The EU Arctic Strategy Between Autonomy and Dependence
Source: iStock.com/danielsbfoto
On October 20, 2026, the European Commission and the High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Kaja Kallas, presented in Strasbourg the joint communication entitled Europe’s Northern Neighbourhood: A New Strategy for the Arctic, which updates the policy adopted in 2021. The title already contains the document’s thesis: the Arctic is not described as some distant region onto which the Union projects (or should project) its interests, but as its Northern Neighbourhood, and the text explicitly declares that the Union is part of it.
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- The EU Arctic Strategy Between Autonomy and Dependence
In support of this idea, the Commission recalls that member states Denmark, Finland, and Sweden are Arctic states and that more than 500,000 European citizens live in the region. The introduction, furthermore, breaks with the language of the past: it speaks of an Arctic that was once a symbol of stability and cooperation and is now more accessible but also more contested, warming almost four times faster than the global average, and it attributes the tensions to Russia “rebuilding its Arctic military footprint” and to “China’s strategic ambitions,” while admitting that multilateralism can no longer be the sole foundation of the European approach. The United States does not feature in this threat picture and is mentioned only later, in the section devoted to partners, as an ally and a founding member of NATO and the Arctic Council. It is a choice of wording that, as we will see, says a great deal about the way Brussels drafted the text.
The previous joint communication—A stronger EU engagement for a peaceful, sustainable and prosperous Arctic—of October 13, 2021, which in turn replaced the policy adopted in 2016, had the Green Deal at its core and rested on three priorities: climate and environment, sustainable development, and the promotion of peace, stability, and cooperation. Its most debated passage was the commitment to push for oil, coal, and gas to stay in the ground, including in the Arctic, together with a call for a multilateral legal obligation against any new hydrocarbon development.
It would be wrong, however, to read that text as naive: even then, European engagement in the region was described as a geopolitical necessity, and the document noted “a sharp increase in military activity in many parts of the Arctic.” The real watershed came on March 3, 2022, when Canada, the Kingdom of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, and the United States announced that their representatives would not travel to Russia, which then chaired the Arctic Council, and suspended their participation in all meetings of the Council and its subsidiary bodies. Project work resumed in limited form in June 2022, without Russia; Norway took over the chairmanship in May 2023, and the working groups returned to work, first by written procedure and then in virtual meetings, but the political level, as the Strategy itself admits, remains frozen.
This is why the Union is now working on the premise that multilateral cooperation remains indispensable but can no longer be the sole foundation of European action, and why it proposes a political framework that would run alongside the Arctic Council without duplicating it, with regular summits between the Union and like-minded partners. The shift in priorities can also be seen in hydrocarbons: the 2026 document reiterates that oil, coal, and gas must stay in the ground but does not take up the goal of a multilateral ban and speaks instead of preventing “all hydrocarbon reserve developments that pose a threat to the Arctic ecosystem,” a formula that came after pressure exerted by Oslo on Brussels.
To understand why Brussels wrote the Strategy in this way, one has to look to Washington. During the Biden administration, the United States was considered by Europe its main ally on both Ukraine and the Arctic: in March 2022 it signed the declaration of the seven states that suspended the work of the Arctic Council following the Russian special military operation. American interest in Greenland did not, however, begin with Trump’s second term: as early as August 2019 the president had suggested the purchase of the island and cancelled his state visit to Denmark after Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen called the idea “absurd”. What changed after his re-election was the method.
On January 7, 2025, while still only president-elect, Trump refused to rule out the use of military force or economic coercion to obtain Greenland and the Panama Canal. On February 14, 2025, at the Munich Security Conference, Vice President J.D. Vance declared that the gravest threat to Europe came from within rather than from Russia or China, attacking European policies on freedom of expression and migration.
In January 2026, the Greenland crisis escalated to the point of persuading several European states to send troops to the island, while Trump threatened tariffs against the countries involved and, when asked about the use of force, replied only “no comment”. A month later, in Munich, Secretary of State Marco Rubio struck a softer tone, describing the United States as “a child of Europe” and stating that the end of the transatlantic era was neither a goal nor a wish of Washington’s, while reiterating that Europeans must do more for their own defense.
On September 7, 2026 the Commission signed a joint declaration with Denmark and Greenland, accompanied by a €200 million package, and fifteen days later, on September 22 in New York, Trump, Frederiksen, and Greenlandic Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen signed the agreement amending the 1951 defense treaty, which allows the United States to open two new defense areas at Narsarsuaq and Mestersvig and to expand the Pituffik base, without any transfer of territory. Less than a month later came the Strategy, which cites that agreement as a strengthening of common security and should also be read in light of this sequence of events.
Moving from the facts to the text, the caution with which the Strategy treats the United States emerges above all from the wording used to refer to it. The United States appears only in the section devoted to partners, described as an Arctic state and a founding member of NATO and the Arctic Council, and the relationship is defined as a “pragmatic transatlantic engagement” and a “predictable” partnership: two adjectives that serve not to describe ongoing cooperation, but to indicate the qualities the Union now demands of an ally and that, evidently, it no longer takes for granted.
