[Note: This is the free preview within the dedicated podcast section of the ASEAN Wonk website, with the full version in a post published on February 19, 2026 available to our paying subscribers. This is not meant to serve as new content and is part of our free preview content within the dedicated website podcast section].
INTRODUCTION
ASEAN Wonk: Welcome to the ASEAN Wonk Podcast, where we bring you expert insights and regional perspectives on Southeast Asia and Indo-Pacific geopolitics and geoeconomics. I’m your host Dr. Prashanth Parameswaran. If you haven’t already, do subscribe to the ASEAN Wonk platform at www.aseanwonk.com so you don’t miss our full posts.
Our guest today is James Crabtree who has held several prior roles including senior adviser to the British prime minister’s strategy unit and director of the IISS think tank in Singapore where he helped run the Shangri-La Dialogue. He’s currently among other things a distinguished visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. We’ll start our conversation talking through some of the dynamics in Europe, Southeast Asia, and the broader geopolitical and geoeconomic canvas. Be sure to stay tuned as we go through a range of other subjects, including the future agenda for Europe-Southeast Asia policy in the coming months, as well as related topics, including emerging areas of geoeconomic cooperation in Indo-Pacific capitals and shifting views on China.
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EUROPE’S GEOECONOMIC DIVERSIFICATION AND SOUTHEAST ASIA
ASEAN Wonk: So welcome to the podcast James. And let’s start, if we can, on the series of geoeconomic deals that we’re seeing coming out of Europe over the past year. We’ve seen just recently deals coming out with India. There’s one with Mercosur. If we go a little bit further back, we’re seeing a number of Southeast Asia negotiations as well, including with Indonesia, which even some officials admitted they didn’t really see coming because it had been going along for quite a while. How do you see this geoeconomic momentum fitting into where Europe sees its role, not just in Southeast Asia, but also the Indo-Pacific and globally? Southeast Asia is Europe’s third largest trade market after the US and China, but to what extent are some of the dynamics new here?
James Crabtree: Well so thanks very much for having me. You know, as with almost everything in life at the moment, it comes down to the Trump factor, which is that Europe has a kind of geopolitical crisis on its hands in as much as since the end of the Second World War. It has had a very close relationship with the United States and, to put it mildly, that relationship is a bit rocky now. And so it’s looking for new friends. What India would call a policy of multialignment is now something that Europe is trying to do. It’s trying to hedge and diversify. And so if you look at what does that look like, then Latin America, the Mercosur deal, has been on the cards for an awfully long time, but is now to some greater or lesser degree being signed and will come into force. There was a little bit of a hiccup because of a kind of cock-up in the European Parliament, but I think the sense is that they’ll get over that and that will come into force. Ursula von der Leyen was recently in the Middle East trying to do a little bit of Middle East diplomacy. And then the big one is India which we’ll talk about in a minute, the EU India free trade agreement which happened recently.
And so I think as is true with many other countries – in India, in Southeast Asia and elsewhere – a world in which the United States is less reliable and more coercive is one where traditional U. S. allies and partners have to look around and see what else is out there. And in a sense, it’s no more complicated than that. Europe is looking for new friends both at the kind of geoeconomic level, but also at the geostrategic level and it’s trying to build what it can to make up for what it’s lost in terms of this newly unreliable relationship with Washington.
EUROPE AS AN INDEPENDENT POLE IN MULTIPOLAR CALCULATIONS
ASEAN Wonk: And just to follow-up on that quickly. We’ve seen some European officials try to make the case that in this current geopolitical and geoeconomic landscape, countries and regions need to be thinking about Europe and the European Union as an independent pole or actor, not the archaic notion of the traditional transatlantic relationship where Europe is thought of as mostly an economic partner, not really a security partner. To what extent do you find this is a credible argument to make today and how do you see countries and actors rethinking how they are seeing Europe as an actor?
James Crabtree: I think it’s almost the other way around: I think the partners got there before the Europeans. So the line that you’re quoting that Europe is an independent pole in a multipolar order is not actually a line from a European, it’s a line from Dr. Jaishankar, the Indian external affairs minister as I think you probably know. And in a sense I think that India for instance has looked at Europe for a long time – I mean for at least the last five years – and thought that in the world in which we’re heading form then we need to treat Europe as a as a pole on its own that is separate from the United States and other relationships. And I think in a funny way, it’s almost taken Trump for the Europeans – I mean, maybe not the French – but for many of the rest of the Europeans who are pretty strongly Atlanticist to kind of make a psychological break with the United States to some greater or lesser extent. We don’t know what this will look like in the medium to long term, but for now anyway.
