In 2015, the US President Barack Obama's administration launched the Three Seas Initiative of the Baltic, Black and Adriatic Seas. Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Romania. The foundation of this initiative for the United States is its systemic military and political presence in Poland (missile defence bases), Kosovo (Bondsteel strategic military base), Bulgaria and Romania (US missile defence bases and naval bases in Varna and Constanta). From this perspective, the Three Seas Initiative can be seen as a political reinforcement of Euro-Atlantic solidarity. Poland plays a key integrating role in both the Three Seas Initiative and the Intermarium projects. Over the past two decades, Warsaw has become an important partner of Washington, and after the UK leaves the EU, Poland will become the main and most consistent partner of the United States among the EU countries. In our opinion, the regional policy of the European Union has an important impact on the development trends of both geostrategic projects.

In particular, the Northern Dimension initiative in the EU policy was put forward in September 1997 at a conference in Rovaniemi (Finland) on the development of the Barents Sea region. The accession of Sweden and Finland to the EU in 1995 meant the emergence of the EU's northern dimension. In December 1998, at the Vienna meeting of EU heads of state, the northern dimension was recognised as a direction of the EU's foreign and border policy. In June 1999, the concept of the Northern Dimension was approved in Cologne. The EU, Iceland, Norway, and Russia were named as partners. Participants in the process are the Council of the Baltic Sea States, the Council of the Barents Sea - Euro-Arctic Region, and the Arctic Council. Since 2007, the Northern Dimension projects have been funded under the European Neighbourhood Policy Financial Instrument Programme. The priorities are: environmental and nuclear safety, cooperation in the energy sector, development of cross-border transport infrastructure, healthcare, preservation of the traditional way of life of small peoples of the north, and development of links between research institutions in the region. Cooperation with the Kaliningrad region was also recognised as a priority. Most of the projects were declarations of intent to focus the Northern Dimension's activities on the northwestern part of the Russian Federation. After 2014, most of the initiatives fell under the sanctions regime. It is no coincidence that the Three Seas Initiative appeared in 2015, not least as a US response to the start of Russia's hybrid war against Ukraine. The initiative is also intended to help stabilise the situation in the Balkans. The process of Europeanisation of the Balkan region is very complicated.

Negotiations on EU accession with the Republic of North Macedonia, which was granted candidate status in December 2005, are ongoing, and negotiations with Turkey began in June 2006. On 12 June 2006, Albania signed an Association and Stabilisation Agreement, on 15 October 2007, Montenegro signed a similar agreement, on 29 April 2008, Serbia, and on 16 June 2008, Bosnia and Herzegovina. To promote the process of European integration of the Balkan countries, a special financial programme «Community for Assistance for Reconstruction, Development and Stabilisation – CARDS» was developed in 2001, which provides for the development of state institutions and legislation, strengthening of democracy, the rule of law and human rights, establishment of civil society and independent media, ensuring the functioning of the market economy, and structural reforms. By 2010, €5 billion had been spent under this programme. However, there is no clear understanding of when the Balkan countries will reach the EU membership criteria. In fact, the EU and the US are making joint efforts to Europeanise and Euro-Atlanticise the Balkan countries.

The Three Seas Initiative and Intermarium geostrategic projects play a significant role in the EU's further eastward movement, which is being resisted by Russia. In May 2009, the EU approved the Eastern Partnership programme as a special dimension of the European Neighbourhood Policy. Its goal was to intensify the movement of Eastern European and Caucasian countries towards political association and economic integration with the EU. The first Eastern Partnership summit was held on 7 May 2009 in Prague and included 27 EU countries, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine. Russia believes that the Eastern Partnership has turned into a «partnership against Russia». It is also worth noting that there is another regional structure in the Black Sea region whose activities have been de facto frozen by Russia's aggression against Ukraine.

