How Taiwan Trades Microchips and Shrimp for Friends at the UN
China has been peeling off Taiwan's tiny list of allies like cheap stickers, but the remaining dozen aren't sticking around for charity.
Imagine having only a dozen friends left because the neighborhood billionaire pays everyone to ignore you. That is pretty much Taiwan's geopolitical reality.
Instead of sulking or mailing out generic aid checks, Taipei is playing custom concierge diplomacy. For Guatemala, they are training local engineers to design microchips. In Haiti, they are funding rice mills and soil sensors to fight hunger. And for Belize, they opened their domestic market to buy hundreds of millions of dollars worth of shrimp.
Taiwan is not handing out blank checks; it is trading high-tech infrastructure for an official voice at the United Nations.
Because Taiwan is barred from the building, these tiny partners are the only ones holding a badge to go in and speak up. When Santiago Peña, the president of Paraguay, took the podium in New York, he publicly called out the room: chips are the fuel of the 21st century, and locking out the people who make them makes no sense.
Turned out trading semiconductor masterclasses for a loudspeaker on the global stage beats a standard diplomatic handshake any day.
Source: UPI
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