit. Ma should have simply held the postponed summit, instead of holding a series of bilateral meetings.
There are only two possible explanations for this approach: Either the South Pacific nations have lost interest in Taiwan and do not want a summit with Ma, which has forced him to hold bilateral meetings, or Ma is not interested in maintaining diplomatic relations with the South Pacific region or holding a multilateral summit, and is only making token visits to the region to demonstrate that he is still aware of their existence.
Regardless of which of these explanations is correct, it is obvious that while the number of diplomatic allies remains unchanged, Taiwan’s relations with the South Pacific region are in great danger of being downgraded.
Lai I-chung is an executive member of Taiwan Thinktank.
TRANSLATED BY PERRY SVENSSON
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