Tue, Mar 17, 2026 page8

• Taiwan’s hidden power in ASEAN

  • By Aniello Iannone
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  Taiwan is not invited to the table. It never has been, but this year, with the Philippines holding the ASEAN chair, the question that matters is no longer who gets formally named, it is who becomes structurally indispensable.

  The “one China” formula continues to do its job. It sets the outer boundary of official diplomatic speech, and no one in the region has a serious interest in openly challenging it. However, beneath the surface, something is thickening. Trade corridors, digital infrastructure, artificial intelligence (AI) cooperation, supply chains, cross-border investment: The connective tissue between Taiwan and ASEAN is quietly and methodically growing denser.

  The result is a slow redefinition of Taipei’s regional presence, not as a recognized sovereign actor, but as a functional node that is becoming increasingly difficult to isolate. Yet, this is not a story about a diplomatic breakthrough. It is a story about how geopolitical realities tend to outgrow the vocabulary built to contain them.

  The government’s New Southbound Policy, in its updated iteration as New Southbound Policy Plus (NSP+), has evolved from an economic diversification initiative into something more precise — a systematic program of institutional hedging. The underlying logic is straightforward, perhaps brutally so: Build linkages dense enough that isolation becomes costly not only for Taiwan, but for those asked to carry it out.

  Taipei has understood something Beijing struggles to acknowledge, that diplomatic isolation works only so long as it costs little to enforce. When an ASEAN member must decide whether to exclude Taiwan from a regional forum, the decision is simple if the ties are shallow, such as a signature on a communique with no real consequences. It becomes considerably more complicated if Taiwan is training the country’s engineers, building its 5G network and holding patents on manufacturing processes it cannot replace within a year or two.

  The NSP+ targets precisely that, by not buying friendships, but creating interdependencies deep enough to make isolation a concrete economic disruption rather than a cheap political gesture.

  The sectors Taipei has chosen are not random: technology transfer, smart infrastructure, semiconductor-adjacent manufacturing, AI capacity-building, education pipelines and investment frameworks. These are exactly the areas where dependency, once established, is difficult to unwind without significant cost. When standards, skills and platforms converge, decoupling ceases to be a diplomatic gesture and becomes an economic disruption. That is Taipei’s wager, and it is a rational one.

  The Philippine presidency of ASEAN is an unusual test of how well that strategy is working, and Manila knows exactly what it is doing. Memorandum Circular 82, issued last year, opened new channels for economic and investment contacts with Taiwan. On the surface it is presented as a minor bureaucratic adjustment, with no official titles, ordinary passports and language calibrated to avoid provoking Beijing. However, read it for what it is in practice: bureaucratic statecraft. Administrative law is being used to open political space that diplomatic law keeps firmly shut. It is not a loophole. It is policy.

  The alignment with NSP+ priorities is not accidental. Taiwan is offering cooperation in precisely the areas Manila needs to make its ASEAN agenda look credible — resilient digital infrastructure, AI and innovation ecosystems, green logistics corridors, and smart manufacturing. Taiwan needs partners who create friction against isolation; the Philippines needs partners who reduce dependence on any single geopolitical patron.

  Neither side can say this in the language of alliance, so both say it in the language of infrastructure, which, in today’s Indo-Pacific region, often amounts to the same thing.

  The second pillar of Manila’s chairmanship pulls in a different direction, yet reinforces the same underlying logic. The push for a legally binding South China Sea Code of Conduct (COC) anchored to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea is not a diplomatic ritual to be consumed in conference rooms. It is a credibility index.

  If the COC advances without requiring historic closure, meaning a wholesale revision of pre-existing territorial claims, ASEAN can say that it still possesses genuine normative traction. If it stalls again, “ASEAN centrality” risks becoming a ceremonial label attached to a region governed elsewhere.

  For Taiwan, this matters more than it first appears. A COC grounded in the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea strengthens the principle that maritime behavior is regulated by international law rather than by unilateral coercion, a principle in which Taipei has a direct and immediate interest, given the situation in the waters adjacent to the Taiwan Strait.

  However, norms do not enforce themselves. They travel only when backed by coalitions, practices and credible costs for those who contravene them. Here the structural constraint is familiar. ASEAN’s consensus rule allows China to slow negotiations without openly vetoing them, raising the transaction costs of agreement, fragmenting preferences and multiplying dependencies.

  Manila cannot override that structure. What it can do is shift the baseline: compress timelines, normalize higher expectations and create momentum that becomes politically costly to reverse. In diplomacy, momentum is not victory, but it is a form of leverage over the future.

  Taken together, these two tracks suggest a single project, not a master plan, but an accumulation of micro-linkages hardening into structure, an Indo-Pacific architecture in which Taiwan’s role becomes harder to erase and a rules-based order harder to casually discard.

  Neither goal would be completed this year. A year in the ASEAN chair does not transform the region’s foundations, but a successful presidency can move both far enough that the direction becomes more resistant to reversal. That, more often than not, is the realistic horizon of foreign policy: not solving structural problems, but making them somewhat more expensive to ignore.

  It is also worth saying something uncomfortable. Infrastructure and technology networks can be disaggregated if political pressure becomes sufficiently intense. Several cases of renegotiable Chinese infrastructure projects across the region demonstrate as much. The procedural optimism underlying the analysis, the assumption that micro-linkages will necessarily solidify into durable structure, is a wager, not a certainty. Taipei and Manila know this — which is, in part, why they are building quickly.

  ASEAN does not die because it is slow. It dies when it ceases to be useful as a mediation device between power and norms. The Philippine presidency is a test of that utility, and a reminder for those watching the region that geopolitical orders do not exist by geography alone. They exist because actors convert fractures into procedures, and procedures into durability. This is how Taiwan is becoming a regional actor. Not through summits, but through infrastructure. Not through recognition; through embedded indispensability.

  Aniello Iannone is a lecturer in Indonesian and Southeast Asian politics in the Department of Political Science and Government at Diponegoro University in Indonesia. His research focuses on ASEAN regionalism, Indonesian politics and the international political economy of Southeast Asia.
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