Strategic autonomy has become the EU’s preferred shorthand for acting with greater agency in a harsher world, yet in relation to Europe’s maritime environment the concept is often debated as if it were a stable constant rather than a strategic variable. The EU’s prosperity and security rest on sea-borne trade, stable chokepoints and seabed infrastructures that carry energy and data, but the protection of these arteries remains fragmented and dependent on external security provision (Bosilca and Riddervold 2024; Zandee et al. 2025; Meijer and Brooks 2021). Recent disruptions have turned that dependence from an abstract vulnerability into an operational constraint, as pressure on key maritime corridors translated quickly into economic risk, political urgency and reactive crisis management (Paes et al. 2024). Growing attention to critical maritime infrastructure further signals that autonomy hinges not only on decision-making sovereignty and industrial capacity, but also on resilience in connective systems that can be disrupted below the threshold of open conflict (Kallas 2025).
This paper argues that the EU’s strategic autonomy is structurally constrained by a maritime access problem that remains under-specified in much autonomy discourse. Autonomy is often framed as the capacity to decide and act independently, but at sea the more basic question is whether an actor can sustain access to vital routes and infrastructures when others contest them. The core claim is therefore simple: no autonomy without access, meaning that credible strategic autonomy requires the ability to protect maritime circulation, manage chokepoint disruption and secure critical infrastructure in ways that reduce reliance on security provisions outside the EU’s control.
The guiding research question is: To what extent does the EU’s maritime strategic autonomy rely on security provisions outside its control, and what institutional and operational steps are needed to address this vulnerability?
To answer it, this paper develops a conceptual framework linking strategic autonomy to maritime power and weaponized interdependence, treating chokepoints and seabed infrastructures as sites where access can be denied cheaply and leverage generated quickly. It then shows how EU maritime security practice, shaped by governance tools and mission-based operations, struggles to function as a durable access guarantee when disruption becomes persistent and multi-theatre. The argument is illustrated through recent maritime insecurity dynamics and EU responses and extended to the legal and governance challenges surrounding submarine cable protection and attribution in grey-zone settings. The paper concludes by proposing a recalibration of maritime autonomy around layered access management, strengthening awareness, infrastructure resilience and surge capacity, while remaining compatible with NATO and the operational realities of the transatlantic security architecture.
Autonomy, Access and Maritime Power
Strategic autonomy usually oscillates between two meanings: the ability to act (capabilities, resources, readiness) and the freedom to choose (political independence in decision-making) (Zandee et al. 2020). In the maritime domain, these meanings are tightly coupled, because political choice and operational action both depend on whether trade, energy and data can still move when routes and infrastructures are contested. This paper treats that linkage as the conceptual fault line. Autonomy is not only a matter of decision or capability, but also of access, of the ability to reliably use critical spaces and infrastructures when others contest them.
A useful way to sharpen the concept is to distinguish autonomy as institutional agency from autonomy as access management. The first speaks to whether the EU can formulate common priorities and mobilize instruments without being politically vetoed or externally steered (Bosilca and Riddervold 2024). The second speaks to whether the EU and its members can keep the arteries of European life functioning when maritime routes, ports and seabed infrastructure become targets or bargaining chips (Bueger and Edmunds 2023). The distinction matters because disrupted access can nullify institutional autonomy even where political will exists, turning formal agency into practical dependence.
Classic sea-power thinking helps clarify why access is foundational rather than auxiliary. Sea power is not simply about fleets fighting fleets; it is about securing the conditions under which commerce, communications and strategic mobility can continue despite rivalry and coercion (Mahan 2010). That logic is especially salient for an actor whose economic model and geopolitical exposure are maritime by design. Europe is not trying to conquer the seas, but it is structurally dependent on maritime circulation and therefore vulnerable to any actor capable of interrupting it (Bosilca and Riddervold 2024). The conceptual move here is not to revive deterministic navalism, but to recover the proposition that political autonomy rests on the reliability of connective infrastructures, and that the maritime environment is where those infrastructures converge most visibly.
