Lithuania’s anti-China stance has been years in the making. Beijing might simply have ignored the early warning signs before Vilnius’ big decision to jump into bed with Taiwan. No small countries would want to antagonise a more powerful one without clear incentives. For Lithuania, that can only be closer relations with the Western alliance headed by Washington. They prove to be far more irresistible than whatever investment and development loans Beijing has promised under the so-called 17+1 initiative with the less developed countries in Central Europe and the Baltic. In fact, for lack of a better word, the strategy, a lesser European version of the Belt and Road Initiative, has been unravelling in recent years, not just with Lithuania but with most of the others as well. Suicidal for China to follow the West’s ‘living with’ Covid-19 strategy Politics is largely geography. That helps explain why America’s anti-China policy has been far more successful in the Baltic and Central Europe than with the Asean nations. Countries in Southeast Asia know they have no choice but to live with behemoth China. Those in Europe fret far more about Russia. Their Soviet-dominated past still haunts them but they look to western Europe as the future. After all, 12 of the 17 countries already belong to the European Union. Whatever economic niceties there are from the Far East are just icing on the cake, though it hasn’t worked out as promised. In May last year, Lithuania asked the World Health Organization to invite Taiwan to attend an assembly to discuss the global response to the pandemic. In February, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, along with Bulgaria, Romania and Slovenia declined to send their presidents or prime ministers to attend the “17+1” summit in Beijing, even though President Xi Jinping had replaced Premier Li Keqiang to represent China. In May, Lithuania announced it would become the first to quit the 17+1 initiative. Opposition have reached end of the road But why Taiwan? Both the island and the mainland have negligible trade with Lithuania. These days, though, the way to Washington is through Taiwan. By setting up “the Taiwanese Representative Office” in Vilnius as a template, the island’s first de facto embassy in Europe, Washington and other Western governments can calibrate their diplomatic war against China while claiming to be respecting the one-China policy, however much Beijing may huff and puff. Lithuania is too small to risk a diplomatic or military conflagration. That’s why it’s so useful.