At the Computex Taipei expo on Tuesday, President William Lai (賴清德) told a hall of technology executives that the most responsible thing Taiwan could do for global supply chains was to keep the political “status quo” intact.
It was meant as reassurance, but it read as a confession of dependence, running both ways.
Taiwan sits at the center of the artificial intelligence (AI) economy. Whether that makes it any safer is the question Computex left unanswered. It might leave Taiwan more exposed.
The figures are dizzying. Taipei has revised its growth forecast for this year to 9.64 percent, with exports up nearly 40 percent and AI servers alone set to make up two-fifths of what is shipped abroad. An entire economy has been repriced upward by the capital-expenditure decisions of a handful of US cloud companies.
That is not broad-based industrial strength; it is a brittle concentration.
Lai gave the game away when he spent part of his speech on water, electricity and land, the bottlenecks that decide whether the boom lasts. Beneath the AI story runs an older one about energy and labor. It is why the “silicon shield” has stopped being reassuring. The theory was elegant: The world would never let Beijing take Taiwan, because it cannot run without Taiwanese chips. The past month strained that logic. US President Donald Trump returned from a Beijing summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) musing that arms sales to Taiwan made a useful negotiating chip; his secretary of state then insisted nothing had changed, even as a multibillion-dollar weapons package sat frozen.
When a great power is responsible for your safety, you are not safe. You are an asset whose price is up for discussion. Taiwan can be the epicenter of the AI revolution and a bargaining chip in the same week. Its shield protects the world’s access to its factories better than it protects Taipei’s freedom to act. It is resilience without autonomy.
Taiwan needs what chips cannot buy: depth. Not the visibility it already has, but room to move. The place to find it is in a region that Taipei treats as a footnote to Washington, Beijing and Tokyo: Jakarta, Manila, Hanoi, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore will shape Taiwan’s future as surely as any Western capital.
Call it functional strategic depth: the ability of a state without allies or recognition to build influence by embedding itself so deeply in a region’s production, capital and labor that prying it loose hurts everyone. Taiwan has the necessary instrument.
A decade of the New Southbound Policy built real ties, and Lai now calls it something grander, an Indo-Pacific strategy of values, technology and resilience. ASEAN is not a substitute for Washington. It is a different kind of space; not an alliance system, but a field of resilience. Seen this way, the map looks different.
The Philippines is the obvious hinge, the Bashi Channel and the seas joining the South China Sea to the Pacific figure in any Taiwan scenario, and Manila is already drawing closer to Japan, Australia, Canada and New Zealand as faith in Washington frays. Indonesia is the country Taipei most reliably underrates, the largest state in ASEAN and a serious actor in the Indo-Pacific region, still filed under “migrants,” “students” and “trade” as though those were minor issues when they are the social infrastructure of influence.
How Taiwan treats Southeast Asian workers, students and communities already inside its economy will matter as much as any investment pledge or diplomatic slogan.
Vietnam, Malaysia and Singapore matter, too, in supply chains and AI rulemaking.
None of that means ASEAN will confront Beijing on Taiwan’s behalf. It will not, and Taipei would be naive to think it would.
The bloc’s caution is not timidity; it is the rational reflex of economies bound tightly to China’s. Hedging is structural. Taiwan should stop hoping those capitals will pick a side and make itself useful enough that they see Taipei as part of their own freedom of movement.
The trap is plain, do not turn the New Southbound Policy into a security project, which would empty Taiwan’s regional offices overnight. Treat its economic and technological ties for what they have always been, instruments of political space, and use them to tackle the region’s real challenges.
Earn the democratic label rather than wearing it. Taiwan can offer cooperation without ideological strings more than Beijing ever will, but only if its regional policy is matched by fair labor practices, transparent investment and serious educational partnerships.
Taiwan’s problem was never that the world forgot it; in the AI age it cannot look away.
The problem is that being watched is not the same as being free to act, and chips buy attention, not agency. Southeast Asia will not save Taiwan if the missiles fly, but without it, Taiwan’s strategy stays a half-finished thought, its fate left to bargains between Washington and Beijing.
Its security will be settled in the Strait. It will also be settled in how Taiwan treats the region it needs, and the workers who already keep its economy at sea.
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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