International security scholarship provides language for how access becomes leverage (Posen 2003). The sea increasingly resembles a layered system of strategic networks, such as shipping lanes and ports, maritime and satellite surveillance, undersea cables and offshore energy assets, where power is often exercised through monitoring, delay, denial or selective protection rather than formal sovereignty. The strategic significance of this control is captured by “command of the commons” thinking: the actor that can secure or deny the maritime commons enjoys an enabling form of power that shapes what others can do across regions, not only at sea (Posen 2003, 8–9).
A complementary lens is weaponized interdependence, which explains how network centrality, particularly in infrastructures that route flows can be converted into coercive power by actors that exploit chokepoints, hubs and gatekeeping positions (Farrell and Newman 2019). Taken together, these frameworks suggest that access is neither neutral nor automatic; it is a political and strategic condition produced by capabilities, positioning and governance arrangements.
This is where the EU’s self-image becomes analytically interesting. The Union has developed a strong repertoire for shaping global order through regulation, standards and multilateral governance, including in maritime spaces that are formally global commons (Riddervold 2023). Yet a governance-centric approach can become a liability in a maritime environment that is increasingly contested, technologically penetrable and exposed to grey-zone tactics (Usewicz and Keplin 2023). In this setting, autonomy cannot be assessed by strategies and institutions alone; it must be assessed by whether Europe can sustain access under contestation.
To operationalize that claim, the paper draws on an actorness perspective tailored to maritime security. This can be treated as a composite of: awareness (knowing what is happening at sea and sharing that picture), priority-setting (turning information into common strategic choices), resourcing (mobilizing assets and capabilities to protect interests), and adaptation (updating tools and doctrine as threats evolve) (Bosilca and Riddervold 2024, 207–10).
This framework links the EU’s institutional strengths to the precise places where maritime access becomes fragile, to situational awareness gaps, slow mobilization, capability shortfalls and difficulties in adapting to hybrid maritime tactics. It also makes visible that the EU can be a meaningful maritime actor while still lacking the capacity to secure maritime access at the scale implied by its autonomy rhetoric (Riddervold 2023).
Finally, the framework incorporates the idea that critical maritime infrastructure protection is not merely a technical policy field but a strategic one. Undersea cables, pipelines and offshore installations are simultaneously economic lifelines and coercive vulnerabilities; their protection requires attribution capacity, monitoring, rapid repair, deterrence signaling and coordination across civilian, military and private operators (Bueger and Liebetrau 2023). The conceptual payoff is a sharper diagnosis of Europe’s strategic blind spot. Autonomy discourse can remain internally coherent while ignoring the material-access layer that determines whether autonomy holds under pressure.
The central theoretical proposition is therefore straightforward: without credible access management at sea, strategic autonomy becomes a declaratory project that is politically resonant but operationally dependent.
The EU’s strategic blind spot at sea
The EU’s maritime vulnerability is not primarily a story about absent strategies, but about a persistent mismatch between ambition and the material, operational and legal realities of securing access at sea. Maritime security is treated as a policy field to be coordinated through frameworks and information-sharing rather than a domain that demands sustained presence, coercive capacity and rapid escalation control (Riddervold 2023). This governance-first instinct has produced real initiatives, but it also cultivates the assumption that maritime access will remain available by default, even as the sea becomes an arena for grey-zone competition, infrastructure targeting and chokepoint disruption (Usewicz and Keplin 2023). The result is a form of strategic sea-blindness. The EU’s dependence on maritime space is immense, yet its ability to act decisively when that space is contested remains fragmented and episodic.
