Romania must deepen ties with Black Sea allies to safeguard offshore gas projects that will position it as the European Union’s largest natural gas producer by 2027, shielding them from escalating Russian threats. This imperative underpins the draft National defence strategy for 2025–2030, released on 12 November.
The EU and NATO member shares a 650-kilometre land border with war-torn Ukraine and has endured repeated airspace violations by Russian drones over the past two years. Floating mines have also disrupted vital Black Sea trade routes for grain, oil, and energy shipments. The Black Sea region – encompassing Bulgaria, Romania, Georgia, Turkey, Ukraine, and Russia, remains a geopolitical flashpoint.
Centrist President Nicușor Dan presented the strategy in Bucharest, framing it as a response to a transformed global landscape: the ongoing war in Ukraine, rising international tensions, rapid technological advancements, artificial intelligence proliferation, economic protectionism, resource competition, sabotage of critical infrastructure, disinformation, radicalisation, cross-border threats like drug trafficking, and climate change impacts.
At the strategy’s core is the Neptun Deep offshore gas project in the Black Sea, a joint venture between OMV Petrom (majority-owned by Austria’s OMV) and state-owned Romgaz. First gas is slated for 2027, propelling Romania ahead of current leaders like the Netherlands.
The draft warns: “Russia’s military actions, its aggression against Ukraine and, especially since 2014, the significant militarisation on the Crimean peninsula threaten security in the Black Sea region, putting at risk the security of shipping and the exploitation of energy resources.”
To counter this, Romania will intensify cooperation with NATO allies Turkey and Bulgaria, as well as other regional partners, to protect energy and telecommunications infrastructure. The document emphasises “solidary independence”, pursuing national interests while honouring EU and NATO commitments.
Romania’s “strategic partnership with the United States is of extreme importance,” the strategy states. Following Washington’s recent announcement to withdraw some rotational troops, President Dan confirmed ongoing talks with other NATO allies for replacements.
Additional measures include considering minority stake listings of state-owned energy (and potentially defence) companies on the stock exchange to enhance transparency and funding.
Domestic vulnerabilities and reforms. The strategy identifies corruption, inefficient public administration, and weak institutional capacity as primary internal risks, eroding social cohesion, economic performance, and national resilience. Cyberattacks, delays in EU integration for neighbours Moldova and Ukraine, and emerging hybrid threats round out the concerns.
President Dan lambasted bureaucratic inefficiencies: decisions often lack data-driven foundations, information becomes inconsistent within days, and sectors fail to coordinate. “We need to reverse what I mentioned earlier as a weakness – we must have an administration that works with data, with information that remains consistent a week later, and one that integrates the efforts of its various sectors,” he said.
To combat corruption without undermining judicial independence, the strategy proposes accelerating administrative and legislative reforms.
The strategy places the Romanian citizen at its core, as its direct recipient, “a privileged actor and the primary beneficiary of all measures proposed.”
“This document, therefore, is not about the Romanian state itself, but about the fundamental obligations of public institutions toward Romanians,” President Dan emphasised.
Its premises include strengthening liberal democratic values, fully preserving citizens’ rights and freedoms, optimising administration, and adapting institutions to citizens’ expectations. Equally vital are state consolidation through debureaucratisation, digitalisation, and the adoption of new technologies; responsible management of public spending and debt; and applying principles of fair competition and merit-based selection to foster economic freedom and entrepreneurial creativity – “the only genuine sources of community development and individual prosperity.”
“All of this demands a transparent and collaborative approach, with institutions operating on principles of honest and responsible cooperation, open to public scrutiny, thus offering real guarantees that Romania becomes a state resilient to internal and external shocks, capable of responding effectively to new threats and security risks,” Dan noted.
Security challenges
The Romanian president stresses that the strategy provides medium-term responses to a security environment “more dramatic than ever before.” Russia’s aggression against Ukraine “has brought war back to Europe, violently altered borders, and, through the long-abandoned logic of spheres of influence, seeks to redefine continental geopolitical balances.”
“The Russian invasion of Ukraine demands our immediate reaction and the mobilisation of significant resources so that our neighbours can resist the aggression and achieve not just a temporary ceasefire, but a just and lasting peace, in line with international law,” he said.
Russian aggression, with its unpredictable and destabilising effects in the Black Sea region, compounds other threats: rising global geopolitical competition, the return to competing economic and security blocs, trade protectionism, the struggle for control over new technologies and rare metals, and the revolution of artificial intelligence – in both civilian and, even more so, military fields.