Is Taiwan the next Vatican-White House flash point?

The Holy See and the U.S. have long had opposite approaches to 'strategic ambiguity' in their relations with Taiwan - are they now on a collision course?

International tensions are rising this week as the White House continues to roll out its agenda across multiple foreign policy fronts.

Embassy of the Republic of China to the Holy See. Credit: Michael Cahill (CC BY 2.0)

On Monday, China’s foreign ministry registered its strong objections to a change to the U.S. state department’s “fact sheet” on Taiwan which dropped an explicit affirmation that previously said: “We do not support Taiwan independence.”

While the change does not formally reverse America’s “one China” policy, it has caused a backlash in Beijing.

A Chinese foreign ministry spokesman called the move “a serious step back in its stance on Taiwan-related issues” which “gravely contravenes international law and the basic norms of international relations.”

The United States has long practiced “strategic ambiguity” about how far it would go to protect de facto Taiwanese independence without recognizing it formally. While it might seem small, dropping the fact sheet line over the weekend is likely the Trump administration’s latest strategically provocative move, after it has already applied tariff pressure to China in a bid to win trade concessions.

Paradoxically, the Holy See has long practiced a kind of reverse policy of the same strategic ambiguity over Taiwan, being one of the last diplomatic powers to recognize the formal sovereignty of the Republic of China as distinct from the mainland government of the People’s Republic of China, even while leaving its embassy in Taipei pointedly empty as it seeks to advance its relations with Beijing.

And the potential for an awkward but interesting three-way diplomatic dance over Taiwan between Washington, the Vatican, and Beijing raises a number of potentially dramatic outcomes — though few may be to the ultimate benefit of Taiwan’s goals.

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Since the initial announcement in 2018 of the Vatican-China deal on the appointment for bishops on the Chinese mainland, Vatican watchers have wondered aloud what the deal could eventually mean for the Holy See’s diplomatic commitments to Taiwan.

The Holy See has recognized the government of Taiwan since 1942, and maintained an embassy in Taipei since then. On the other hand, the Vatican has had no official diplomatic presence with Beijing since 1951, when the Church was officially expelled from the mainland by the Communist government.

Since then, reopening China has been an aim of the Vatican’s diplomatic service, probably on a par with Beijing’s desire for a reunified “one China” with Taiwan.

In addition to achieving some kind of “normalization” — even at the cost of sinicization — for the local Church, it has long been understood that clearly a path for a papal visit to the mainland has been a treasured ambition of the Vatican under Pope Francis, with the pope coming close, geographically speaking, in 2023.

Pursuing its ambitions with Beijing has come at a cost for the Vatican, however, both practically in terms of China’s ongoing moves to reorder the mainland Church without Roman input, and morally, as the Vatican has remained studiedly silent in the face of human rights abuses — even acts of genocide — committed by the Chinese government.

This proved a diplomatic flashpoint in 2020, during the first Trump administration, when then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visited the Vatican shortly after delivering a pointed call for a tougher Roman line on China and human rights abuses.

Since then, the Vatican has renewed its deal with Beijing several times, and seen its diplomatic line on Taiwan quietly evolve in the process.

In 2021, the South China Morning Post quoted an unnamed Vatican official saying “Taiwan should not be offended if the embassy in Taipei is moved back to its original address in Beijing,” prompting the Taiwanese government to insist that “the friendly relations between Taiwan and the Vatican remain solid, and two-way communication channels remain open and smooth.”

That insistence notwithstanding, the evidence points to a cooling of Vatican commitment to its diplomatic partners in Taipei.

While the Holy See has officially preserved its full bilateral relations with Taiwan, in spite both of mainland pressure and its own diplomatic ambitions for an embassy in Beijing, there has not been an ambassador, or nuncio, to Taiwan since the 1970s — instead, the nunciature there was for decades staffed only to the level of a chargé d'affaires.

But even that representation was put briefly into question in 2022, when the last incumbent was transferred to become nuncio to Rwanda without a successor being named. The post was left vacant for several months before a new appointment was made.

And the Vatican was Taiwan’s only diplomatic partner not to appeal for it to be allowed to participate in the World Health Organization’s assembly meetings on the coronavirus pandemic.

While Rome has made some efforts to offset its public coolness to Taipei — appointing a former Taiwanese vice president to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 2021 — it has become increasingly clear which way the Vatican’s wind is blowing across the Taiwan Strait, even if formally breaking ties with Taiwan would represent too public climbdown for Rome to consider seriously.

Conversely, though, some sources close to the Vatican’s Secretariat of State have suggested that, purely from the perspective of Vatican diplomacy, a mainland takeover of Taiwan would actually simplify matters — assuming that it did not trigger a bloody conflict.

The prospect of such a conflict occurring, though, is largely what has deterred the Chinese government from acting to forcibly “reunify” what it considers to be a rebel province, even though it is known to be a key priority of President Xi.

That is the situation into which the Trump administration appeared to move provocatively last weekend, with the change to the U.S. State Department’s fact sheet.

Of course, it is unclear what goals — if anything specific — the administration might want to achieve for and with Taiwan, or if the State Department is staking out a new, more aggressively ambiguous position, purely to increase its diplomatic capital which it can spend on issues like trade in discussion with Beijing.

But if the move signals a sincere hardening of the U.S. line on Taiwan, the Vatican’s froideur to its formal diplomatic partner could come in for the same kind of public notice which its relations with China did five years ago, especially given the recent public tensions between the Trump administration and the Vatican.

Just last week, the Pope Francis made a surprisingly direct intervention on American politics, writing to the U.S. bishops on what he called the “major crisis” of the Trump administration’s policy of mass deportation for illegal immigrants, and appearing to respond directly to comments from Catholic Vice President JD Vance about the ordo amoris and a hierarchy of who owes what to whom in American politics and policy.

That followed public criticism by Vance of the U.S. bishops conference, whom he accused of using government funds to “pad its bottom line” through immigrant resettlement grants.

And all of this was preceded by the decision by Francis to name a notable critic of the Trump administration, Cardinal Robert McElory, to become the next Archbishop of Washington, which The Pillar reported previously was itself a response to the administration’s pick for a new U.S. ambassador to the Holy See.

The Trump administration has, in the month since the inauguration, shown itself willing to confront directly erstwhile diplomatic allies of the United States — and its relationship with the Holy See has become publicly tense in a way not seen since full diplomatic relations were established 40 years ago.

If the next round of acrimony comes over Taiwan, no one should be surprised.