Paraguay’s president urges UN to let Taiwan in, calls island’s exclusion ‘a stain’

Paraguayan President Santiago Pena told the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday that his country “is not neutral” on the Taiwan Strait, pledging support for the self-ruled island and calling for its “full and meaningful participation” in the UN system.

Casting a conflict in the strait as a potentially far greater threat than the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, Pena warned of “ominous clouds gathering over the Indo-Pacific” and of a conflict that would hit Japan, the rest of East and Southeast Asia and global chip supplies.

“Anyone pretending that this is far off or too distant to matter simply has not understood the 21st century,” Pena said, arguing that microchips had become to this century what oil was to the last.

With stakes that “could scarcely be higher” and “the very future of humanity” on the line, neutrality was not an option for Asuncion.