Having come into existence more than a billion years after viruses, homo sapiens keeps outliving them.

Countries and international organizations such as NATO and the EU must adapt their inherent activities, without freezing them, both to present-day realities and to the upcoming period of recuperation. We must be better prepared for the virus’s disappearance than we were for its advent.

It is in this understanding that – The Atlantic Club of Bulgaria (ACB) launches a Three Seas National Programme (BG3SEU) and thus joins the Three Seas Initiative (3SI) of connectivity among twelve EU countries around the basins of the Black, Adriatic and Baltic Seas.

Ambassador Elena Poptodorova, Vice President of the Atlantic Treaty Association, will be the director of the ACB national program.

The Three Seas platform brings together Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia for the implementation of large-scale transportation, infrastructure, energy, digital and ecological projects.

Such projects shall enhance EU and NATO security in the region of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and shall diversify the international economic presence in the region.

The Three Seas Initiative highlights CEE as an inalienable factor in the competition between the Northern and the Southern Sea Routes encompassing Eurasia. This rivalry will only be further exacerbated with the advance of global warming and the melting of the Arctic Ice Caps. The Covid-crisis is one more proof that Europe needs a larger number of passable and faster transportation corridors. The Three Seas Initiative offers an ocean of opportunities down the meridians of CEE and across the parallels of the Danube.

The 2020 3SI Summit is scheduled to take place on 19 – 20 October in Tallinn, Estonia, and we hope Bulgaria will host the Summit in 2021.

The ACB urges Estonia and Bulgaria to overcome the general virus-bred consternation and engage their full techno-digital potential to hold remotely (if otherwise risky) all Three Seas events as scheduled.

In a logical expectation for life in Europe and the world to take its normal course, the ACB-launched Three Seas National Programme aims at:

SHORT- AND MID-TERM:

• Bulgaria to get ready to make full use of the new opportunities and corridors connecting the Three Seas and beyond to the Western Balkans and the Aegean;
• Just recently US Secretary of State Michael Pompeo announced additional financing of 1 billion USD for the Three Seas Initiative. Returning to a regular work mode, Bulgaria should join the Three Seas Investment Fund and put forward large-scale infrastructure projects, both public and private, and secure support from the Fund;
• Upon resuming their usual activity, the European Parliament and the European institutions should lend support to the 3SI.
• The initiative should bring in Greece too, involving the Aegean as well;

LONG-TERM:

• CEE to proceed to planning and constructing new infrastructure corridors optimizing the Southern Sea Route  as against the competition of the Northern Sea Route.

The ACB invites all interested national, European and trans-Atlantic parties to join us in a common cooperative drive in pursuing the West’s new strategic priority in Europe – the Three Seas Initiative.

Tomorrow begins today!