And I think here, Europe has a strong story to tell, maybe stronger than it realizes. As in, if you’re sitting in Malaysia or Indonesia or Singapore and you’re thinking about, okay, the US is less reliable: what are our diversification plays? Then you have Northeast Asia, the advanced democracies of Asia, you have India, you have the Middle East, Canada maybe, but really Europe is one of the big opportunities that any country that is looking to hedge and diversify would look to. To be fair, Europe is geopolitically declining relatively speaking, but it is still full of rich technologically advanced nations. Europe is also rearming. It’s spending a lot more in its military. And therefore an argument that I’ve been making for the last two years really is that the story that Europe can tell about itself is very different post Ukraine than before Ukraine. The notion that Europe was this sort of slightly peculiar postmodern trading conglomeration that didn’t have anything to say in terms of hard security, well, it’s not really true anymore. No – this is a continent and a European apparatus that has been at the very forefront of the most important military conflict in the world that has been raising money to fund that conflict that has been trying to manage geopolitical relationships around that conflict.
“And therefore an argument that I’ve been making for the last two years really is that the story that Europe can tell about itself is very different post-Ukraine than before Ukraine. The notion that Europe was this sort of slightly peculiar postmodern trading conglomeration that didn’t have anything to say in terms of hard security, well, it’s not really true anymore.”
And so if you take Europe – not just Brussels, but within Europe, you have four or five of the world’s most capable middle powers. So the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Poland, Ukraine itself, and then if you add Turkey into the mix as a NATO member, that’s six serious global middle powers. Not major powers in the sense of China, Russia, India, but capable military middle powers. And I think if you add that together, then in a sense that is why India would say that Europe is a pole in a multipolar order. And I think it’s actually been the Europeans that have been slow to tell that story about themselves and only lately have kind of caught up with the way some of the rest of the world has viewed them.
EUROPE AND THE GLOBAL MIDDLE POWER CONVERSATION
ASEAN Wonk: The other piece of that is the changing geopolitical perspective not just in Europe, but also within European countries as well. It’s difficult to get away from the remarks of Canadian prime Minister Mark Carney at Davos and his notion of a moment of rupture and the need for middle powers to collaborate, and I agree with what you said earlier that parts of the region, including Southeast Asia, have been ahead of this conversation already. But to what extent do you think Europe fits with this middle power conversation? Because as we both know, even with the term middle power, there’s ambivalence in some capitals about using the term and accepting a hierarchy of powers. And within that, are you seeing changing notions within Europe about how to think about its own geopolitical and geoeconomic map and diversifying more globally?
James Crabtree: Well I think if you look at the Europe India event that happened recently at the Brussels level then that moment was in a sense a pan-European moment. And so some of these agreements happen at the Brussels level in that it’s Brussels that makes the big trade deals. But there are a number of other kinds of competencies which can sit at the European level, and Ursula von der Leyen is probably the most recognizable European Commission president in a long time. So in a sense I think Brussels and Europe is now taken more seriously as a strategic as opposed to a trading partner. And so on the one hand, you can see Europe in terms of its economic and increasingly to some degree in terms of its strategic weight in that group of the world’s largest powers – the European Union in some ways sits next to the United States, China, India aspirationally and to some degree Russia as part of a grand block.
But then within that, you also have the European middle powers. And in some areas, particularly defense and security, these relationships are still predominantly bilateral. And therefore, India is buying French Rafale jets and German submarines and it might be striking a trade and sort of security deals with technology with the United Kingdom for instance. So I think it’s a little bit more complicated because you have this both transnational and national element with Europe. But I don’t really think there’s been this sort of jarring fall to earth in which European nations are struggling to conceive of themselves as global middle powers. I mean, that may have been true sort of twenty or thirty years ago, but, I think now, anyone in a European capital – well, I mean, in the big ones, the ones that I mentioned – would conceive of themselves as high-capacity global middle powers who are able to do things within the global system. But they are not able to operate at the same level as the really big countries. And I think that’s fine, you know? I mean, one of the things that Europe does have is it has quite a lot of these sort of capable high-tech prosperous middle powers. And therefore, particularly if they act together, then they have quite a lot of weight still in in the global system.
And again, that’s not me saying this as a kind of European. I think that’s what others see. That’s what Southeast Asian nations; that’s what India sees. And in a funny way, the Europeans are not as easy to deal with as the United States because there are lots of them and they’re complicated. They also don’t offer you what the United States offers. They don’t have whacking great big tech companies for instance in the same way. But they are sort of reasonably reliable in a way that the Trump administration isn’t. They’re certainly not erratic in the way that the Trump administration is. And therefore, you’re looking for a sort of set of powers with whom you can do business, then – this is the same with Japan or South Korea – they offer something that many countries see as quite valuable.
ASSESSING VALUE ADD IN PARTNERSHIP DIVERSIFICATION
ASEAN Wonk: And to that point and to follow-up, in this period of diversification lies the big perennial question, which is, to what extent do each of these individual actors produce a sort of value add within this landscape? One thing that strikes me in Southeast Asia is that despite the notion in Washington that Europe is associated with regulation, some of the regional governments are pretty comfortable with regulation and rulemaking. If you’re looking at Europe and the European Union, would be that sort of value add in terms of opportunities that Europe offers?
