On a quiet lane in Taipei’s central Daan District (大安), an otherwise unremarkable high-rise is marked by a police guard and a tawdry A4 printout from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs indicating an “embassy area.” Keen observers would see the emblem of the Holy See, one of Taiwan’s 12 so-called “diplomatic allies.”
Unlike Taipei’s other embassies and quasi-consulates, no national flag flies there, nor is there a plaque indicating what country’s embassy this is. Visitors hoping to sign a condolence book for the late Pope Francis would instead have to visit the Italian Trade Office, adjacent to Taipei 101.
The death of Pope Francis has brought renewed attention to Taiwan’s diplomatic relationship with the Holy See, a quasi-state entity whose formal diplomatic ties with Taiwan are a historical artifact causing needless distraction and indignity for the government. President William Lai (賴清德) has been barred from attending the funeral of Pope Francis, despite Lai’s predecessors Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) and Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) attending John Paul II’s funeral and Francis’ inauguration in 2005 and 2013 respectively.
The embarrassment has been compounded by the foolishness of Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Francois Wu (吳志中), who said that Lai’s attendance was his ministry’s “most important aim.”
Meanwhile Minister of Foreign Affairs Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) is on a state visit to the microstate of Eswatini, another “ally” of Taiwan. Despite the ministry’s claims that foreign policy is based on democracy and human rights, it sends billions of dollars to subsidize the regime of King Mswati III, a tyrannical dictator who lives lavishly, flying on Taiwanese private jets to Taiwanese hospitals, while his people live in abject poverty and have the highest HIV rate in the world.
Mswati has responded to these challenges by slaughtering his people when they complain and kidnapping underage girls who disappear into his palaces for forced “marriages.”
In the middle of this, Eswatini’s far more important neighbor South Africa has downgraded ties with Taiwan, and the ministry has shown no plan to restore the relationship.
The fecklessness of the ministry over the past week demonstrates that Taiwan’s failed strategy of supporting so-called “diplomatic allies” is not merely a waste of resources, but downright counterproductive. Taiwan hitching its claims of sovereignty to international recognition by this wagon of microstates and quasi-states only serves to belittle Taiwan’s very legitimate and real claims to sovereignty.
Members of this club are mostly island microstates, including US protectorates, Haiti — which lacks a legitimate government — and a handful of small Latin American states. This is not a club that a high-functioning and successful sovereign Taiwan wants to be in.
Taiwan’s relationship with the Holy See has produced exactly zero gains for Taiwan over the decades. The Holy See, possessing no territory bounded by borders it controls, no army, no permanent citizenry and no economy, is not a country. Yet Taiwan allows its sovereignty and legitimacy to be belittled by an entity that is not even a proper state itself.
Taiwan must accept that the Holy See does not care about its sovereignty. It refuses to use Taiwan’s preferred sovereign name “Republic of China, Taiwan,” instead maintaining the “Apostolic Nunciate to China,” reflecting that its presence in Taipei is merely an attempt to reach the millions of Catholics in China, rather than the small community of Catholic Taiwanese, who form less than 1 percent of Taiwan’s population.
It should be abundantly clear by now that Taiwan’s embassy in Rome is not serving as a bridgehead to Europe, as the ministry has long claimed. Instead, it has served as a distraction from far more robust relations developing with European partners, particularly those in central and eastern Europe. Yet rather than invest deeper in those partnerships, which include critical economic and security ties, the ministry often risks letting those relationships deteriorate while it maintains its “most important aim” of preserving the fiction that these formal diplomatic relationships mean anything.
The fact remains that Taiwan’s “diplomatic allies” are not allies; they provide no useful benefit for Taiwan and certainly would not come to Taiwan’s aid in a crisis. Aid would instead come from Taiwan’s true allies: the US, Japan and whichever like-minded partners Taiwan can rally to its side over the next several years. The ministry has simply played into China’s game, draining resources and human resources on sustaining unsustainable and counterproductive relationships that themselves only cement Beijing’s “one China” propaganda.
Taiwan needs to develop a new “Taiwan first” foreign policy strategy that strategically builds support among like-minded countries with shared interests that would contribute to Taiwan’s survival. An excellent first step would be reallocating resources within the ministry’s budget away from microstates toward building a wider range of supporters within democratic allies such as the US, European countries and the Philippines, which recently upgraded its relations with Taiwan.
Without a new strategic diplomacy, Taiwan risks only further humiliation and marginalization.
Sasha B. Chhabra is a visiting fellow at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research in Taipei.
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