The Carney middle-powers ‘doctrine’ viewed from Europe.
European leaders are gradually heeding Mark Carney’s call for divested links to the U.S.
European leaders are gradually heeding Mark Carney’s call for divested links to the U.S.
Iceland faces various potential threats and opportunities that will inevitably change the country’s future and strategic independence. The current global shift towards multipolarity and unilateralism represents a serious threat to the autonomy of small states. A valuable option is signing treaties with more powerful states or joining larger international organisations.
The European Union’s proposed return hubs would allow some people ordered to leave the bloc to be transferred to facilities in third countries. Backers present the scheme as a practical answer to weak return rates and political pressure over migration. This article examines how the proposal emerged, how it is meant to work and why it raises sharp legal, humanitarian and political questions.
The Faroe Islands represent a unique case in which a small geopolitical actor can pursue its goals with pragmatism and determination despite its size and limited resources. The Faroese economy is mostly dominated by the fishery sector, which is also the most relevant element influencing the islands’ autonomous foreign policy and international activity.
China has turned education into a geopolitical strategy, producing the engineers behind DeepSeek, ByteDance, and more. The question is no longer whether Europe has noticed. It is whether it can respond fast enough to matter.
Greenland is no longer a peripheral Arctic territory but a strategic pressure point where U.S. power projection, European strategic ambition, and local sovereignty intersect. What appears to be a debate about resources or military positioning is, in fact, a deeper geopolitical test of the transatlantic order. The island has emerged as a focal point of great-power competition, shaped by climate change, resource potential, and shifting security dynamics.
In this context, Greenland functions as a geopolitical stress test for European strategic autonomy. It reveals both the ambitions of the European Union to act independently and the structural constraints that continue to bind it to the transatlantic alliance. At the same time, Greenland is not merely an object of competition but an active strategic actor, leveraging its position to balance external powers and advance its own sovereignty.
Artificial intelligence featured prominently at the 2026 World Economic Forum, framed as both a driver of productivity and a source of strategic uncertainty. Investments and leadership forecasts pointed to rapid capability gains, yet implementation data suggested that many organisations remain in pilot phases with uneven impact across sectors. At the same time, divergent regulatory approaches, emerging rules on deepfakes and electoral integrity, and ongoing debates about data governance highlighted a widening gap between technological development and institutional readiness.
Rob Jetten’s government has an ambitious European agenda. However domestic political conditions may impede its ability to realise these.
One of the main challenges affecting the EU structure is the absence of a shared strategic narrative to unite all member states and develop a common strategic path to navigate global uncertainties. This narrative would be a geopolitical compass based on geopolitical necessities and threats, that would guide the EU’s foreign policy and diplomacy.
IRIS² is the EU’s bid to secure satellite connectivity for governments while also supporting commercial services. The real test is governance. Who controls access, how crisis priority is decided, and how accountability works in a long public–private concession will shape whether IRIS² actually strengthens EU autonomy.