The comparison with Canada, by contrast, is significant: Ottawa has an entire dedicated text box and is described as a “natural ally” with which the Union shares the same outlook on the world, while the United States occupies a mere entry in the list of partners. The text, moreover, presented the 21st EU-Canada summit as a step toward an Alliance for the Future. The summit was held in Montréal on October 29 and 30, nine days after the Strategy was presented: the Alliance was launched with a joint declaration aiming at a common space of growth, resilience, and economic security, and the new developments include a dialogue dedicated to the Arctic, one of three new dialogues launched under the security and defense partnership signed in June 2025, alongside Canada’s accession to SAFE, the European instrument for industrial cooperation in defense.
Finally, where the text becomes concrete, the key word is autonomy. The introduction states, at last, that European strategic autonomy is “inseparable from the Arctic” and that the Northern Neighbourhood must be able to choose its own path free from coercion and undue dependencies, and the initiatives that follow point in the same direction: a “sovereign and secure” submarine cable between Greenland and the Union, a satellite observation and communication system built on Copernicus, Galileo, and IRIS², support for European launchers and spaceports, a European icebreaking capability and a Maritime Security Hub led by the member states.
The relationship with NATO is not called into question, and the Strategy reiterates that European capabilities are conceived as complementary to the Alliance, through structured dialogues and staff-to-staff exchanges. But the text does not entrust NATO with the task of guaranteeing the security of the European Arctic: maritime surveillance, cable protection, icebreakers, and military mobility are presented as capabilities that the Union and the member states must build for themselves, alongside those of the Alliance rather than leaving them to it.
On the security front, the Strategy relies first and foremost on surveillance: satellite data, the exchange of tracking information through the European Maritime Safety Agency, a Maritime Security Hub and, as a first step, an Arctic Cable Hub, while the only explicit reference to the Northern Sea Route is the commitment to keep sanctioning “the shadow fleet entering” from it. The most concrete part, however, concerns icebreakers, treated as dual-use capabilities, useful as much for civilian maritime security as for cable repair, search and rescue, and military mobility. The document envisages mapping needs and shipbuilding capacity through the new Industrial Maritime Value Chains Alliance, studying joint procurement and the pooling of assets, and examining European arrangements for access to member states’ vessels, including those with advanced and nuclear propulsion, but it does not set out any dedicated funding, despite von der Leyen having proposed in January, at Davos, to finance this capability through increased defense spending.
The gap to be closed is wide: Russia deployed eight nuclear icebreakers during the last winter navigation season, four of them of the new generation, while Finland operates nine and the United States has two polar icebreakers, both currently out of service for repairs. The paradox is that European autonomy runs through the very shipyards Washington has turned to: around 60% of the world’s operational icebreakers are designed or built in Finland, and the $6.1 billion agreement of October 2025 for eleven vessels for the US Coast Guard provides for four of them to be built in Finnish yards, with the first in service by 2028.
Analysts who have read the document, from very different perspectives, reach a similar conclusion: the Strategy sets a direction rather than a plan.
On one side, it is observed that joint communications have always served a communicative rather than a strategic function, that the Arctic has never had a dedicated budget line and that the Northern Neighbourhood is named but not drawn, defined by shared values and interests rather than by borders; on the other, it is noted that security, although now the dominant theme, remains largely a prerogative of the member states, that one to two years usually pass between a joint communication and concrete acts, and that the funding, procurement, and governance of the new initiatives are still open questions. The figures quantified in the text bear out this reading: over €1 billion in cohesion funds for 2021–2027, €200 million for Greenland in 2026–2027, and around €260 million from the European Defence Fund for ten projects with Arctic requirements, while no figure appears for icebreakers or the Maritime Security Hub, and the discussion on resources shifts to the next multiannual financial framework for 2028–2034.
Two further knots that the text avoids confronting also remain unresolved: the distinction between the Arctic, the Baltic, and the North Atlantic, treated as one single space, and the relationship between the freedom of navigation the Union declares it wants to defend and the rules by which Moscow governs passage along the Northern Sea Route. The Strategy only states the principle, without saying to whom or to what it applies, while Russia requires any vessel, Russian or foreign, to obtain a permit before transiting, justifying this with an extensive reading of Article 234 of the Convention on the Law of the Sea, which allows coastal states to lay down special anti-pollution rules in ice-covered waters. The two positions clash, because if freedom of navigation applied to the letter, the permit regime would become questionable, but the document never links the principle to the Route and never names Russia.
With this Strategy the Union arrives, very belatedly, at an Arctic policy that treats security as a European matter: until 2021 the Arctic was above all a question of climate, research, and the protection of local populations, and it took the events in Ukraine and the Greenland crisis for Brussels to consider its northern neighbourhood part of its own security. It is nonetheless a step in the right direction because the text identifies concrete capabilities to be built, from icebreakers to submarine cables and surveillance, and acknowledges that everything cannot be entrusted to an ally that has become less predictable.
But a strategy is measured by its funding, its responsibilities, and its ability to name the problems, and on all three fronts the document falls short: the next multiannual budget and the knots left untied, starting with freedom of navigation, will tell whether this late awakening produces a policy or merely a text, however interesting it may be to read.
