A Pacific pivot ahead for Taiwan?

• By Michael Schiffer and Brian Harding

• • Add TT as Preferred Source

  • 

  • 

  • 

On Aug. 31 when Minister of Foreign Affairs Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) joined the Pacific Islands Forum leaders’ meeting in Koror, Palau — invited as a development partner, a status the forum has extended to Taiwan since the early 1990s — Chinese Special Envoy for Pacific Island Countries Affairs Qian Bo (錢波) promised “consequences.” Less than two weeks earlier, China had advised its citizens against travel to Palau, reprising the tourism embargo it imposed in 2017 after Palau reaffirmed ties with Taiwan. Five of the forum’s 18 leaders also stayed home, and Kiribati sent its former ambassador to Beijing to lead its delegation.

The Pacific islands have long occupied an outsized role in Taipei’s foreign policy, and Taiwan continues to be an important part of the region’s fabric. Historically, Taiwan’s engagement has largely been a fight for recognition, but now, as geopolitics descends on the region, stakes are raised for everyone. This is true not only for Taiwan’s place in the Pacific, but also for what sort of diplomatic community the Pacific states want to create for themselves, what sort of partnerships they seek to build, and how they view exercising Pacific sovereignty. When Beijing threatens a host government over its guest list, it claims a veto over Pacific institutions.

While recent history has been grim — in July, Papua New Guinea ordered Taiwan’s office closed without consulting Taipei, which followed the loss of Solomon Islands, Kiribati and Nauru as allies since 2019 — but not all is lost. The partners that Taiwan has kept sit in some of the most strategic waters of the Asia-Pacific region, most importantly Palau, where this year’s drama unfolded, but also the Marshall Islands whose vast exclusive economic zone lies along the routes that connect Hawaii, Guam and Australia.

From Washington’s perspective, Palau is now more important than any time since World War II. A recent US budget request includes US$384.6 million for port improvements, while US Marines are stationed on Peleliu where an imperial Japanese airfield is being overhauled, and Washington has helped Palau establish a Maritime Joint Operations Center. Japan has similarly expanded its own maritime and infrastructure work in Palau, and the Philippines is interested in building closer ties with its neighbor. All this benefits from the physical and social infrastructure Taiwan has built over decades.

Together these countries — Taiwan, the Philippines, Palau, the US and Japan — largely encircle the Philippine Sea, a location of increasing People’s Republic of China (PRC) presence and potentially common geography for these partners to focus cooperation, and the link between the First and Second Island Chains of the Western Pacific.

Taiwan brings expertise this region needs. Every nation around the Philippine Sea faces some version of the same PRC coercion playbook: illegal fishing, research vessels conducting surveys that the law of the sea largely permits, influence operations aimed at local elites and economic punishment calibrated to small economies’ dependence on tourism. Taiwan has faced the full-scale version of this strategy the longest. The National Security Bureau logged more than 2.3 million pieces of disinformation and more than 45,000 inauthentic accounts in a single year. Its Whole-of-Society Defense Resilience Committee, created in 2024, ties civil mobilization, stockpiling, infrastructure protection, medical capacity and communications security into exercises that run across multiple cities. Palau, Guam and the Northern Marianas face the same pressures with a fraction of the analytic and institutional capacity. When the Chinese research icebreaker Ji Di (極地) loitered in Palau’s exclusive economic zone without authorization in May, Palau’s available response was a diplomatic note.

At sea, the region’s smaller states hold purview over vast waters, but they lack the capacity to patrol, while larger states hold means without jurisdiction. Palau has donated patrol craft and too few mariners to crew them. Taiwan, with a capable coast guard and one of the Pacific’s largest distant-water fishing fleets, sits on both sides of the illegal fishing problem, which argues for bringing it inside regional monitoring, where its fleet’s conduct becomes a shared responsibility. Precedent exists in Taiwan’s participation as a fishing entity in the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission, which manages the world’s largest tuna fishery, and the same logic could apply to Palau’s Maritime Joint Operations Center, where partners could post liaison officers to pool data on illegal fishing, research-vessel movements and vessels loitering over undersea cables.

Expanding Taiwan’s space with these neighbors requires no government to change its recognition policy, and Manila has shown how. In April last year, the Philippines lifted most restrictions on officials traveling to Taiwan for trade and economic missions, and in August last year Lin led a trade delegation to Manila in a private capacity. Last month, when Beijing protested Taipei’s plan for a second office in Cebu, the Philippine Department of Foreign Affairs answered that its “one China” policy does not preclude economic, cultural and functional cooperation with Taiwan.

Three steps would move the region forward: The Pacific Islands Forum should convert Palau’s open door into standing practice, so development partners’ attendance stops depending on each host’s tolerance for Beijing’s displeasure. The US, Japan and the Philippines, as they deepen trilateral ties, should bring Palau — as well as Micronesia and the Marshall Islands — into their maritime cooperation initiatives, and build channels on illegal fishing, cable security and disaster response that Taiwan can join from the start. Governments that encourage Pacific states to engage with Taipei should agree in advance on how they would offset the coercion that follows, with tourism promotion, air connectivity and budget support ready before the next coercive tactic or set of “gray zone” activities lands.

The Pacific architecture emerging during today’s geopolitical flux will be built by whoever shows up with something to contribute. For Taiwan, the place to start is close to home: the region surrounding the Philippine Sea, where it can build working channels with Palau, the Philippines, Japan and the US on the waters they share. Taiwan’s story in the broader region is not over — a Pacific that keeps Taiwan at the table will have more with which to build.

Michael Schiffer is a distinguished senior fellow (non-resident) at the Sasakawa Peace Foundation USA, and has served as assistant administrator for Asia at the US Agency for International Development, US deputy assistant secretary of defense for East Asia, and as a congressional staffer. Brian Harding is a senior fellow (non-resident) at the foundation. He previously led programming on Southeast Asia and the Pacific at the US Institute for Peace, and has worked at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Center for American Progress, and served in the Office of the US Secretary of Defense as country director for Asian and Pacific security affairs.