Bandar Seri Begawan. Foreign ministers of some European Union (EU) and ASEAN nations will meet in Brunei Darussalam on Tuesday, but the question remains whether the two blocs will circle back to their discussions on setting up a regional trade agreement.

Their aides have begun arriving at Bandar Seri Begawan’s International Convention Center for the preparatory talks on Monday morning local time.

The session is closed to journalists.

But the two clubs have been entertaining the idea of securing a bloc-to-bloc free trade agreement (FTA), according to a joint statement from their last ministerial talks in 2024. 

“[We] reaffirm a future ASEAN-EU FTA as a common long-term objective,” the 2024 statement reads.

To this day, they have not set up a fixed timeline for when the negotiations could start. ASEAN data showed that its two-way merchandise trade with the EU had hit $320 billion in 2025 -- a year marred by US President Donald Trump’s tariff wrath.

FTAs in general aim to slash or eliminate tariffs -- the exact opposite of what the Trump 2.0 administration had been pursuing.

EU Ambassador to ASEAN Sujiro Seam had previously said that Europe preferred to clinch the smaller-scale pacts with the individual ASEAN economies first as something that he called the “building blocks” to a regional agreement. Europe had already secured these accords with Singapore and Vietnam. 

Its trade deal with Jakarta is set to take effect early next year, thereby rolling a zero-tariff carpet for Europe-bound Indonesian goods. The group’s trade chief Maros Sefcovic had targeted to conclude FTAs with Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand by 2027.

“Implicitly, that means that the question of region-to-region free trade agreement could indeed be reviewed after 2027,” Seam told the Jakarta Globe in January.

Seam said that the Trump tariffs had prompted ASEAN nations to diversify their markets without “hedging all bets on China”. 

“So naturally, it [ASEAN] turns to other partners.”

However, this was before Washington’s sudden war in Iran, which had thrown energy supplies and the global economy upside down. The government data showed that Indonesia-EU trade had reached $30.4 billion in 2024. 

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