James Crabtree: Well, I think it’s complicated, right? There are things that the European Union does at the Brussels level which countries in Southeast Asia don’t like at all. So the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) is one of the ways: it’s a sort of European tool to try and manage climate change, to some degree penalizes poorer countries. They hate that. And so that bit of European rulemaking they strongly dislike. There are other rules that Europe has which are not very popular. But at a sort of more basic level, particularly when you’re thinking about Southeast Asia, then there’s a kind of underlying agreement that although countries in South and Southeast Asia tend not to be very keen on what we used to call the liberal rules-based order, they are keen on a rules-based order. Most of them are small to medium sized countries, and small to medium sized countries do not like the idea of a kind of gradual collapse back into a world in which the strong do what they can and the weak do what they must. And therefore there is a kind of congruence between European nations and Southeast Asian nations.
So for instance, if you take something like wanting to have UNCLOS and rules of the sea, then actually having European nations around is quite helpful. Because they give some ballast to the idea that these are rules that cannot simply be kind of ripped up by great powers at their whim. So I think I think at a basic level, both Europeans and Southeast Asians – and actually it’s true of India as well – they might disagree over what the rule should be in a rules-based international order, but at least for now, they do want to have an order that is rules-based albeit not liberal. You know, one of the things that Europeans have learned to do is – as a friend of mine in Germany who had the line which he used at the last Raisina Dialogue – to be less strategically obnoxious. And so they sort of ceased to a large degree going around in South and Southeast Asia wagging fingers and talking about human rights and generally annoying people. That has helped because in neither jurisdiction did anybody particularly welcome being given lectures by Swedes and Dutch people about the state of their internal politics. And so to the degree that Europe has kind of put a lid on that, then that has helped.
“So for instance, if you take something like wanting to have UNCLOS and rules of the sea, then actually having European nations around is quite helpful. Because they give some ballast to the idea that these are rules that cannot simply be kind of ripped up by great powers at their whim.”
In terms of what Europe has to offer, it’s pretty clear: it’s still the world’s largest market and therefore the trade deals are huge. If you are in the business of striking trade deals, European Union is one of the most important ones that you can strike. For Southeast Asia, it has over recent years been the most important trading partner – I don’t know kind of where it stands with China at the moment, but it sort of been there or thereabouts in terms of the most important trading partner. Technology I think would be the second thing that I would point to. Again, as I said before, not as easy as the United States because it doesn’t have the hyperscalers like Google or big AI companies, which everyone wants a piece of. But it has a lot of underlying technology in terms of manufacturing industrial technology, pharmaceuticals, deep tech in the sense of the research base in the large European universities. So it’s a little bit more difficult to kind of get out of European companies, but it does exist and that’s very valuable for developing economies in South and Southeast Asia. And then I think there’s a bunch of other stuff which is newer, as I say, defense and security partnerships, not just at the level of the larger nation states, but also at the Brussels level as you saw with the defense and security pact that was done between the European Union and India.
Supply chains and economic security is a big concern of Europe. And so I mean that’s an agenda that’s being more fleshed out with respect to India where both sides have big concerns about China. It’s maybe less advanced with Southeast Asia where countries in Southeast Asia view China as a more kind of balanced proposition as opposed to more of a competitor, which I think is true in both Europe and India. And maybe the sort of green tech transition would be another. So I think there’s a lot of areas of kind of common interest. And the point I would go back to making is that particularly on kind of defense and security in the sense of hard security, but also economic security, the potential partnerships in areas like critical raw materials or supply chains are reasonably new. I mean, it wasn’t something that we were talking about pre-COVID and in a sense, the way that China has changed over recent years and to some degree the way the US has now changed. And so I think Europe has things to offer on all of those. It’s not the perfect partner, but then nobody is, you know? So in a sense out there in the world of trying to find people with whom you can diversify, you have to take the countries as they are. And that, as I say, it’s a reasonably small series of buckets of sort of East Asian democracies, Middle Eastern sort of oil emirates, and Europeans are kind of your big plays if you’re sitting in South or Southeast Asia, I think.
WHAT TO WATCH INTO 2027: PRIORITIES AND AREAS OF COOPERATION
ASEAN Wonk: If we look at some of the future-looking agenda items for Europe and Southeast Asia, there’s an EU upgrade planned already by 2027. And so some of the areas you mentioned in terms of the green economy, the digital economy and supply chains are conversations that are already occurring. One of the striking things is around this concept of economic security, which as both you and I know there are debates around but where we are seeing quite a few developments, including the EU’s own economic security strategy released last December. What are the areas you’re looking at particularly as we head into the rest of this year and into 2027 in particular?
James Crabtree: So the…
[Note: This is the end of a free preview podcast, with the full version in an earlier post published on February 19, 2026 available to our paying subscribers. This is not meant to serve as new content and is part of our free preview content within the dedicated website podcast section].
