Asia

As November 2026 approaches, the future of the export control measures imposed by China on rare earth elements and related materials, currently under suspension, remains surrounded by uncertainty. On September 28, 2026, China’s Ministry of Commerce announced the extension of the broader economic and trade agreement between China and the United States “Kuala Lumpur Agreement” until January 10, 2027. However, this announcement didn’t explicitly amend the expiration date specified in the “Announcement No. 70 of 2025,” which mandates the suspension of six prior decisions until November 10, 2026. So, unless a subsequent official decision is issued to extend this suspension, the potential resumption of these measures remains a regulatory risk.

Submarine data cables have become a vital pillar for the security and economies of Europe and Asia, carrying the international data traffic that carries financial and commercial transactions, cloud computing and digital services, as well as cross-border business operations. The reliability of these services depends not only on the availability of functional cable systems but also on the geographical distribution of the routes connecting markets, data centres, and digital infrastructure.   In this context, the Red Sea region and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait are of particular significance. They link the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea and serve as a primary channel for data traffic between Asia and Europe. Furthermore, the risks in the Strait of Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb raises the stakes for the submarine and terrestrial corridors connecting continents together. In such a context, countries including France, Italy, Germany, Pakistan, India, and Singapore face significant tests regarding their interconnectedness to such corridors. This raises crucial questions: how do countries differ in their ability to maintain connectivity, and what costs and dependencies do alternative routes introduce?

In October 2024 the EU imposed countervailing duties of 7.8% to 35.3% on Chinese battery-electric vehicles (BEVs), on top of its 10% car tariff. Hybrids were not covered, because the investigation never examined plug-in hybrids and in January 2026 a Commission spokesperson said that duties could not be extended to hybrids without a new, formal investigation. Chinese hybrid imports then rose from about 107,000 in 2024 to about 302,000 in 2025, according to Eurostat figures cited by China’s Ministry of Commerce, and the Commission expects about 800,000 in 2026.   After trade consultations in Beijing on 8–9 October 2026, the EU and China announced an understanding on hybrid vehicles. Officials have since reported a quota of 350,000 Chinese hybrids a year, rising 6% annually from the second year for four years, applied as a safeguard from early December. EU leaders met on 15–16 October, but that was an internal EU summit: its conclusions did not name the understanding, and leaders pressed the Commission for wider defensive trade tools. Yet against this backdrop of political manoeuvring, a fundamental economic reality remains: the quota is a shield, not a strategy. Reducing imports is not the same as improving competitiveness. A quota can give European producers temporary relief, change the composition of trade and encourage production in Europe, but it does not directly address energy costs, scale, technology or supply chains. The central question is additionality: does the arrangement generate investment, productivity and innovation that would not have occurred without it?

Opinion polls influence the political environment they seek to measure. By shaping perceptions of electability, they affect voters’ choices, media attention, campaign funding and access to electoral competition. The paper examines how these interactions can transform polling from a means of observing electoral sentiment into an instrument for shaping it. Its central finding is that influence does not require fabricated figures: selective publication, concealed sponsorship and the presentation of uncertain forecasts as assured outcomes can turn genuine data into a misleading account of public opinion.   Evidence across several countries illustrates how this influence operates. In the 2018 US General Social Survey, 23.6% of respondents considered spending on ‘welfare’ insufficient, compared with 73.2% when the question referred to ‘assistance to the poor’, demonstrating the significance of wording. During the 2023 Republican presidential debates, the minimum polling threshold rose from 1% to 6%, illustrating how measured support can become a condition for gaining the visibility needed to attract further support. The paper also examines how electoral expectations affect financial markets, drawing on India’s 2024 election and the controversy surrounding privately commissioned polling during the Brexit referendum.   The consequences extend beyond inaccurate predictions. Favourable polling narratives can distort campaign decisions, concentrate resources and narrow the alternatives visible to voters, while disappointed expectations can be exploited to undermine confidence in elections. Artificial intelligence introduces further risks through fabricated responses and synthetic substitutes for human participants. Nevertheless, the paper distinguishes methodological error from deliberate deception and argues that effective safeguards must preserve independent polling. Disclosure of funding, questions, sampling methods and weighting assumptions, alongside responsible reporting and independent scrutiny, can help ensure that polls inform electoral choice without presenting the outcome as predetermined.