At the doctrinal level, the EU does not lack language that recognizes the problem. The updated EU Maritime Security Strategy and Action Plan explicitly frames the maritime domain as an increasingly contested space shaped by hybrid threats, critical infrastructure risks, and geopolitical rivalry (Council of the EU 2023; North Atlantic Treaty Organization et al. 2023; General Secretariat 2021). Yet the strategy form itself matters. The EU can set priorities, coordinate agencies, and encourage capability development, but it does not command a standing naval instrument comparable to a state’s fleet. Maritime power in Europe is held by member states with different threat perceptions and budgets, and EU-level action therefore tends to emerge as a compromise architecture (Riddervold 2023). This is not a trivial distinction. At sea, being responsible is indistinguishable from being present.
This structural constraint becomes visible when comparing the EU’s operational record to its rhetorical aspirations. Recent EU maritime missions have largely been designed around bounded mandates rather than around a standing doctrine of access protection (Reykers 2025; Riddervold 2023; Bosilca and Riddervold 2024). The mission pattern is recognizable: deploy in response to a crisis, patrol a defined zone, and rely on limited force packages assembled from national contributions. Such missions can be effective at the tactical level, but they do not automatically translate into a durable ability to control escalation, deter sabotage or guarantee the security of maritime infrastructures (Reykers 2025, 2017; Bueger and Liebetrau 2023; Riddervold 2023).
The recent Red Sea episode illustrates the limits of this mission logic when contested access becomes persistent. The creation of EUNAVFOR ASPIDES[1] acknowledged that commercial shipping and freedom of navigation are not self-enforcing when non-state actors contest a chokepoint with sustained attacks and disruption (Bosilca and Riddervold 2024). At the same time, the very need to constitute a new operation through a Council decision underscores the ad hoc character of the EU’s maritime posture. Capability is assembled as politics permits, not held at readiness as doctrine requires. This is the central blind spot: in a world where maritime disruption is used as leverage, access protection becomes a standing strategic function, but the EU tends to treat it as a sequence of contingencies.
The governance orientation of EU maritime policy deepens this pattern because contemporary threats are designed to exploit ambiguity. The EU has developed an ecosystem of maritime governance tools well suited to safety, law enforcement, and regulation (Riddervold 2023). Yet governance logics can struggle when threats are deniable and politically calibrated, and when response must be fast enough to prevent faits accomplis while remaining legally defensible (Usewicz and Keplin 2023). Hybrid actions at sea exploit precisely those seams. The actor may be unclear, the threshold may remain below armed attack, and uncertainty itself becomes a tool of coercion. Under these conditions, the EU’s emphasis on coordination and civilian instruments can look like strategic hesitation, because the time horizons of governance do not match the tempo of coercion.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the politics of critical maritime infrastructure. The September 2022 Nord Stream sabotage is widely treated as a wake-up call because it exposed how seabed infrastructures have become strategic targets while remaining difficult to monitor, attribute and protect (Ahlander and Adomaitis 2025). The challenge is not merely technical; it is institutional and conceptual. Protecting maritime infrastructures requires integrating defense and diplomacy, cyber security and industrial actors, yet European approaches still struggle to become genuinely integrated across these domains (Bueger and Liebetrau 2023; Bueger and Edmunds 2023). The maritime environment amplifies the difficulty. Infrastructures are dispersed across a three-dimensional space, surveillance undersea remains limited, and repair is highly specialized, which increases the strategic payoff of even temporary disruption. If the EU’s autonomy debate tends to focus on decision-making sovereignty and industrial capacity, subsea vulnerability introduces a harsher proposition; that autonomy can be undermined without a single tank crossing a border, simply by disrupting the physical systems that carry data, energy, and trade (Bosilca and Riddervold 2024).
Submarine cables form the backbone of digital communication and thus sit at the intersection of security, prosperity and geopolitical competition. The EU has begun to respond more explicitly, including through dedicated planning on cable security and resilience (Kallas 2025). Yet the same underlying issue returns. Plans and coordination mechanisms help, but deterrence, detection, and response in contested maritime spaces depend on surveillance depth, specialized assets, and credible escalation management, capabilities unevenly held among member states and not easily pooled at EU level on short notice (Bueger and Liebetrau 2023; Zandee et al. 2025).
