Plain-language explainers on the forces shaping the world.
ASEAN is often described as Southeast Asia's answer to the EU. It is not. It is a consensus club that exists precisely because its members do not want supranational authority.
The ASEAN Way is a consensus rule. A consensus rule means any single member can prevent any collective action it dislikes.
ASEAN members: 10. Combined GDP: ~$3.6 trillion (2023)
Hussein Ibish at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington has spent a decade arguing that the Gulf monarchies' simultaneous engagement with Washington, Beijing, Moscow, and regional rivals is not opportunism but doctrine. The doctrine is now mature enough to read on its own terms.
Riyadh and Abu Dhabi are not picking sides between Washington and Beijing. They are running parallel positions on every major file and asking each capital to compete for what the Gulf actually wants.
UAE-China bilateral trade: $99B in 2023, up from $46B in 2018. UAE-US bilateral trade: $35B in 2023 (UAE Federal Competitiveness and Statistics Centre, US Census Bureau).
Steven Gruzd, head of the African Governance and Diplomacy Programme at the South African Institute of International Affairs, has tracked South Africa's BRICS engagement since its 2010 entry. The 2023 BRICS+ enlargement raised harder questions for Pretoria than the original membership did.
South Africa is the smallest BRICS member by every metric. Pretoria's value to the group is symbolic — an African anchor — but the symbolism gets diluted with every new member that adds size.
South Africa's share of total BRICS+ GDP (2024 expanded membership): about 1.6%. Share of total BRICS+ population: about 1.4% (World Bank data; SAIIA analysis).
Suzanne Maloney at Brookings has tracked the Abraham Accords since the September 2020 signing. The October 2023 war and its aftermath did not break the agreements but substantially changed the political ceiling on Saudi accession.
The Accords were sold as a regional transformation. They turned out to be a Gulf-Israel commercial channel with a thin political layer that the war did not destroy but did expose.
UAE-Israel bilateral trade: $1.06B (2021), $3.18B (2023), $2.96B (2024) (Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics).
Vali Nasr at SAIS has tracked the Beijing-brokered Iran-Saudi diplomatic restoration since its March 2023 announcement. The deal has held longer than the sceptics predicted. It has not produced the strategic realignment the optimists predicted.
The diplomatic restoration is mature. The strategic alignment is not, and the analytical mistake is to confuse the former for the latter.
Saudi-Iran bilateral trade, 2022: ~$24M; 2024: ~$340M (IMF Direction of Trade Statistics).
Anand Menon at King's College London, directing UK in a Changing Europe since 2015, has built the most empirically rigorous tracker of UK-EU regulatory and political alignment since 2016. The 2024 picture is gradual de facto realignment without the political language to describe it.
Brexit as identity is settled. Brexit as policy is being quietly unwound on most files where divergence costs more than it pays. Nobody is allowed to call this realignment.
UK regulations actively diverging from EU equivalents in 2024: about 14% of measured policy areas. Areas actively realigning: about 22% (UK in a Changing Europe Divergence Tracker 2024).
Andrew Small at the German Marshall Fund has been one of the most careful Western analysts of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation since its post-Iran-accession expansion. The SCO is real, growing, and substantially less coherent than the anti-Western framing suggests.
The SCO can issue a communiqué. It cannot resolve the India-Pakistan dispute, the India-China border, or the Iran-Saudi tensions inside its own widening membership.
SCO member states by 2025: 10 (China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Iran, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan); combined population: ~3.4 billion.
Oliver Stuenkel at FGV São Paulo, author of *Post-Western World* (Polity, 2016) and *The BRICS and the Future of Global Order* (Lexington, 2015), has produced the most operationally detailed account of how Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's third presidential term differs from his first two on foreign policy.
Lula 1.0 wanted a UN Security Council seat. Lula 2.0 wanted South-South leadership. Lula 3.0 wants to be the broker — between the West and the rest, between Russia and Ukraine, between OPEC+ and the climate agenda.
Brazil's BRICS+ enlargement vote (August 2023): supported Saudi Arabia, UAE, Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia entries; cooperated on Argentina invitation that Milei subsequently declined (Itamaraty diplomatic record; Stuenkel 2024).
ASEAN's ten member states have, with varying success, pursued hedging strategies between China and the US. The 2022-2025 period has tested these strategies. Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Philippines have each moved differently — the contrasts illuminate what is structurally possible and what isn't.
ASEAN doesn't have a foreign policy. ASEAN has ten foreign policies organised by a consensus norm that prevents any of them from forcing the others.
ASEAN-China bilateral trade (2024): $912B. ASEAN-US trade: $476B.
The March 2023 Beijing-mediated agreement to restore Iran-Saudi diplomatic relations was a regional shift. Three years in, the rapprochement has produced real change — Yemen ceasefire holding, Hajj coordination, embassy reopenings — and revealed the limits Iranian and Saudi strategic interests still impose.
Riyadh and Tehran agreed to stop bleeding each other in Yemen. They have not agreed on anything else that matters.
Saudi-led coalition strikes in Yemen, 2024-2025: under 50 (compared with 2,800+ in 2018).
Tanvi Madan at the Brookings Institution has been the clearest analyst of the US-India-Japan-Australia Quad since its 2017 revival. Her account separates the performative summits from the working-group output that constitutes most of the Quad's actual content.
The Quad is not a treaty alliance and is not trying to be. Reading it as a proto-NATO is the most common analytical mistake of the decade.
Quad working groups operational by 2025: 11, covering vaccines, critical and emerging tech, climate, maritime domain awareness, infrastructure, cyber, semiconductors (Brookings Quad Tracker).
Evan Laksmana, senior fellow at CSIS in Washington and previously at IISS Singapore, has written the most rigorous academic-and-policy account of what Indonesian foreign policy doctrine actually does — as distinct from what it says — under successive presidents.
Jakarta's non-alignment is not a refusal to choose partners. It is a refusal to be asked to choose, and a quiet willingness to buy everything from everyone.
Indonesia's defense imports 2018-2023 by supplier: France 31%, US 28%, South Korea 17%, Russia 9%, others 15% (SIPRI Arms Transfers Database 2024).
Lula's third-term Brazil has positioned BRICS+ membership and Western alignment as parallel hedges rather than alternatives. The 2024 G20 Rio summit illustrated the approach. Critics in both camps call it incoherent. Brazilian foreign-policy doctrine would call it 'autonomy through diversification.'
Brazil is not choosing sides because choosing sides is the choice that costs Brazil most.
Brazil's bilateral trade with China (2024): $157B — more than 2x its trade with the US.
Mark Leonard at the European Council on Foreign Relations has argued that the 2022 invasion of Ukraine forced the EU's strategic-autonomy debate out of theory and into operational policy. What the union does on defense industry and energy since 2022 is the only honest measure of the concept.
Strategic autonomy was a French slogan for a decade. After February 2022 it became a German and Polish program. That is what actually changed.
EU joint defense procurement as a share of total EU defense spending: about 18% in 2022, target of 35% by 2030 (European Defence Agency; EDIRPA program).
BRICS+ now includes the UAE, Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, and others. Headlines frame it as anti-Western bloc-building. The reality is messier: a club whose members agree mostly on what they dislike, not what they want.
India will not de-dollarize with China. Saudi Arabia will not abandon the petrodollar at Beijing's pace. The bloc is a press release.
BRICS+ share of global GDP (PPP): 36% — but bilateral trade is dwarfed by their G7 trade