Executive Summary

Europe’s turn toward the Indo-Pacific has unfolded over the past five years through the European Union (EU), the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and national strategies that increasingly describe the region as essential to Europe’s economic stability, maritime security, and the preservation of the rules-based order.

Across these strategies, several patterns have emerged. Europe’s Indo-Pacific focus is largely China driven. For example, concerns about China, such as its use of economic dependency as political leverage and its contestation of maritime norms, shapes nearly every national Indo-Pacific strategy. Yet Europe’s responses rely heavily on diplomacy, regulation, and presence missions rather than military power, reflecting limited expeditionary capacity and a desire to avoid becoming entangled in Sino-American rivalry. This has reinforced Europe’s preference for non-traditional security domains, such as maritime governance, cyber resilience and climate and disaster relief, and capacity-building, where it can act as a normative, civilian power. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has further narrowed Europe’s bandwidth, pulling resources back to the European theatre and prompting a pragmatic recalibration of Indo-Pacific ambitions. Meanwhile, South Korea, despite robust bilateral cooperation with several European states, remains peripheral within most European Indo-Pacific strategies, overshadowed by Japan, Australia, India, and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in Europe’s China-oriented framing.

These dynamics yield two broader implications. First, Europe’s most meaningful role in the Indo-Pacific will be governance-based: standard-setting, export controls, sanctions enforcement, illicit-finance disruption, maritime law, digital rules, and connectivity finance. These instruments rarely shift military balances, but they can produce strategic benefits, for example, better maritime domain awareness, tighter proliferation monitoring, and more resilient supply chains. Second, Europe’s engagement will continue to be shaped and constrained by the United States. U.S. leadership amplifies European rule-making and lowers the cost of signalling in the region, but Washington’s preference for “more Europe in Europe” limits the scope for autonomous European hard-security activism in Asia, reinforcing a functional division of labour.

The report therefore recommends that Europe avoid over-centralizing Indo-Pacific policy under a single EU framework and instead empower coalitions focused on Europe’s comparative strengths, while significantly expanding use of the NATO-IP4 format as its primary security platform with the region. Institutionalizing NATO-IP4 ministerial dialogue, producing shared threat assessments, and planning long-term transregional exercises would shift Europe's Indo-Pacific engagement from summit-driven commitments toward arrangements with their own institutional momentum, such as standing working groups or scheduled exercises. For South Korea, the report urges reframing North Korea as a governance challenge—illicit finance, sanctions evasion, cyber operations, and arms transfers to Russia—that aligns directly with European concerns related to China and Russia. Seoul should complement strong bilateral ties with a region-wide strategy that uses NATO-IP4 and EU mechanisms to anchor South Korean priorities within Europe’s evolving Indo-Pacific thinking.

Table of Contents

Executive Summary

I. Introduction

II. Europe’s Strategic Turn to the Indo-Pacific

1. The EU’s Indo-Pacific Strategy

2. NATO’s Indo-Pacific Turn

3. National Indo-Pacific Strategies and Rationales

4. Early Patterns of Security Engagement

III. Observations

1. China as the Central Rationale Behind Europe’s Indo-Pacific Focus

2. Mismatch Between Threat Perception and Operational Tools

3. Focus on Non-Traditional Security Domains

4. Post-Ukraine War Constraints and Updated Indo-Pacific Strategies

5. South Korea’s Marginal Presence in European Strategies

IV. Implications

1. Europe as a Governance Actor

2. U.S. Influence

V. Recommendations

1. For Europe

2. For South Korea

VI. Conclusion

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