A final element of the blind spot is narrative. The EU tends to imagine the maritime domain as a space of multilateral order even as competitors treat it as a space of strategic contestation (Gunnarsdottir and Riddervold 2025; Bosilca and Riddervold 2024; Bueger and Edmunds 2023). The EU’s external identity has long emphasized rule-based governance, but governance without credible protection can become performative when infrastructures and chokepoints are deliberately targeted (Bueger and Edmunds 2023). If maritime access is the condition of possibility for Europe’s trade, energy security and digital sovereignty, then treating it as background logistics rather than as a strategic variable is no longer analytically tenable.
In sum, the EU’s maritime blind spot is best understood as a layered gap. Between strategy and standing capability, between governance tempo and coercive tempo, and between infrastructural dependence and infrastructural protection. The EU can and does act at sea, but its action remains shaped by mission logic, institutional fragmentation, and uneven member-state willingness to treat maritime access as a shared strategic asset. That is precisely why maritime insecurity functions as a wake-up call for strategic autonomy. It reveals that autonomy cannot be reduced to industrial policy and institutional sovereignty when the arteries of European power run through chokepoints, seabed and contested waters.
Infrastructure, Chokepoints and the Limits of Autonomy
Maritime access is most vulnerable where global trade is routed through a small number of narrow chokepoints and where critical seabed infrastructures have often been treated as technical policy silos rather than strategic vulnerabilities, because both conditions generate high leverage at relatively low cost (Verschuur et al. 2025; Bueger and Liebetrau 2023). In these settings, disruption need not be total to be strategically meaningful. Even partial uncertainty can impose cascading economic and political pressure on actors whose prosperity depends on predictable maritime connectivity (Verschuur et al. 2025). The relevance for strategic autonomy follows directly from the conceptual framework: if autonomy implies the ability to sustain vital flows under contestation, then chokepoints and seabed infrastructures are the places where autonomy is tested.
Chokepoints matter because they concentrate systemic risk into geography (Verschuur et al. 2025; Pratson 2023). When major routes narrow, a limited number of state or non-state actors can impose outsized costs by targeting a small spatial envelope rather than the entire maritime system. The resulting effects propagate beyond delays through freight pricing and economic-security politics. Stress-testing chokepoint disruption therefore translates an abstract autonomy debate into measurable vulnerability. The more an actor depends on a corridor, the more autonomy becomes contingent on the corridor’s security (Verschuur et al. 2025; Pratson 2023). This is particularly acute for Europe, which is structurally embedded in maritime trade routes and therefore cannot treat disruption as an externality that only affects others.
The Red Sea crisis provides a live illustration of chokepoint leverage, showing how quickly contested access becomes a strategic problem for an actor that lacks a standing doctrine of access protection (Paes et al. 2024; Reykers 2025). Attacks and credible threats against commercial shipping in and around Bab el-Mandeb created incentives for rerouting and raised costs, producing a dilemma even for states not directly targeted. The case also demonstrates that maritime insecurity mixes physical and informational effects, as violence and risk perception interact through insurance markets, reputational signaling and political pressure (Paes et al. 2024; Farrell and Newman 2019).
European operational responses in the Red Sea highlight both the value and the limits of a mission-based approach. The launch of an EU naval operation signals political willingness to defend maritime circulation and provides a concrete instrument to contribute to shipping safety (Dombrowski and Reich 2019). Yet the institutional form of the response illustrates why autonomy cannot be inferred from the existence of a mission alone. A mission can reduce immediate risk, but it does not resolve whether Europe possesses the sustained capabilities and strategic coherence to guarantee access across multiple theatres simultaneously (Reykers 2025; Samaan 2024). Crisis response can therefore be necessary while still revealing deeper dependence on broader security provision when disruptions persist or multiply.
