The EU’s Global Gateway in the Pacific: a pragmatic opening for reorienting European cable security

Submarine-cable security has arrived on the European agenda as a sabotage problem, and the European Union has answered it well: a comprehensive Cable Security Toolbox built on operational resilience rather than perfect protection. Read against the empirical record, however, the threat lies elsewhere. Cable damage is overwhelmingly accidental and, in Europe, declining; what climate change alters is not why cables fail but how badly a failure ends. That acute risk concentrates in the Pacific Island Countries, where the cable is second-order infrastructure with first-order consequences: often a nation's only link, with repair capacity an ocean away and failures that escape the legal and disaster-risk architectures meant to record them. The Toolbox already points the right way. What it invites is not a new instrument but a change of orientation: carrying proven repair, detection and reporting know-how outward, in coordination with partners and on Pacific terms.

The European Commission and the High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy in 2025 published an Action Plan on Cable Security, bringing Connecting Europe Facility Digital funding for digital infrastructure to roughly EUR 1 Billion under the current budget. In February 2026 the Commission’s expert group delivered its operational layer: a Submarine Cable Security Toolbox of mitigating measures, a first list of Cable Projects of European Interest, and EUR 347 Million in CEF funding for strategic cable projects, including a EUR 20 Million call to build repair capacity at European ports. The Toolbox spans five areas of mitigation: redundancy, repair capacity, landing-station resilience, sensor and SMART-cable monitoring, and workforce development. The instrument is comprehensive and well-funded. Its underlying doctrine is deliberately realistic: with more than a hundred thousand kilometres of cable in European waters, surveilling every fibre is currently unfeasible, so the Toolbox moves the objective “from perfect protection to operational resilience” across the full cycle of prevention, detection, response and deterrence. It is a serious instrument, aimed in the right direction.

Author: Thomas Nielsen, Junior Researcher

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Photo credits: Gandh