As ASEAN advances its digital agenda and AI adoption accelerates across Southeast Asia, regulatory choices are starting to shape trade, investment, and strategic partnerships in the Indo-Pacific. In this environment, the EU can seize the opportunity and promote fruitful partnerships amid ASEAN’s competitive market while positioning its regulatory framework as a driver for cooperation.
Timor-Leste’s accession as ASEAN’s eleventh member in October 2025 marked the end of a fourteen-year accession process and a major milestone in the country’s post-independence foreign policy. While widely celebrated as a symbol of regional inclusion and reconciliation, the membership raises deeper questions about integration, institutional capacity, and ASEAN’s ability to manage persistent development gaps among its members.
The Trans-Caspian Corridor (TCTC) links Europe to the Greater Caspian Region and Central Asia, holding great potential to boost trade and diversify transport routes. Yet, fragmented regulations and limited digitalisation still slow its development. Tools such as eTIR, e-CMR, and Single Window Systems (SWS) can harmonise procedures and streamline cross-border trade. With its strategic location and digital reforms, the Greater Caspian Region stands at the centre of this transformation. Through region-to-region cooperation and interoperable digital frameworks, the EU can help make the TCTC a more efficient, competitive, and sustainable trade route between Europe and Central Asia.
As the EU is set to accelerate on its path toward climate neutrality, technological sovereignty and independence, the European Union’s access to Critical Raw Materials (CRM) poses a pressing structural priority, with CRMs playing fundamental roles in the manufacturing of semiconductors, solar panels, wind turbines, and other essential components of the emergent green and digital economy. Despite this apparent strategic importance, the EU relies on a dangerously bottlenecked import base. With China producing 86% of the world’s rare earth minerals, the EU imports 100% of its supply of heavy rare earth elements (REE) from China. Such a dependency transforms CRMs from merely a supply chain concern into a genuine geopolitical challenge. This policy brief argues that CRM integration into the EU-India FTA would be a strategic necessity for the security of Europe’s industrial future.
This EIAS Briefing Paper explores the implementation of a joint, fiat-backed stablecoin as a tool for facilitating EU-China Trade, which reached a valuation of approximately 762 billion USD in 2024. Despite the high volume of Bank-to-Bank (B2B) transactions, bilateral trade remains tethered to inefficient financial infrastructure characterised by high foreign exchange (FX) markups, third-party reliance, and settlement latencies. These frictions impose systemic costs and lock up billions in working capital. This paper proposes a private fully-collateralised stablecoin pegged to a 50/50 basket of the Euro (EUR) and Offshore Renminbi (CNH). Blockchain architecture and smart contract automation offers the potential of near-instantaneous completely transparent settlement and reductions in transaction costs to a fraction of traditional transfers.
Japan has a new Prime Minister and faces challenges both old and new. A comment from an opposition politician led Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi to make a statement on a possible commitment from the Japanese Navy to protect Taiwan. The response from China was quick, but the implications for Takaichi are more telling. Will she reposition Japan globally, or be stopped by the same forces that forced Shinzō Abe to halt his ambitions?
As the EU’s 4th Indo-Pacific Ministerial Forum (IPMF) took place in Brussels on the 20th and 21st of November 2025, the European Union faces a pivotal moment. Despite grand declarations, Brussels’ impact in the region remains constrained by episodic engagement and an overreliance on formal diplomatic channels, notwithstanding efforts to engage with civil society and other relevant stakeholders. How can the EU explore potential alternative channels of diplomacy to establish lasting, practical, and realistic partnerships with its Indo-Pacific partners? By leveraging European expertise as a result of private-sector champions, while simultaneously working together on developing capacity-building initiatives on the ground, the EU may transform its strategy from rhetoric into tangible action and show its partners it is serious about its commitments.
Chinese banks have established themselves in the European Union as key players in financing trade, investment, and business activities between Europe and China. Their special institutional structure in the form of the ‘branch-cum-subsidiary’ model, often established in Luxembourg, allows for high financial flexibility, but also brings regulatory tensions. At the same time, new European regulations on banking supervision, investment control, and economic security are changing the framework of their activities within the union. This leads to challenges and new requirements for a balanced and reciprocal design of EU-China financial relations.
The EU’s Joint Communication on a New Strategic EU–India Agenda, released in September 2025, signals a renewed push to elevate India as a core strategic partner. Centred on trade, technology, security, connectivity, and global governance, the agenda reflects shared interests amid growing geopolitical uncertainty. While economic potential and security cooperation are significant, persistent trade barriers and regulatory frictions remain. Its success will hinge on effective implementation, with the partnership offering scope to support international stability and strengthen multilateral cooperation.