Chokepoints are only one side of the access equation. Undersea cables and related maritime infrastructures have become foundational to economic and political life, yet their security does not fit onto classic notions of territorial defense (Bueger and Liebetrau 2023). The vulnerability is not only physical exposure; it is the difficulty of protection and attribution where infrastructure is spread across jurisdictions and legal zones. This creates an enabling context for grey-zone coercion, where adversaries can impose costs or test thresholds while exploiting uncertainty over responsibility and response options.
The governance challenge is compounded by the mismatch between older legal frameworks and contemporary threat environments. Existing rules for the protection of cables and pipelines were not designed for routine hybrid sabotage and enforcement hurdles sharpen as infrastructures grow in number and strategic significance (Ringbom 2025; Chang 2025). Reform may reduce ambiguity, but law cannot substitute for monitoring, resilience and credible response capacities. Without effective protection and recovery mechanisms, an actor may have formal rights but lacks practical access security, while adversaries exploit precisely that gap (Ringbom 2025; Govella 2025).
EU policy responses increasingly acknowledge this infrastructure layer, moving cables and seabed assets from technical policy silos into strategic debate. Yet recognition is not equivalent to protection, because plans must be translated into capabilities, coordination and routines that hold under pressure. A cable security action plan can articulate priorities, but it must still contend with fragmented ownership, uneven national capabilities, and the need for deterrence and response in a domain where attribution is contested (Kallas 2025; Govella 2025). In this sense, infrastructure policy becomes a test of strategic autonomy’s credibility. The more autonomy is framed as resilience and security, the more the EU must demonstrate that it can secure the connective systems on which resilience depends.
Taken together, chokepoints and seabed infrastructures reveal the limits of an autonomy discourse that treats maritime access as a background condition. Chokepoint disruption shows how easily access can be contested and how broadly effects propagate through European economic and political systems. Infrastructure vulnerability shows that access is not only about surface routes but also about the hidden connective tissue of modern life, where disruption can be ambiguous yet strategically consequential (Zandee et al. 2020; Pratson 2023; Govella 2025). These dynamics do not imply that Europe should pursue maximal self-sufficiency or replace existing alliances, but they do imply that autonomy cannot be evaluated without asking a prior question: who guarantees access, how robust is that guarantee under simultaneous crises, and what happens when it becomes conditional or overstretched. Those questions set up the next section’s focus on transatlantic dependencies and the operational reality of maritime security provision.
Transatlantic Dependencies and the Operational Reality
European debates about strategic autonomy often proceed as if autonomy were primarily a European internal variable while treating the maritime security environment as a stable background condition (Zandee et al. 2020). That background condition is largely U.S.-enabled. It has been maintained through alliance structures and American maritime preponderance, which provide a form of commons security that is easy to benefit from and hard to replicate (Posen 2003). In practical terms, Europe’s ability to sustain maritime access under pressure still relies heavily on capabilities and operational patterns anchored in NATO and, within NATO, disproportionately enabled by the United States (Lundin 2025). Autonomy therefore cannot be evaluated without specifying what portion of access security Europe produces and what portion Washington effectively underwrites.
The structural logic is straightforward. The actor that can persistently monitor and defend the maritime commons across theatres and time shapes the operating environment for everyone else. That advantage rests less on fleet numbers than on enabling capacities that the United States holds at scale, e.g. ISR, logistics, command integration, forward presence and the ability to surge when crises overlap. Where those capacities are concentrated, they generate an order-maintaining function that others can consume, including by routing trade through corridors whose security they do not directly underwrite (Posen 2003).
NATO’s maritime strategy reflects this reality by treating the maritime domain as central to collective defense and crisis management, and by presupposing readiness and integrated command arrangements that exceed what the EU can mobilize as an EU instrument (North Atlantic Treaty Organization 2025).
