The mother of all trade deals to America’s new defence strategy, the dismissal of a PLA princeling, Prabowo’s Peace Board support, ASEAN’s rejection of Myanmar junta’s poll victory and the deadly serious business of marriage in China –we present the latest news and views from our region.

India and the EU have agreed to create a free trade area covering almost two billion people, repudiating Donald Trump’s belligerently protectionist approach to trade.

The new pact was an enormously consequential free trade agreement, The Indian Express said in an editorial. It underlined India’s desire to seek deeper global integration within a predictable, rules-based framework – at a time when Trump had taken a wrecking ball to the trading system.

The Financial Express used more moderate language but conveyed a similar idea, saying both the India and the EU sought to hedge against fickle ties with the US.

It quoted Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi as saying the free trade deal would represent a quarter of the world’s economy.

The Hindu newspaper said the pact would see the EU drop tariffs on 99.5 per cent of items India exported to the region, with most tariffs going to zero immediately the agreement came into force. India had given concessions on 97.5 per cent of the value of goods it traded with the EU.

“We have delivered the mother of all deals,” EU President Ursula von der Leyen said. “This is a tale of two giants – the world’s second and fourth largest economies… A strong message that co-operation is the best answer to global challenges.”

Modi said: “India has concluded the largest free trade agreement in its history.”

India and the EU had also launched a security and defence partnership, The Statesman newspaper reported. It covered intelligence sharing, defence manufacturing, maritime safety and co-operation in the domains of space and cyber.

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent slammed the trade deal, saying Europe was funding Russia in the Ukraine war. India bought Russia oil, refined it and sold it to Europe.

“They are financing the war against themselves, he said. “We have put 25 per cent tariffs on India for buying Russian oil. Guess what happened…The Europeans signed a trade deal with India.”

An explainer in The Indian Express said the trade talks were launched in 2007 but most progress was made in the past six months. By July last year negotiators had covered barely seven of the pact’s 21 chapters – then they managed to wrap up all the remaining chapters by last week.

“US tariffs may have accelerated the India-EU trade negotiations but India and the EU managed to narrow differences by re-evaluating negotiating positions amid rapid geo-economic shifts that have even left multilateral bodies such as the World Trade Organisation scrambling for relevance,” the story said.

US defence strategy makes China a top priority but doesn’t mention Taiwan

The 2026 US National Defence Strategy outlines the aim of deterring China through military strength but there is a striking omission: it does not mention Taiwan.

The strategy, issued late last week, promises a strong denial-based defence against China along the first island chain – stretching along the East Asian coast from the Kuril Islands in the north and including Japan, the Ryukyu Islands, Taiwan, the northern Philippines and Borneo. But the document does not mention the island at its centre.

An analysis in The Diplomat, the Asian news magazine, notes that the text says Donald Trump seeks stable peace and direct engagement with China.

“Consequently, the Pentagon’s role is redefined,” the article says. “It is no longer an ideological crusader against an ‘authoritarian model’. Its mandate is to ensure the president can ‘negotiate from a position of strength’.”

The article, written by Yaqi Li, a researcher at the Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, says the new strategy is less a standard Pentagon product and more a political instrument.

It marries denial-based defence with promoting military-to-military communications as a strategic priority, to prevent accidental war. It says the omission of Taiwan is a calculated blank space, designed to maintain room to move in forthcoming summit diplomacy with Xi Jinping.

But the strategy has a flaw: it makes assumptions about crisis management that do not hold in China’s party-army system. “Washington has built a risk-management strategy dependent on a counterpart that views silence as a weapon,” Li says.

South Korean commentator General Chun In-bum says the strategy makes homeland defence and the Indo-Pacific – specifically China – the top priorities. Writing in The Korea Times, he says it also signals that allies must assume primary responsibility for their own regional security.

“The United States no longer believes it can deter all adversaries everywhere,” Chun says. “Strategic prioritisation has replaced omnipresence.”

The Korea Herald says in a news story the strategy assigns to South Korea primary responsibility for deterring North Korea. Seoul could expect to receive critical, but more limited, US support.

The Times says in an editorial a disconcerting aspect of the defence strategy is that, like the National Security Strategy released last November, it omits any reference to North Korea’s denuclearisation.

Insecure Xi sacks his top general

The high command of the People’s Liberation Army has been thrown into turmoil, with the removal of two top officials of the Central Military Commission, including Zhang Youxia, China’s highest-ranked uniformed officer.

Zhang, number two in the commission to President Xi Jinping, and Liu Zhenli, chief of its Joint Staff Department, were suspected of serious violations of discipline and law, Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post, reported. Zhang, 75, was also a member of the all-powerful Politburo.

As a result of previous purges and now those of Zhang and Liu, the commission now had only one uniformed official, the paper said.

A commentary in The Diplomat said earlier purges had been framed as a fight against corruption. But not this time. The op-ed, by Zi Yang, a Singapore-based expert on the Chinese military, said this laid bare the depth of interpersonal conflicts at the top of the PLA.

The removal of Zhang, whom Xi had known from childhood, was highly unusual, given Xi’s need for trusted individuals in powerful positions, to help him control the PLA.

He said a plausible explanation for the purges was that Xi was motivated by growing distrust due to personal conflicts, exacerbated by the insecurities of an aging leader with limited military experience.

Youlun Nie, an academic commentator on Chinese affairs, said Zhang was no mere commander. After Xi, he was the sole “princeling” on the Politburo. He was widely considered politically untouchable, Nie wrote in Nikkei Asia, the politics and business news magazine.

Removing such a titan on mere corruption charges would upend the traditional understanding of Beijing's patronage system.

“[Zhang’s removal] is a desperate measure triggered by a perfect storm of crises,” Nie said. “At its core, this purge marks the violent intersection of failed war preparations and the supreme leader’s existential insecurity.”

