Think Tank

The ECB’s 2025 strategy review responded to high inflation, supply shocks and broader structural transformations. The framework preserved the core of the 2021 design but introduced refinements in five areas: price stability, temporal orientation, instruments, analytical framework and communication. This briefing outlines these changes and assesses their implications, noting progress and highlighting persisting gaps.

For more than four decades, Iran has faced various international sanctions designed to modify its regime's conduct across multiple areas of concern. These areas include nuclear and ballistic missile programmes and proliferation, support for terrorism, regional destabilisation and human rights abuses. Since 1979, the United States' (US) sanctions on Iran have evolved into a complex and comprehensive regime. Between 2006 and 2010, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) imposed multilateral sanctions ...

Peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait are under strain. The People’s Republic of China’s diplomatic offensive against the Republic of China, Taiwan, has more recently been coupled with routinised large-scale and increasingly complex military exercises, incursions across the median line and an uptick in hybrid warfare tactics. China’s assertiveness has been met, and sometimes anticipated, by United States-led military and diplomatic countermeasures aimed at fostering Taiwan’s resilience within ...

This European implementation assessment of Regulation (EU) 2016/1139 establishing a multiannual plan for the stocks of cod, herring and sprat in the Baltic Sea and the fisheries exploiting those stocks aims to inform the ongoing work of the European Parliament's committee on Fisheries (PECH) on an own-initiative implementation report, 'The multiannual plan for the Baltic Sea and ways forward' (2024/2127(INI)). This European implementation assessment is composed of two parts. First, an introduction ...

Saudi Arabia's foreign policy is central to the kingdom's transition from oil dependency to economic diversification under the Vision 2030 reform programme. Riyadh's strategy of multi-alignment – balancing its longstanding United States (US) security partnership while expanding ties to China, Russia, and the Global South – offers both opportunities and vulnerabilities. While this approach provides greater strategic autonomy and diplomatic influence, it also generates tensions as competition between ...