This asymmetry becomes visible in crisis response. In the Red Sea episode, Europe’s interests were directly affected by contested access, and the EU responded by establishing an operation to contribute to freedom of navigation (Reykers 2025; Rodriguez-Diaz et al. 2024; Bosilca and Riddervold 2024). Yet the episode also underlined that sustained, high-tempo maritime protection in a persistent, multi-domain threat environment still depends on U.S. capabilities and alliance command practices. EU action is therefore better understood as a contribution within an alliance-backed access guarantee than as a self-standing guarantee. This matters for strategic autonomy because autonomy rhetoric implies credible self-reliance under pressure, while operational reality still points to reliance on U.S.-enabled security provision in demanding scenarios (Fiott 2018).
Dependence is most acute where maritime contestation is inseparable from high-end deterrence. The Black Sea illustrates this: maritime security there is tied to war dynamics, escalation control, and regional military balances, and European capacity to shape outcomes is constrained by geography and the distribution of hard military power. If strategic autonomy means protecting critical interests without external support, such theatres show that Europe’s maritime environment is a security arena where escalation management remains unevenly distributed. Even where EU initiatives improve resilience and coordination, the strategic ceiling is set by the wider deterrence architecture (Posen 2003; Bekkering et al. 2025).
This operational reality complicates burden-sharing politics. Strategic autonomy is sometimes framed as emancipation, but in the maritime domain it is better framed as renegotiating Europe’s contribution within an interdependent alliance order in which the United States remains the decisive enabler. This framing avoids a false binary between autonomy and alliance, while still acknowledging that dependence creates constraints and reputational risks (Zandee et al. 2020; Fiott 2018). If autonomy discourse ignores who secures maritime access in practice, it produces a credibility gap. Europe signals agency while allies and adversaries observe structural reliance. That gap is politically costly because it raises expectations that cannot be met when access is pressured across multiple theatres simultaneously.
European autonomy projects may underappreciate the scale of the capability challenge and the strategic costs of perceived decoupling from U.S.-enabled security provision. The value of this skepticism is not to abandon autonomy, but to discipline it into an operational agenda focused on closing concrete capability and coordination gaps. The maritime domain forces the relevant test: when access is contested, what can Europe do rapidly, at scale, and for how long, and which parts of that response depend on U.S. capabilities operating through NATO rather than EU instruments (Meijer and Brooks 2021).
Internal European constraints reinforce the dependence dynamic. Maritime power remains largely national, preferences diverge, and resources compete across domains. The result is a pragmatic division of labor. The EU contributes through governance and mission-based deployments where consensus exists, while sustained commons security and high-end maritime deterrence remain anchored in NATO structures shaped by U.S. enabling power. This division can be functional, but it becomes strategically problematic if autonomy rhetoric implies independent access management that European instruments cannot yet deliver (Zandee et al. 2020; Bosilca and Riddervold 2024).
The central conclusion is therefore not a call to replace the alliance order, but to define strategic autonomy in a way compatible with the operational reality of U.S.-enabled maritime security provision. If autonomy is to be credible at sea, it must translate into access-focused capabilities, governance arrangements, and resilience measures that reduce vulnerability and increase Europe’s share of the burden within the alliance architecture. Moving from declaratory autonomy to practical access management provides the logic for the next section’s recommendations.
Recalibrating Europe’s Maritime Autonomy
Recalibrating Europe’s maritime autonomy requires a shift from treating maritime insecurity as a sequence of contingencies to treating maritime access as a standing strategic function. Autonomy, understood as access management, does not demand maximal self-sufficiency or separation from NATO, but it does require that Europe can anticipate disruption, reduce vulnerability and respond credibly when routes and infrastructures are contested (Fiott 2018). In a context where U.S. enablement remains decisive but cannot be treated as unconditional, the practical task is to narrow the gap between Europe’s autonomy rhetoric and the alliance-enabled operational reality by building capabilities that reduce dependence at the margins and increase European contribution in practice. This section therefore outlines a realistic agenda compatible with EU competences while recognizing that many hard capabilities remain national and must be organized through shared frameworks rather than centralized command (Zandee et al. 2020; Bosilca and Riddervold 2024).