Aviation is usually discussed as a cause of climate change. This analysis treats it as an industry whose operating environment is changing faster than its economics can absorb. Three terms need to be kept apart: hazard is the physical event, such as a storm or flood; exposure is what lies in its path; and vulnerability is how badly the exposed system is damaged. Climate change raises the hazard, and aviation’s structure determines its vulnerability, meaning a more severe event produces a proportionately larger loss only if it strikes a system with little capacity to absorb it.   Aviation’s vulnerability stems from three structural features: networks with almost no slack, margins too thin to absorb recurring shocks, and dependencies concentrated in a few nodes. These features create an economic coordination problem: the benefits of resilience are distributed across airlines, airports, passengers, and the wider network, while the cost of maintaining spare capacity is borne directly by individual operators. What is privately efficient may therefore be less resilient than what is socially optimal. Northern Europe illustrates the vulnerability of network flow, while Thailand illustrates the vulnerability of node concentration.

The international system faces complex geostrategic pressures that place global supply chains under unprecedented strain. Escalating military tensions, particularly disruptions to shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, are putting pressure on oil and liquefied natural gas flows. In 2025, this passage carried around a quarter of seaborne oil trade and 19% of global trade in liquefied natural gas. These developments coincide with a shift in the Russia–Ukraine conflict towards attacks on energy infrastructure, alongside tighter restrictions on Black Sea shipping and disruptions to key export routes for strategically important grains. This convergence leaves the world caught between declining oil supplies and restricted access to part of the available food supply, complicating procurement and threatening the foundations of national security.   Faced with these shortages and rising shipping costs, some major powers and emerging economies are expanding biofuel production as an instrument of national policy to ease the energy crisis, alongside pursuing environmental objectives and supporting agricultural production. Agricultural producer countries are consequently choosing to redirect part of their strategic crop output, including maize, sugar cane and palm oil, towards biofuel plants to meet transport needs. This analysis advances the hypothesis that expanding biofuels derived from food crops may heighten the vulnerability of importing countries when demand growth outstrips the capacity of production and stocks to accommodate it, while trade policies restrict exportable supplies. The scale of this effect depends on the feedstocks used, the volume diverted and the responsiveness of production. It does not apply to the same extent to fuels produced from agricultural residues or used oils.   Import-dependent countries, particularly in the Middle East and Africa, may bear the cost of these pressures through diminished food security and domestic stability. An inability to secure food can, in this context, undermine social stability and signal the risk of political crises whose severity varies according to institutional effectiveness and the capacity to protect the most vulnerable groups. This complex situation poses an urgent question: how far can importing countries withstand the convergence of energy and food policies, and what protective mechanisms can safeguard their national security as competition intensifies between the use of crops for food and for fuel?

The global economic landscape is witnessing rapid transformations that impose structural challenges on food supply chains. India emerges as an influential actor due to its agricultural weight and its connection to Middle Eastern markets. Amidst this connection, India experienced a climate shock in late summer 2023 that tangibly affected rainfall. This coincided with a marked acceleration in implementing the national Ethanol Blended Petrol (EBP) programme for an E20 target, which depletes staple crops like maize, rice, and sugarcane to produce fuel instead of food. The climate variation and supply shocks resulting from the E20 programme formed a primary driver of price pressures, pushing the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to maintain a tight monetary policy, and pushing the federal government to take protectionist measures that included a consecutive ban on the export of strategic commodities, noting that export restrictions began in 2022 and expanded in 2023. While the protectionist decisions and the central bank's decisions were not officially attributed to ethanol as a direct primary cause, its growing depletion of crops is considered a potential structural multiplier of inflationary pressures.   Against this backdrop, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states, which depend heavily on Indian agricultural imports to meet their consumption needs, find themselves vulnerable to the consequences of these disruptions. The repercussions are not limited to immediate supply disruption or rising import costs, but extend to include deep strategic challenges regarding the extent to which Gulf investments in the Indian agricultural sector can provide genuine protection against sovereign export ban decisions.   This analysis therefore aims to explore the dimensions of the Indian supply crisis and its impacts, moving through tracking the path of inflation and the export restrictions imposed by New Delhi, arriving at an assessment of the level of Gulf exposure, and analysing the limits of the effectiveness of foreign direct investments as a tool for strategic hedging against recurring food crises.

