The Three Seas Initiative shows what Europe could be without the EU

While the EU is in crisis and the USA changed again its strategy regarding Europe, the Three Seas Initiative is getting stronger

Central Europe – “America is eager to expand our partnership with you. We welcome stronger ties of trade and commerce as you grow your economies and we are committed to securing your access to alternate sources of energy so Poland and its neighbours are never again held hostage to a single supplier of energy”, the US president said, referring to the former Russian monopoly on supplying gas to the region. But that was in 2017 and the US president in question was Donald Trump, on a visit to Warsaw.

Being more concerned with repairing relations with Berlin and settling the thorny issue of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, Joe Biden’s administration has shown much less interest in the Three Seas Initiative (3SI). 3SI is a cooperation forum of twelve Central European countries, all of which are members of the EU. From north to south and from west to east, these are Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Austria, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, Romania and Bulgaria. These countries include all those on NATO’s eastern flank.

Although, as early as February, US Secretary of State Tony Blinken assured the twelve 3SI countries of the intactness of US support for this initiative, which is not very much liked in Brussels, Berlin and Paris, in reality this support seems to have become more words than deeds, especially after the announcement a few days ago of an agreement between Berlin and Washington on the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline.

Where his predecessor Donald Trump had talked about investments and US gas sales, at the 3SI summit in Sofia, Bulgaria, on July 8–9, President Joe Biden assured Central Europe in a video message of the full support of the United States and spoke of the need to develop the economy in a transparent manner, strengthening democracy and rooting out corruption, which he could be busy doing at home rather than reverting to Barack Obama’s moralistic diplomacy. The American president also clarified his vision of a Three Seas Initiative to “tie you even closer to the European institutions”, which is not necessarily the vision shared by the 3SI participating countries, but which does correspond to the German view.

German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who had been invited to the Sofia summit, regretted that Germany had not initially been invited to participate in this regional cooperation forum and expressed his desire for 3SI to become an integral part of the European Union’s policies and instruments and to be based on respect for “European values”.

The problem is that the Three Seas Initiative is essentially economic, not ideological, and it is also intended to counterbalance the Franco-German axis that weighs heavily on decisions taken in Brussels, even though its participants see it first and foremost as a complementary organisation to the EU.

Instead, in May 2021, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki called for increased US involvement in the Three Seas Initiative to counter Russian and Chinese influence in the region. He felt that “the Three Seas Initiative is still underestimated by the United States’ administration”.