French President Emmanuel Macron leads the last attempt by European leaders to pursue Southeast -Asian countries that are concerned about becoming additional damage in the American trade war and safety disputes between Washington and Beijing.
Macron has already announced € 9 billion ($ 10.3 billion) in deals and promises of closer defense cooperation during a visit to Vietnam on Monday. He will strive for that momentum later this week in Indonesia and then in Singapore, where he gives a keynote address to the annual Shangri-La Dialogue Security Security Forum on Friday.
The region is receptive: Southeast Asia is trapped between the threat of dramatically higher American rates on the one hand, and a wave of cheaper Chinese goods that undermine their economies on the other side. But Macron is also confronted with the reality that the region will not quickly shake its dependence on one of the super powers of the world.
“For Southeast -Asia, Europe offers valuable ballast in an increasingly polarized world,” said Shahriman Lockman, an analyst at the Institute of Strategic and International Studies in Malaysia. But the capacities of Europe are limited, he added: “Europe can only supplement, not replace the United States.”
The Macron tour comes when the European Union is in a hurry to diversify supply chains and access new markets as a central element of her response to the charges of US President Donald Trump.
In recent months, the EU has improved trade discussions with Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand. It aims to breathe new life into negotiations on commercial and economic security with Australia and at the same time seeking a radical agreement with India at the end of the year.
The renewed involvement in the region began during the Biden administration, which encouraged European countries to deepen ties in Southeast -Asia in an attempt to broaden both support for Ukraine and build on its own alliances in the region. But it is now being accelerated, partly because of the rates of Trump and his interrogation of many historical military alliances.
“Washington is now pushing these countries together again – but this time it is because uncertainty about the trade policy and security guarantees of America are the partners of America looking for stronger ties elsewhere in the world,” said Jennifer Welch, Chief Goe -Economy Analyst at Bloomberg Economics.
Asia is running
The constant war in Ukraine will be an important focus for Macron, who, according to officials, will claim that the conflict that Russia began has worldwide consequences that reach deeply in Asia – to include both China and the increasing support of North Korea for Moscow. That is a development that officials in Seoul, Tokyo and other Asian capitals have alerted.
When consolidating its Asia-Pivot, the EU investigates closer cooperation with the extensive and progressive agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade block with 12 countries that extends from New Zealand to Canada. That movement would mainly be welcomed in Southeast Asia, said a diplomat in the region. Trump withdrew from the earlier iteration of the partnership in 2017.
Behind the scenes, EU officials also compared notes with counterparts from South Korea and Japan about Trump’s commercial conversations with China, according to people who are familiar with those discussions.
Various Asian countries try to see how the EU deals with its trade negotiations with the Trump administration, while looking for a blueprint for their own conversations, said Supavud Saicheua, a member of Thai Prime Minister Paetongtarn ShinaWatra’s economic advisory panel, said in an interview.
What they have seen so far is perhaps not reassuring, where Trump says last week that negotiations with the EU were nowhere to go and threatened to impose a rate of 50% on the block from June. He then announced an extension until July 9 to close a deal.
Economic
With most Southeast Asian countries with the US and China as their largest trading partners, their room for maneuver is limited in the short term, said Gregory Poling, director and senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“The countries that are most dependent on the US are looking for deals because they have to,” said Poling.
Some Southeast Asian countries have even seen Europe irrelevant for a long time when it comes to the broader architecture of the region, according to two officials who asked not to be identified on internal deliberations. That perception is an obstacle that the block still works to overcome, they added.
Moreover, the dependence on many Asian countries in the US for safety – have a need that Europe would have to fill – make them reluctant to assume a more difficult negotiating attitude towards the Trump administration or to vocally speak out at his rates, said different European officials.
Back in Washington, Trump has renounced some historical American safety recognitions, including NATO, but so far the administration has largely given support to its partners in Asia, something that was not lost in the region, analysts say.
For Macron, power projection in the Indo-Pacific is a pillar of its geopolitical strategy, which includes military exercises with allies such as Japan, Malaysia and India, a top buyer of French military equipment. As the home of various overseas areas and around 1.6 million French citizens, Paris has a direct interest and deep historical ties in the wider Indo-Pacific.
But although Europe will welcome new business deals, there is a constant debate in the EU about how far the block should go, given the security challenges, in particular the war in Ukraine, it has to do closer to home.
“The Europeans occasionally send ships to the South Chinese Sea, but these are largely symbolic gestures in support of international law, not credible deterrence,” said Lockman.
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Published on 27 May 2025
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