The Atlantic Ocean is the world's most strategically dense maritime space, functioning simultaneously as the principal artery of transatlantic trade, the physical backbone of transatlantic data flows, and an arena of renewed great-power competition stretching from the Arctic to the Caribbean. Yet the institutional architecture meant to secure it, above all the coordination between NATO and the European Union, has not kept pace with the speed and diversity of the threats the ocean now carries. This brief maps the Atlantic's strategic value, surveys four converging pressures (great-power rivalry, narcotrafficking, critical undersea infrastructure, and military power projection), identifies specific NATO-EU coordination gaps, and proposes targeted recommendations, with particular attention to the position of smaller Atlantic-facing allies.

1. The Strategic and Economic Value of the Atlantic

The Atlantic functions less as a boundary between Europe and the Americas than as critical infrastructure in its own right. It hosts the world's busiest transatlantic shipping lanes and underpins a partnership that the United States government itself estimates contributes roughly $1.5 trillion a year to the global economy, a figure expected to double by the end of the decade (U.S. Department of State 2023). Beneath its surface lies an even less visible but equally indispensable asset: a network of fibre-optic submarine cables that now carries more than 99% of intercontinental data traffic, including the financial transactions, diplomatic communications, and cloud infrastructure of both sides of the Atlantic (De Rosi 2026). 

This infrastructure is concentrated in a small number of chokepoints and landing stations, which makes it both highly efficient and correspondingly exposed: incidents of accidental or deliberate cable damage already average well over a hundred a year worldwide, though the available data do not break this figure down by ocean basin (Sherman 2023). Academic research on cable governance argues that this exposure is not a narrow technical matter but a core and growing dimension of international security governance, one that has so far received far less analytical and institutional attention than its strategic weight warrants (Bueger and Liebetrau 2021). In short, the Atlantic's value is inseparable from the security of the corridors, cables, and chokepoints that make it usable, and that value is precisely what is now being contested.

2. A Contested Ocean: Renewed Geopolitical Rivalry

Three developments illustrate how far great-power competition has moved into the Atlantic space. First, in the North Atlantic, assertive and escalating U.S. interest in Greenland has moved from rhetoric toward active negotiation, driven less by the island's population or economy than by its position astride Arctic shipping lanes and its deposits of critical minerals needed to reduce Western dependence on China (Schwartz and Baskaran 2026; Reed and Harmon 2026). 

Second, in the Western Atlantic and Caribbean, Washington's 'maximum pressure' campaign against Venezuela, combining sweeping economic sanctions, narcotics-trafficking indictments against senior Venezuelan officials, and a steadily expanding naval and air presence intended to force political change in Caracas, escalated dramatically in early 2026, culminating in a large-scale strike on Caracas and the capture of Nicolás Maduro, after a monthslong naval build-up officially framed around counter-narcotics enforcement (Council on Foreign Relations 2026; Al Jazeera 2025). Roughly 15,000 U.S. personnel were deployed to the Caribbean at the height of the operation, alongside one of the largest U.S. naval deployments to the region in decades (Al Jazeera 2025). 

Third, more speculatively, analysts and officials have floated renewed U.S. interest in Cuba as a complementary point of control over Caribbean and South Atlantic approaches. Together, these episodes show a North Atlantic being reshaped by force, deal-making, and forward positioning that extends well beyond the debates that have long dominated NATO’s agenda. The same applies to the South Atlantic: scholars argue that, despite its strategic weight and Global South actors such as Brazil, Nigeria, and South Africa, it remains neglected by Western grand strategy (Leoni et al. 2025). A genuinely Atlantic-wide policy cannot separate that neglect from rivalry in the ocean’s northern and western reaches.

3. Narcotrafficking: A Transatlantic Security Threat

Maritime narcotrafficking is one of the clearest examples of a threat that treats the Atlantic as a single, undivided space. Cocaine produced in Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia increasingly reaches Europe via a South Atlantic route, crossing from Brazilian and Argentine ports toward the Gulf of Guinea and North Africa, before entering Europe through West African transit hubs such as Guinea-Bissau, Senegal, and Cape Verde (FIAP 2024; European Union Drugs Agency 2022). Traffickers increasingly rely on at-sea transfers between 'mother' and 'daughter' vessels far from any coastline, low-cost semi-submersibles, and diversified entry points into the EU, deliberately designed to exploit exactly the kind of maritime domain awareness gaps that fragmented Atlantic surveillance produces (Europol 2026). 

United Nations seizure data confirm that these flows are not random. They are structured by geographic proximity, corruption, and market forces into a mappable network of source, transit, and destination states, a structure that in principle should make the corridor easier, not harder, to target with coordinated interdiction (Aziani et al. 2021; Screen and Aziani 2025). Coastal states with limited naval and coast guard capacity, including several West African and South Atlantic states, absorb a disproportionate share of the resulting violence, corruption, and institutional strain, even though the final destination of most of this cocaine is the European market (European Union Drugs Agency 2022). Left unaddressed, this dynamic will continue to convert weak maritime governance anywhere on the Atlantic rim into a security liability for Europe as a whole.

