Wed, Apr 22, 2026 page8

• Taiwan and the grammar of trust

  • By Aniello Iannone
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  The most useful place to start thinking about Taiwan’s predicament is not the Taiwan Strait. It is Southeast Asia, and how the region evaluates the reliability of external powers. The latest “State of Southeast Asia” survey shows that Japan enjoys high trust across ASEAN. Japan is trusted because it has been materially present and strategically active without being coercive. Most powers in Asia fail at that combination. In Indonesia, trust has softened and the reasons are structural. Jakarta, under Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto, is maximizing optionality, refusing to anchor itself to any single partner. Everyone loses relative salience. Meanwhile, Japan’s attention has drifted northward. Taiwan, the constitutional debate, the trilateral with Washington and Seoul. Southeast Asian elites register that drift. They say nothing. They adjust.

  This matters for Taiwan, because it shows how trust operates in the Indo-Pacific. The region does not evaluate partners through ideological affinity. It asks a blunter question: Can this power be useful without becoming a liability? Does it widen our options or narrow them? That metric applies equally to Japan, China and the US. It is that metric through which the region watches what unfolds across the Strait, not as a contest between democracy and authoritarianism, but as a stress test of how major powers handle their commitments under pressure. What happens to Taiwan shows Southeast Asia what could happen to them.

  Chinese Nationalist Party Chairwoman (KMT) Cheng Li-wun’s (鄭麗文) visit to Beijing earlier this month needs to be viewed in this context. What Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) staged at the Great Hall of the People was not cross-strait dialogue. It was a demonstration of political reach, proof that Beijing can shape Taiwan’s domestic debate, reward accommodation and bypass the elected government in Taipei as if it were irrelevant. Xi invoked shared bloodlines and historical inevitability. Cheng spoke of peace. Neither mentioned the military exercises that encircled Taiwan in December last year, or the six live-fire drills since 2022. The 10 incentive measures announced immediately afterward, tourism, flights, a proposed KMT-Chinese Communist Party (CCP) communication channel, are standard “united front” statecraft. ASEAN governments recognize the mechanics instantly. They have been navigating the same playbook for years.

  The sequencing is crucial. The meeting occurred with a presidential summit between the US and China approaching next month, a US$14 billion US arms package to Taiwan sitting unsigned and the KMT-controlled legislature blocking President William Lai’s (賴清德) US$40 billion defense budget. Beijing is showing, to Washington, to the region, to the Taiwanese public, that it possesses political instruments, not just military ones.

  The US side of the equation is shifting. In February, US President Donald Trump did something no predecessor had done, in discussing Taiwanese arms sales directly with Xi. The “six assurances” explicitly say that Washington does not consult Beijing on weapons transfers to Taipei. Trump set that aside. The US$14 billion arms package appears ready, but it has been held back, calibrated around summit diplomacy. What has changed is the openness with which this administration treats the issue as a variable inside the US-China equation, not a standalone commitment grounded in law and deterrence.

  Southeast Asia sees this with particular sharpness, because the region carries institutional memory of exactly this pattern: A major power adjusting its commitments when the strategic arithmetic shifts. For Taiwan, the consequences are specific. The security architecture does not collapse, but it becomes conditional. In this part of the world, the distance between conditional and unreliable closes faster than anyone tends to expect.

  There is a structural parallel in the South China Sea. The Philippines says its intends to conclude the Code of Conduct as chair of ASEAN this year. It is not likely to succeed. Negotiations have run since 2002. ASEAN cannot enforce anything against China. The claimant states cannot agree among themselves. The lesson is not about failure, it is about what happens when an institution meets a power asymmetry it cannot overcome. ASEAN produces language, but cannot convert it into leverage. Taiwan faces the same problem from outside the architecture entirely, with shrinking diplomatic maneuvering space and a security guarantee being renegotiated in conversations to which it is not a party.

  Beijing’s strategy is built on this reality. Not invasion, but erosion. The patient construction of conditions under which resistance becomes costlier and accommodation easier. Identity trends push against it, more than 60 percent of Taiwanese identify themselves as Taiwanese, not Chinese. However, identity without institutional capacity is aspiration, not strategy. That capacity, defense spending, alliance coherence, legislative functionality, is exactly what is under contest. The countries that survive in this region do not depend on a single guarantor. They extract commitments from multiple partners while trusting none fully. Taiwan’s architecture runs on different logic and the political foundations holding it up weaken by the year.

  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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