Cooperation in the Indo-Pacific – between competition and complementarity

Since the start of 2026, world events have been unfolding at an ever-faster speed. At recent international forums, world leaders have offered assessments and policy frameworks how to respond to the erosion of the current order and its fulcrum, international law. A central element in the coming debates will be the shape of the future relationship between the US and China. In shaping their own relations with Beijing and Washington, Europe and the Indo-Pacific are significantly affected by the future trajectory of US-China relations. The recent sequence of visits to Beijing by leaders from Europe, Australia and New Zealand underscored the importance attached to assessing ties with China as fundamental geostrategic and geo-economic changes unfold.

It is against this backdrop that FES Australia & New Zealand brought together a delegation of regional experts from German think-tanks and academic institutions for meetings in Canberra, Melbourne and Sydney between 16 and 20 March 2026, to build stronger links with Australian and New Zealand counterparts and to offer a platform to compare perspectives on relevant policy settings. Representatives of the Mercator Institute for China Studies, of the German Council on Foreign Relations, of Ruhr University Bochum as well as colleagues from FES Shanghai and from Victoria University Wellington - Te Herenga Waka discussed a wide range of related issues with experts from the Lowy Institute, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, the National Security College as well as other scholars at Australian National University and at the University of Melbourne, with The Australia China Relations Institute and the University of Sydney’s United States’ Studies Center. They were also hosted by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, by the Australian Institute for International Affairs, by Universities Australia and by the State government of Victoria, and engaged with a number of individual experts who generously shared their time and insights. The agenda ranged from risks and opportunities in trade and investment, over technological and education cooperation challenges to threat assessments and defense postures, exploring proposals for policy settings that find the sweet spots between engagement and de-risking, between cooperation and protection.

A better appreciation of the wider scope of views that shape the discussions in the respective communities of policy experts will help us to jointly identify where the most added value can be achieved when the exchange is followed up later in the year by a second delegation visit to Brussels and Berlin of experts from Australia and New Zealand.