EU urged to drop 2021 ‘peaceful Arctic’ vision in 2026 strategy
A new European Policy Centre brief wants the EU to ditch the outlook that has shaped its Arctic policy since 2021, a peaceful, sustainable and prosperous region and put security first.
The brief comes ahead of the European Commission’s own Arctic policy update, due this autumn. Commission President Ursula von der Leyen flagged the revision back in 2025, pointing to the changing Arctic climate and rising Russian and Chinese activity.
“[There is a need] to strengthen the protection of critical infrastructure, including subsea cables and power grids,” she said at the time, the brief notes.
The EPC authors say things have got worse since.
The strategy is being drawn up by the European External Action Service, the EU’s diplomatic arm, headed by High Representative Kaja Kallas, whose tenure has focused heavily on Russia and hybrid threats. It builds on a 2021 Joint Communication and was opened for public feedback earlier this year.
Published on July 30, “From sea to space: How the EU can turn the tide on the Arctic” is written by Maria Martisiute and Tobias Etzold of the EPC, with Linda Solstrand Dahlberg of UiT (The Arctic University of Norway). It draws on desk research and a closed-door expert roundtable held in May.
The 2021 policy, they argue, focused on climate adaptation, the green transition and cooperation with Indigenous communities, but skipped past defence and security. It recognised the Arctic as an arena for great power competition without saying how to handle it.
“EU’s full engagement in the Arctic was a geopolitical necessity,” it deemed, but the policy “did not consider strategic competition to be an important factor in shaping the EU’s role in the Arctic,” the authors write.
The result, they say, is a gap between the EU’s stated goal of a stable region and a reality of rising conflict risk.
The authors read the pressures on the Arctic as symptoms of a wider European weakness. Russia’s war on Ukraine is in its twelfth year, they note, its hybrid war against the EU and NATO in its twentieth, while Europe’s rearmament has barely started. The Arctic, warming nearly four times faster than the global average, is becoming more accessible and more contested.
The U.S. shift runs through the argument. The brief points to a reduced American presence in Europe, a 2026 U.S. National Security Strategy that no longer frames Russia as a threat, and Washington’s designs on Greenland, which it says have left many in the Arctic exposed.
The brief’s headline recommendation is to treat the Atlantic, Arctic and Baltic as a single security theatre, on the logic that Russia acts as both an Arctic and a Baltic power. It is one of five areas for action, alongside a tougher line on hybrid threats, folding the Arctic into Europe’s defence industry, investment in dual-use infrastructure, and a Nordic-style civil-military approach to resilience.
The sharper test is Greenland, where the brief wants the EU to face down U.S. pressure with money rather than words, a fight Brussels has so far avoided.