The first requirement is to strengthen the sense layer: maritime autonomy begins with the ability to know what is happening in and under the sea and to translate that knowledge into timely action. In contested environments, the decisive advantage often lies less in raw force than in domain awareness, detecting anomalies near critical infrastructure, monitoring patterns of interference, and fusing maritime, cyber, and intelligence signals into a shared operating picture. European strategy documents acknowledge the importance of maritime situational awareness and information-sharing, but the key reform is to treat these not as technical add-ons but as core enablers of access security and credible burden-sharing. The operational standard should be early warning and rapid attribution support, because ambiguity is itself a coercive tool and delayed identification narrows response options while increasing escalation risk. This implies deeper integration across civilian agencies, defense actors, and private operators, and systematic exercises that test decision-making under time pressure rather than only reporting frameworks (North Atlantic Treaty Organization 2025; European External Action Service 2024; Usewicz and Keplin 2023; Bosilca and Riddervold 2024).
A second requirement is to strengthen the shield layer: resilience and protection for critical maritime infrastructure, especially submarine cables and seabed assets. The EU’s cable security action plan provides a baseline because it frames protection as a cross-sector task involving risk assessment, resilience measures, cooperation, and response coordination. Yet the credibility of such plans depends on implementation mechanisms that survive political turnover and budget cycles, including clear responsibilities for monitoring, incident response protocols, and pre-arranged cooperation with industry actors that control much of the relevant infrastructure. The challenge is not awareness but institutional complexity. Ownership is distributed, threats are ambiguous, and effective protection requires coordination across jurisdictions and between civilian and military actors. A realistic shield agenda therefore prioritizes redundancy and recoverability alongside protection, because fast repair and restoration can reduce the strategic payoff of disruption even when prevention is imperfect (Posen 2003; Bueger and Liebetrau 2023; Bueger and Rafaly 2025; Govella 2025).
Legal and regulatory reforms complement this resilience agenda by narrowing the space for grey-zone exploitation. The law of the sea provides foundational protections for cables and pipelines, but existing frameworks were not designed for routine strategic sabotage and coercive ambiguity associated with contemporary hybrid competition. The EU cannot rewrite global maritime law unilaterally, but it can pursue practical clarification through diplomatic initiatives, improved reporting standards, and clearer operational doctrines on thresholds and cooperation with partners. The key point is that legal uncertainty is not only a normative inconvenience; it can become an operational constraint that delays or dilutes response, effectively shifting advantage to the disruptor. Legal work should therefore be treated as part of access management, not as a separate compliance exercise (Ringbom 2025; Chang 2025; Usewicz and Keplin 2023).
The third requirement is to strengthen the surge layer: credible capacity to protect access when crises intensify or overlap. This does not require a unified EU navy, but it does require planning for rapid deployment, sustained escort capabilities when needed, and a clearer political logic for burden-sharing across member states. The experience of assembling CSDP maritime operations shows Europe can act but also reveals the limits of ad hoc mobilization when threats are persistent and multi-theatre. A realistic reform agenda would therefore establish pre-agreed force packages, readiness standards, and logistical arrangements that reduce the time from political decision to operational effect. It should also treat maritime protection as a recurring requirement rather than an exceptional intervention, because adversaries increasingly treat disruption as an iterative strategy rather than a one-off crisis event (North Atlantic Treaty Organization 2025; Paes et al. 2024; Reykers 2025; Bosilca and Riddervold 2024).
Coordination with NATO is central to making this agenda feasible and strategically coherent. The alliance’s maritime strategy provides a framework for deterrence and collective defense that the EU cannot and should not replicate in full, particularly in high-intensity deterrence theatres. Yet autonomy as access management is compatible with deeper alliance integration precisely because it emphasizes contribution and resilience rather than separation. The objective is not to replace the transatlantic guarantee, but to reduce Europe’s vulnerability to the conditions under which that guarantee is extended and to increase Europe’s capacity to carry the maritime security burden in less escalatory settings. In practical terms, this means aligning EU infrastructure resilience measures with NATO situational awareness and planning, clarifying division of labor in crisis response, and ensuring that European missions and NATO posture reinforce rather than duplicate each other (Zandee et al. 2020; Fiott 2018; North Atlantic Treaty Organization 2025).
