Less than two weeks after former Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen wrapped up a Rome visit in late June, Italy's Senate passed a piece of legislation that had been trapped in legislative limbo for 24 years — a diplomatic outcome that, according to people familiar with the situation, was no coincidence.
The Foreign Cultural Artifacts Lending Immunity from Seizure Act, a bill that had been raised in nearly every high-level Taiwan-Italy meeting for a quarter century, cleared the Italian Senate after Tsai's Rome visit and a near-simultaneous trip to Milan by Taiwan's Foreign Minister Lin Chia-lung. Sources described the outcome as a textbook example of Taiwan's emerging approach to advancing its interests in Europe: a coordinated, multi-track operation that deploys a former head of state to open doors that sitting officials cannot.
Rome Visit Breaks a 24-Year Italian Deadlock
Tsai's late June Italy schedule began at Bellagio — the resort town on the shores of Lake Como in northern Italy — where she attended the Global Women's Leadership Summit, a gathering chaired by former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. From there, she proceeded to Rome, where Italian Senate Vice President Gian Marco Centinaio personally received her at the upper chamber. She held meetings with lawmakers from across the political spectrum, both in the ruling coalition and the opposition.
While Tsai engaged Rome's political class, Foreign Minister Lin traveled separately to Milan, leading a trade delegation and visiting Italian subsidiaries of Taiwanese companies, including chipmaker GlobalWafers. The two visits appeared unrelated in public — but sources say they were anything but. People familiar with the arrangements described the approach as a deliberate "two-pronged advance": each official covering different terrain in the same country during the same window.
Tsai's Visits Are Coordinated With Taiwan's Foreign Ministry
Since leaving office in May 2024, Tsai has made four separate trips to Europe, visiting eight countries: Czech Republic, France, Belgium, Lithuania, Denmark, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Italy. She has spoken at major European think tanks and forums, and met with sitting parliamentarians in multiple capitals.
Behind the scenes, many of the invitations Tsai receives are channeled through Taiwan's overseas representative offices. Her trips are planned jointly by her personal office and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA), with senior ministry officials sometimes meeting with Tsai in person to work through timing and logistics.
A clear pattern has emerged in how Tsai and Minister Lin divide the European calendar. In October 2024, Tsai visited Czech Republic, France, and Belgium; a month later, Lin followed with a Belgium visit of his own, then traveled to Czech Republic in September 2025, with a quiet side trip to Paris during the same month. Sources note that a sitting foreign minister carries a stronger sovereignty signal than a former president — making the minister's visits inherently more politically charged. Tsai going first, the reasoning goes, helps lower the political temperature before the official visit follows.
The coordination has extended beyond the two of them. In November 2025, Vice President Hsiao Bi-khim transited through Frankfurt Airport and entered Belgium to attend the annual conference of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC) at the European Parliament. Two days later, Tsai arrived in Germany, also via Frankfurt. Sources say Taiwan's MOFA, working on President Lai Ching-te's instructions and with limited diplomatic resources, coordinated both visits simultaneously — a deliberate effort to put Beijing on multiple fronts at once and make it harder to mount a countermeasure against either trip.
Invitations From Washington Go Unanswered, by Design
In all five of her official overseas trips since leaving office, Tsai has not visited the United States. Her only North American stop was a brief stay in Canada in late November 2024. The only private travel she has been reported to have made is to Japan.
The absence stands out because early signals pointed the other way. During Tsai's Germany visit in November 2025, Taiwan's representative to the US made an offhand remark that a Tsai visit to Washington was "imminent." Around the same time, Politico's National Security Daily reported she would travel to the US within weeks of wrapping up her October 2024 European swing. Neither came to pass.
Sources say US and North American invitations for Tsai have been as numerous as those from Europe. A diplomat familiar with foreign affairs explained the calculus: the current Lai administration is actively working to manage and expand Taiwan's channels with Washington, and a Tsai visit would require MOFA resources and attention at a moment when those resources are already stretched by ongoing, sensitive bilateral diplomacy. Arranging access to the US would also be considerably more politically complicated than coordinating a European itinerary. Tsai, sources say, has no wish to disrupt or complicate the groundwork her successor's government is laying.
The contrast with her own record is telling. Within a month of Tsai's 2016 inauguration, she had already visited Central American allies and transited through Miami and Los Angeles. President Lai Ching-te, who has now been in office for more than two years, has made just one transit through US territory — passing through Hawaii and Guam during a late 2024 Pacific allies trip — and has yet to set foot on the American mainland.
Europe's China Disillusionment Opens Doors for Taiwan
What makes Europe fertile ground for Tsai's post-presidential diplomacy is a structural shift in how the continent views both Beijing and Taipei. For years, EU decision-making on Taiwan was constrained by the bloc's consensus model, and France and Germany — the union's two largest economies — were reluctant to deepen ties with Taipei in ways that might invite Chinese economic retaliation.
That calculus has changed, according to former diplomats with European posting experience. The COVID-19 pandemic put supply chain vulnerability into sharp relief. Russia's invasion of Ukraine then deepened European suspicion of China, which has maintained close ties with Moscow. More recently, German criticism of Chinese business practices undercutting the country's small and medium-sized enterprises has crystallized a broader sentiment: China is now increasingly seen as both a security concern and an economic partner that delivers diminishing returns. As those two assessments have solidified, European appetite for engagement with Taiwan has grown.
The results are visible in moments that would have been hard to imagine just a few years ago. When the People's Liberation Army launched its "Justice Mission-2025" exercises around Taiwan in late December 2025, the EU's European External Action Service (EEAS) issued a statement as soon as the drills ended — while the US State Department took three more days to respond. The UK, French, and German foreign ministries also preceded Washington with their own statements. In late June 2026, the representative offices of the UK, France, and Germany in Taiwan jointly released a statement expressing concern about Chinese naval activity in Taiwan's eastern waters; the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) — Washington's de facto embassy in Taipei — only commented after journalists asked. A former diplomat who served in Europe summed up the shift: European capitals proactively speaking out on Taiwan's situation, he said, "was previously unimaginable."
For Taiwan's foreign policy establishment, the implication runs deeper than optics. Tsai's persistent presence in European capitals — keynotes, parliamentary visits, think tank appearances — is steadily deepening the foundation that makes those statements possible. By operating as Taiwan's most active post-presidential diplomat in Europe while deliberately staying out of Washington, she is widening the international space available to President Lai's government without creating friction in the bilateral relationship that matters most to Taipei's security calculus.