4. The Atlantic as a Platform for Power Projection

The practical value of Atlantic geography for power projection is best illustrated by a single facility: Lajes Field, on Terceira Island in the Azores. Historical scholarship on the early Cold War situates Lajes at the centre of NATO's earliest logistical architecture, arguing that Portuguese-American bargaining over the base directly shaped the alliance's Atlantic posture from its founding years, well before Portugal's own democratisation (Marcos 2014). 

In use as a transatlantic staging point since 1943, and the refuelling hub for U.S. resupply flights to Israel during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Lajes has functioned for eight decades as what the U.S. Air Force itself calls the ‘crossroads of the Atlantic’ (505th Command and Control Wing 2022). That role has intensified rather than faded: in June 2025 Lajes served as the refuelling hub for the B-2 bombers that struck Iranian nuclear facilities in Operation Midnight Hammer, and by February 2026 satellite imagery showed more than a dozen U.S. Air Force tankers, alongside fighter and transport aircraft, staged at the base amid renewed U.S.-Iran tensions and the redeployment of U.S. naval assets from the Caribbean toward the Eastern Mediterranean (Airlive 2026; Donn 2026). 

None of this activity requires a large permanent footprint; it requires only that a small mid-Atlantic archipelago remain available, on short notice, as a bridge between North America, Europe, the Middle East, and beyond. This is the clearest demonstration that Atlantic geography still confers strategic weight on small actors, and that this weight comes with exposure: decisions taken in Washington translate almost immediately into operational activity, and political controversy, on the territory of the host ally.

5. Where NATO-EU Coordination Falls Short

NATO's own Atlantic architecture has been strengthened in recent years. Joint Force Command Norfolk, tasked with protecting transatlantic sea lanes and reinforcement routes, has had its mandate widened to cover the Nordic and High North states and now explicitly includes the protection of undersea cables among its responsibilities (Vandiver 2025). NATO has also begun transferring leadership of the Norfolk and Naples commands to European officers, a step toward a more balanced allocation of responsibility within the alliance (Vandiver 2026). Academic accounts of the EU-NATO relationship have long identified this kind of functional overlap without a formal division of labour as a structural, recurring weakness rather than a temporary gap, one that resurfaces across successive security domains as each organisation builds out its own instruments in parallel (Schleich 2014). 

What remains largely absent is a systematic bridge between NATO’s maritime domain awareness and the European Union’s own tools, especially the EU Maritime Security Strategy and Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO) projects on surveillance and critical infrastructure protection. This disconnect creates three practical gaps. First, intelligence on hybrid maritime activity, including suspected sabotage or reconnaissance near submarine cables, is not routinely fused across the NATO-EU boundary. Second, EU-funded counter-narcotics and coastal-capacity programmes in West Africa remain largely detached from NATO’s maritime picture of the same waters. Third, neither organisation has a standing joint mechanism dedicated specifically to undersea infrastructure protection, despite both treating it as a priority. For smaller Atlantic-facing allies such as Portugal, which host critical transit infrastructure but lack the naval mass to monitor surrounding waters alone, these gaps reduce both situational awareness and leverage over how their strategic geography is used.

The Way Forward

The Atlantic's commercial and geopolitical value to the security and development of its coastal states is not in question. What is in question is whether that value can be converted into results without deeper cooperation and diplomatic connectivity among the states and institutions that share the ocean. Without it, progress on shared security challenges, and on the depth of partnership needed to sustain it, will remain limited. There is always more to build on the Atlantic's full potential. More than thirty coastal states across four continents have already chosen to formalise cooperation on the ocean's shared challenges, from trade to science to security (U.S. Department of State 2023), and the wider community of states and territories touching its waters and adjoining seas is considerably larger still. The opportunities this scale represents are immense, and so is the responsibility of sharing them, a responsibility that falls squarely on NATO and the EU to translate into working coordination rather than parallel effort.

Translating this potential into practice requires four concrete steps. First, NATO and the EU should establish a standing maritime domain awareness cell dedicated to undersea infrastructure, fusing intelligence on hybrid activity near submarine cables across the NATO-EU boundary. Second, EU-funded counter-narcotics and coastal-capacity programmes in West Africa should be formally linked to NATO's maritime picture of the same waters, closing the disconnect identified above. Third, building on the Norfolk and Naples command transfers, the two organisations should formalise a clearer division of labour for Atlantic maritime security, rather than each continuing to build parallel instruments. Finally, smaller Atlantic-facing allies such as Portugal should be given a structured voice in NATO-EU coordination mechanisms, in recognition of the strategic weight that facilities like Lajes Field confer on them.

References

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Airlive. 2026. “A Massive Number of US Air Force Tankers Have Been Spotted at Lajes Field in the Azores.” February 21. https://airlive.net/military/2026/02/21/a-massive-number-of-us-air-force-tankers-have-been-spotted-at-lajes-field-in-the-azores/. 

Al Jazeera. 2025. “Top US Military Adviser Tours Caribbean as Pressure on Venezuela Deepens.” November 25. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/11/25/top-us-military-adviser-tours-caribbean-as-pressure-on-venezuela-deepens. 

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