This agenda must also be politically disciplined, because strategic autonomy debates can drift into maximalist slogans that are neither operationally credible nor politically sustainable. Skeptical perspectives are useful here because they emphasize the scale of the capability challenge and the strategic costs of framing autonomy as emancipation from the United States rather than as a practical increase in European capacity within alliance structures (Meijer and Brooks 2021).
The corrective is to define autonomy in incremental, measurable terms: fewer blind spots in seabed monitoring, faster incident response, greater redundancy and repair capacity, and more predictable European contributions when access is contested. This approach does not promise a definitive solution to an evolving threat environment, but it does provide a coherent strategic direction: building the capacity to sustain access under pressure while remaining embedded in the alliance structures that underpin Europe’s security environment (Kallas 2025; Zandee et al. 2020).
In sum, recalibrating Europe’s maritime autonomy requires re-embedding maritime access into the autonomy debate as a material and operational condition, not merely a rhetorical aspiration. Strengthening the sense–shield–surge layers offers a practical route to doing so: better awareness to reduce ambiguity, stronger resilience to reduce the payoff of sabotage, and more reliable surge capacity to protect circulation when threats escalate. If implemented consistently, these measures would reduce Europe’s exposure to conditional security provision and narrow the gap between autonomy discourse and the operational reality of maritime dependence that has become increasingly visible in recent crises (Zandee et al. 2025; Farrell and Newman 2019b; Bosilca and Riddervold 2024; Fiott 2018).
Strategic Autonomy as Access Management
This paper shows that strategic autonomy rests on a harder condition than institutional agency and industrial capacity. The ability to secure maritime access to the routes and infrastructures through which Europe’s prosperity and security flow. Maritime access is no longer a neutral feature of globalization; it is a contested strategic variable shaped by chokepoints, hybrid coercion, and the vulnerability of critical seabed systems. When disruption can be imposed cheaply and ambiguously, through corridor pressure or infrastructure interference, autonomy becomes less a matter of declared intent and more a matter of whether vital flows can be sustained under pressure.
On that test, Europe’s maritime autonomy remains structurally reliant on security provision outside EU control, above all U.S.-enabled capabilities operating through NATO’s command practices and readiness assumptions. This does not make European action irrelevant, but it does discipline autonomy claims: autonomy cannot be treated as a destination if the material foundations of access security are still largely external. The implication is therefore not a binary choice between autonomy and alliance, but a recalibration of autonomy toward measurable access-management functions that increase European contribution and reduce exposure when guarantees become conditional, overstretched, or politically constrained.
In that context, the renewed Trump-era tendency to treat NATO commitments as more conditional and transactional raises the strategic premium on Europe’s ability to sustain maritime access even when U.S. prioritization is uncertain (Dunn and Webber 2025). That is why the paper’s recommendations focus on a practical access doctrine, sense, shield, surge, and on making it interoperable with NATO rather than performative beside it. Ultimately, no autonomy without access is a constraint: Europe can only claim meaningful strategic autonomy if it can keep maritime circulation and seabed connectivity functioning in contested waters with less dependence on external enablement at moments of stress.
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[1] EUNAVFOR ASPIDES is the EU’s Common Security and Defense Policy (CSDP) defensive maritime security operation, launched on 19 February 2024, tasked with safeguarding freedom of navigation in response to the Red Sea crisis by providing maritime situational awareness and accompaniment/protection for merchant shipping across the Red Sea and key adjacent sea lines of communication (including the Gulf of Aden, Arabian Sea, Gulf of Oman, and Persian Gulf) (European External Action Service 2024).