Nie listed four possible factors behind the purge. At the top of the list was Taiwan. Xi’s ambition to unify China and Taiwan was real but the instrument for achieving it – the PLA under Zhang – was hollow. There were scandalous defects in the PLA’s Rocket Force, including missile fuel tanks filled with water and silo lids that would not open.

“Xi realised that the high-tech arsenal he had heavily invested in and taken such pride in… might turn out to be nothing more than expensive fireworks,” Nie said.

Peace Board backing clashes with pro-Palestine policy

Indonesia has joined Donald Trump’s Board of Peace for Gaza. President Prabowo Subianto is said to see the new body as offering an opportunity to achieve peace in Gaza and Palestine.

But the move has been criticised as hard to reconcile with Indonesia’s support for Palestinian independence.

Indonesia last September offered to send 20,000 peace-keeping troops to Gaza. This month, Prabowo joined 21 other heads of state in signing the Peace Council charter at a ceremony Trump hosted at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

Tempo magazine quoted Prabowo as saying the suffering of the people or Gaza had been reduced and humanitarian aid had been entering the enclave on a massive scale. “Indonesia is ready to participate,” he said.

Other Islamic nations that agreed to join included Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Jordan, Turkey, Pakistan and Egypt.

Sepa Aradz, Indonesia’s Minister of the State Secretariat, said Indonesia wanted to expedite the peace process between Palestine and Israel.

However, an opinion piece in The Jakarta Post said neither Gaza nor Palestine was mentioned in the charter. The article, by Lina Alexandra and Pieter Pandie of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, Indonesia, said this raised the question of whether the board was genuinely about tackling Gaza's problems or whether it reflected Trump’s ambition to set up a mini-UN security council that would sideline the existing UN system.

“Indonesia has consistently framed its support for Palestinian independence not merely as a matter of diplomatic preference but as a constitutional obligation rooted in international law, anti-colonial solidarity and the defence of basic human rights,” they said. “It is, therefore, difficult to reconcile this long-standing position with Indonesia’s willingness to engage in a peace initiative whose approach to Gaza and the broader Palestinian question raises serious normative and political concerns.”

An article in Nikkei Asia, by Virdika Rizky Utama, a researcher with a Jakarta think-tank, said the board was never intended to tackle the political roots of the Gaza conflict. Its function was managerial – to organise the aftermath of destruction. “Indonesia’s decision… should be read less as pragmatic diplomacy than as a serious error of judgment,” he wrote.

The only poll Myanmar military can win

The ruling Myanmar regime has won its three-stage election, which finished last weekend, by a widely expected landslide.

The Union Solidarity and Development Party, the proxy party for the junta, was expected to win 193 out of 209 lower house seats and 52 out of 78 in the upper house, according to ucanews.com, the Catholic Asian news site.

But the party won only 71 seats in both houses in the 2020 election – three months before a coup that ousted the government of Aung San Suu Kyi and tipped the country into civil war, the story said.

Ucan called the election a sham poll and said it was recognised by China, India, Russia and the US, all of which were interested in the country’s mineral resources. North Korea, Belarus, Cambodia and Laos also supported the poll.

But ASEAN had said it would not recognise the result. And the UN, many Western countries and human rights advocates had derided the election as rigged.

Human Rights Myanmar said in a report the election failed to meet international legal standards, Mizzima, a Burmese exile news site, said. The organisation said the vote breached five core principles of legitimate elections, including freedom of choice and universal suffrage.

“According to the report, genuine political competition was impossible due to the dissolution of major opposition parties, including the National League for Democracy – the winner of the 2020 election,” Mizzima said.

The election result coincided with the final week of an International Court of Justice hearing of charges that the junta had committed a genocide against Rohingya Muslims, starting in October 2016. The charges were brought by The Gambia.

In a separate story, Mizzima quoted Gambia legal counsel Paul Reichler as telling the court Myanmar’s military operations were a calculated attempt to destroy the Rohingya as an ethnic group.

Why Chinese women are saying I won’t

A young woman known in the media as Wei, a high-school teacher in a village in central China, was meant to get married last month. She did not want to marry but her parents were adamant.

Wei fought against the pressure and tried to call off the wedding the day before the scheduled date but to no avail. On 10 December, her wedding day, she committed suicide. “I have completed the biggest task of my life,” she wrote on the social media platform WeChat.

The story of Wei’s tragic end is told in a feature article in the South China Morning Post, written by senior reporter Phoebe Zhang. Women in China, especially educated women with good jobs, are being forced to marry, Zhang says.

“It still happens and the pressure is intense,” Zhang writes. “I have several friends with master’s degrees whose well-to-do families still demand they marry.

“One 30-something, who had gone to the best schools and spent more than 10 years abroad, was forced to attend the frequent dinner dates her mother set up. It’s a scary thought – two strangers forced to spend time alone, often simply because their parents had heard something good about the family.”

Demographer Yi Fuxian says China’s “marriage market” suffers from a profound mismatch. Yi, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says decades of sex-selective abortions during the time of the one-child policy created a severe shortage of women of child-bearing age, while women’s higher educational achievement meant that female students outnumbered male students.

Many men are unable to find wives, he says in an op-ed distributed by Project Syndicate, the expert writers’ group, and published in Bangkok Post. “More women are likely to remain unmarried, given their preference for more highly educated husbands.”

Hence the parental pressure on young women to marry. (And, as Zhang notes in her story, a preference for sons remains strong).

Yi says births in China last year numbered 7.92 million, down from 9.54 million in 2024 and almost half of the number projected (14.33 million) in 2016, when the one-child policy was repealed. “The decline in the fertility rate was inevitable,” Yi says. “Like a boulder rolling down a hill.”