The wars nobody can afford to ignore

By Francis Allan L. Angelo

A new Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) policy brief by Henrietta Levin and Hugh Grant-Chapman lays out something that should unsettle anyone paying attention: the Global South — home to most of the world’s population — has no real stake in defending Taiwan’s autonomy, and Beijing knows it.

The January 2026 report, based on a task force of 20 scholars from Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and Southeast Asia, found that most developing-world leaders see Taiwan’s political status as irrelevant to their national interests. Meanwhile, a Chinese invasion of Taiwan could inflict an estimated USD 10 trillion in global economic damage, with the poorest nations bearing the worst of it.

That finding alone would be worth discussing. But reading it now — as Brent crude briefly surges past USD 119 a barrel following Iranian strikes on Gulf energy facilities, as the Strait of Hormuz chokes under the weight of the United States-Israeli war on Iran, as Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine grinds into its fifth year — the brief reads less like a policy paper and more like a warning siren nobody in the Global South wants to hear.

Here’s the pattern. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, 141 countries voted at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) to demand withdrawal. But the abstentions were telling: India, China, South Africa, Pakistan, and most of Central Asia.

A follow-up resolution on reparations managed only 94 votes in favor, with 73 abstentions. No Global South country joined Western sanctions. The logic was familiar — don’t pick sides, keep the doors open, play for time. As one analysis noted, for many of these countries, avoiding a choice between great powers is not just expedience but a matter of national security.

The CSIS brief finds the same playbook operating on Taiwan. Most Global South governments endorse Beijing’s One China Principle. The 2024 Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) summit declared Taiwan part of China’s territory. The China-Central Asia summit did the same in 2025.

The China-Latin America forum endorsed the principle for the first time that year. And yet — the task force found these same governments genuinely intend to remain neutral if a conflict actually breaks out. They treat their rhetorical backing of Beijing as a “costless goodwill gesture.”

It isn’t costless. The war on Iran proves that in real time. Gulf states spent years pursuing détente with Tehran, believing diplomacy would keep them out of any future conflict. When the United States and Israel launched strikes on February 28, 2026, Iran hit back at every Gulf Cooperation Council country — not just military bases but airports, hotels, oil refineries, and Qatar’s Ras Laffan liquefied natural gas (LNG) facility.

The damage knocked out roughly 17 percent of Qatar’s LNG export capacity. Regional producers account for about 49 percent of global urea and 30 percent of the world’s ammonia — critical for fertilizer and food security. The cascading effects on fertilizer prices, shipping insurance, and energy costs will land hardest on countries that can least afford them. The Global South, once again.

This is where the CSIS brief’s finding about Taiwan gets genuinely dangerous. Beijing has invested enormous energy building the appearance of consensus around its claim to the island. If that consensus hardens further, the report warns, it emboldens Beijing to take increasingly aggressive steps — dangerous military exercises, erasure of Taiwan from international bodies, and the steady erosion of norms that have kept the peace for decades. And if Beijing ever decides the moment has come to fight, the sudden neutrality of countries that spent years echoing its position will count for very little.

The task force’s recommendations are practical, if limited by Taipei’s constrained resources. Taiwan’s trade with the Global South reached USD 203 billion in 2024, a fraction of China’s USD 2.83 trillion. But Taiwan’s semiconductor dominance — the one area where its brand eclipses China’s — gives it leverage.

Taiwanese foreign direct investment (FDI) to New Southbound Policy countries jumped from USD 2.4 billion in 2018 to USD 8.7 billion in 2024. The brief argues Taiwan should diversify beyond chips into financial technology, agricultural technology, drones, and robotics, and consider establishing a development finance institution to compete on scale.

But the harder lesson cuts across all three flashpoints: Ukraine, the Gulf, and the Taiwan Strait. The Global South’s preferred posture of strategic ambiguity — hedging bets, avoiding alignment, treating great-power aggression as someone else’s problem — has a shelf life. It works until the missiles fly.

And when they do, the countries that stayed quiet find themselves paying the highest price with the least say in the outcome. The question for policymakers in Manila, Jakarta, New Delhi, Abuja, and Brasilia is not whether they can afford to take a position. It’s whether they can afford not to.