US-Europe relations

The Ukraine war has made the EU, at least for now, more united than before and it is increasingly aligned with the US amid a reinvigoration of NATO. The grouping had erstwhile been seeking to forge a “third way” in playing a role in the Indo-Pacific free of the US-China binary construct. But as it moves closer to the US, will it be carried along by the “democracy versus autocracy” narrative and estrange itself from China to its own detriment?

The row continues between China and Lithuania over the naming convention “Taiwanese Representative Office in Lithuania” as China continues to exert pressure via export blocks on Lithuania. The Lithuanian president has also chimed in, calling for the name of the office to be changed. However, this reeks of being a proxy war between the US and China over Taiwan. Han Yong Hong explains.

The EU and ASEAN are supporters of a rules-based global system, says Joergen Oerstroem Moeller. As such, they can use their collective weight to persuade Washington and Beijing to focus less on their bilateral tensions and more on solving contemporary problems.

Portugal has in the past decade developed very lucrative relations with China. Chinese investment significantly assisted its recovery from the 2008 global economic crisis. However, Lisbon’s increasingly close ties with Beijing have raised serious concerns in Washington.

Analyst Zheng Weibin compares the current China-US competition to the Cold War, and notes that much of US domestic policy is in fact targeted at China, which perhaps distracts from the real domestic issues that the US should be tackling.

Chinese academic Zhang Jingwei notes that the recent meeting between US President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin was a step towards easing US-Russia relations. But fundamental tensions remain, not least due to NATO’s wariness of Russia and the US-China-Russia triangle.

The Comprehensive Agreement on Investment (CAI) was effectively frozen by the European Parliament last week, in consideration of China’s human rights issues in Xinjiang and its sanctions on individuals and organisations from the EU. Zaobao correspondent Edwin Ong asks: will this be the end of the deal, or is there still hope of a revival?

As China-US competition continues, economics professor Zhu Ying observes that two camps seem to be emerging. But it is not so straightforward as one camp being pro-US and another pro-China. The trilateral relationships of the US-EU-China and China-US-Russia will create pendulum swings.

US-based researcher Yu Shiyu notes that the EU seems to have gained greater unity and internal coherence from the stress test of Covid-19. In contrast, the US seems to be more divided and has not found its way around the pandemic as well as its many other domestic issues. What has the EU done right to be able to be a standard setter in the post-pandemic era?