Longevity is moving beyond the domain of medical research to become a potential source of economic and strategic power. Advances in genomics, regenerative medicine, cellular reprogramming, and AI-enabled drug discovery are attracting growing private investment and government attention, even as evidence for dramatic extensions of healthy human lifespan remains limited. Against a backdrop of population ageing and declining fertility, even incremental improvements in healthspan could reshape labour markets, pension systems, healthcare demand, and national productivity.   However, longer healthy lives present a fundamental paradox. While they could expand individual freedom, preserve human capital, and create opportunities for education, creativity, and multiple careers, they could also extend working lives at the expense of personal choice, delay inheritance, compound wealth, and allow political, corporate, and scientific elites to retain influence for longer. If access to longevity interventions remains concentrated among wealthier individuals, existing inequalities could deepen across both generations and societies.   The geopolitical implications are equally significant. The United States, China, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Singapore represent different approaches to building longevity research, investment, regulatory, and biotechnology capabilities. Countries that develop and deploy effective interventions could strengthen their human capital and technological competitiveness, while those lacking research infrastructure or access to advanced therapies risk greater dependence on external suppliers. The convergence of AI and biotechnology adds further concerns surrounding biological data, dual-use capabilities, cybersecurity, and the concentration of technological power.   This Special Edition identifies the signals that could indicate a transition from scientific promise to systemic change, outlines plausible future scenarios, and examines how governments can prepare. Its central argument is that the strategic consequences of longevity will depend not only on scientific progress, but also on how societies distribute additional healthy years, regulate emerging technologies, and adapt the institutions governing work, wealth, retirement, and political authority.  

While political capitals retain legal and sovereign authority, seaports have emerged as the "functional capitals" of the modern state. These maritime nodes are where sovereign decisions are translated into material reality, controlling the flow of energy, food, industrial inputs, and data. With 80% of global trade volume and 70% of its value moving by sea, the disruption of a major port can rapidly paralysise a nation's economy and military logistics, demonstrating that port power is highly consequential and systemic.   Port power is relational, depending on factors like geographic position, network centrality, industrial depth, and digital architecture. The global port network is highly concentrated, with less than 5% of ports handling half of the global maritime trade, creating a paradox where extreme efficiency leads to profound systemic vulnerabilities. This concentration makes ports susceptible not only to physical blockades or congestion but also to cyberattacks and climate change, necessitating robust resilience strategies.   Furthermore, foreign investment in port infrastructure carries significant geopolitical implications, moving beyond simplistic narratives of "debt-trap diplomacy". Long-term concessions and operational control can create strategic dependencies, even without outright asset confiscation. Additionally, modern ports possess a dual-use nature, where commercial facilities can provide latent military option value, blurring the lines between economic integration and naval expansion. Ultimately, true national power lies in the effective integration of the political capital's authority with the strategic port's physical capabilities.   This publication was written in August 2026

For over two decades, The President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) stood as the clearest example of what concentrated donor power could do: one country's political will, translated into billions of dollars a year, credited with saving more lives than any single global health program in history. That era is now ending, not through a managed transition but through an abrupt, largely unplanned withdrawal that began within days of the second Trump administration taking office in January 2025. The story that follows is not simply about cuts to HIV/AIDS funding, but it is about what happens when the architecture of global health financing loses its dominant pillar, who scrambles to fill the resulting vacuum, whether the countries left exposed can build the fiscal and institutional capacity to stand on their own, and whether the system that emerges is more fragile or more resilient than the one it replaces. The transition is already producing real costs: closed clinics, disrupted treatment, and rising infections in countries that had spent years bringing their epidemics under control. Besides, it is also accelerating financing reforms, regional cooperation, and domestic manufacturing that donor dependence had, for twenty years, made largely unnecessary. Both of these things are true at once, and this analysis traces both.

Hundreds of fishing boats ring a reef no one is technically fighting over. No missiles fired, no warships trading shots, just a coast guard that cannot get close and fishermen who eventually leave. Weeks later, the water functions as someone else's. China has spent over a decade building this capability: the People's Armed Forces Maritime Militia, a fleet that flies no naval flag and answers to no declaration of war, subsidized and coordinated to advance state objectives in the South China Sea without crossing the threshold that would draw in the US Navy, trigger a treaty, or unite the region against Beijing.   The significance of the militia extends beyond China's activities in the South China Sea. It provides an example of a broader trend in which civilian assets are increasingly incorporated into national security strategies. The more useful question is not what China is doing with these assets, but why this specific tool, and what it signals about how the next round of great-power competition will be fought.

On July 15, 2026, reports revealed that the EU has authorised Ukraine to purchase Chinese drone components using EU defence funds. This decision is striking, as although Europe accuses China of supporting Russia's military-industrial development and seeks to contain China’s military capabilities, the new shift suggests that it may represent a new geopolitical reality rather than a temporary wartime exception.   This decision represents a new direction where Europe has been obligated to finance Chinese defence-related industries because no viable alternative exists. This points to a broader strategic aspiration where China tries to position itself to become an indispensable supplier of military components. It means supplying the core parts and technologies upon which global weapons production increasingly depends. This raises a crucial question: can China leverage its dominance in military components to become the indispensable infrastructure of global defence production?