In June 1998, the Charter of the Black Sea Economic Cooperation was signed in Yalta and entered into force on 1 May 1999. The BSEC member states are Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bulgaria, Greece, Georgia, Moldova, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Turkey, Ukraine and Turkey. The BSEC Council of Foreign Ministers meets twice a year. The main areas of activity are the promotion of regional trade, improving the efficiency of transport systems (creation of the Black Sea Ring Road), and energy development. The Black Sea Ring Road project is supported by the EU as part of the Europe-Caucasus-Asia transit project. In 2007, the EU adopted a document on the BSEC called «Black Sea Synergy». However, these projects have been on hold since 2014. The development of the Baltic-Black Sea axis is also hampered by the Belarus-Russia union state. Given these trends, the European Union is trying to strengthen its eastern border as much as possible.

This is especially important in view of the migration crisis. On 15 February 2003, the EU Regulation replacing the Dublin Convention was approved. The responsibility for granting political asylum was assigned to the country where a relative of an applicant for this status legally resided. A fingerprint database of asylum seekers was created. In October 2008, five main directions of the EU immigration policy were approved: 1) the establishment of the external border protection agency FRONTEX at the EU level, 2) the creation of a blue card for inviting highly skilled labour to the EU, 3) reducing the inflow of unskilled foreign labour and preventing human trafficking, 4) the introduction of a common asylum system in 2010, and 5) support for countries exporting emigrants. The FRONTEX agency was launched in Warsaw in 2005. Its tasks include coordination of operational actions of member states to protect external borders, analysis of threats and risks at external borders, assistance in training of national border guard personnel, and deportation of illegal immigrants.

The Trump administration cited the European experience of combating illegal migration when arguing for the construction of a border wall with Mexico.

At the same time, the key issue for the United States in relation to both the Three Seas Initiative and the Intermarium projects is the geostrategy of gas and oil pipelines. In the Baltic Sea, the United States is opposing the Russian Nord Stream 2 project. In the Black Sea and the Adriatic Sea, the United States is opposing another Russian project, the South Stream. Instead, the US alternative is to build terminals to receive US liquefied natural gas. Of equal strategic importance to the United States is the geostrategic fragmentation of Eurasia, the weakening of the European Union's ties with Russia and China, and the giving of a new impetus to Euro-Atlantic cooperation.

In 2017-2020, the Trump administration distanced itself from its dominant role in NATO, demanding more military spending from its European partners. However, the coronavirus pandemic has made its own adjustments. The first blow of the pandemic to the European integration project was dealt to four freedoms: movement of capital, goods, labour, and services. A pandemic-related shutdown of production would mean both insufficient supply and too little demand. Quarantine measures have split the Common Market into «national containers». The monetary union was already facing a serious crisis before the pandemic. The crisis with illegal migrants dealt another blow to European solidarity. Populists took advantage of the humanitarian crisis. Left-wing and right-wing populism is rampant in Europe. The UK's withdrawal from the EU has created a budget deficit for the European Union. Contemporary political discourse offers European optimistic and European pessimistic scenarios. The European republic is decentralised (European regions), post-national, parliamentary-democratic and social. This refers to a possible turn from the project of the «United States of Europe» to the «European Republic». The new Europe requires new political thinking without populism and nationalism. The liberal EU is facing a national-populist challenge. The European republic should be in the centre of a triangle: liberalism (freedom), socialism (equality) and nationalism (brotherhood). In this sense, the Three Seas Initiative is also instrumental for US foreign policy towards the European Union as a format for organising bilateral and multilateral cooperation as an alternative to ties with the «confederate core» of Germany and France in the EU.

Conclusions

The updating of traditional regional projects such as the Baltic-Black Sea Axis, as well as the emergence of relatively new regional projects such as the Three Seas Initiative, is a natural consequence of the rapid transformation of the European system of international relations. As a result, a new architecture of the European continent is emerging, existing European unions and interstate organizations are organically supplemented with new structures. The attitude of the subjects of the European system of international relations to the mentioned regional projects is different. The European Union conditionally «ignores» the American project «Three Seas Initiative» and takes an even cooler attitude to the project «Interseas». This is not surprising, because both projects transform the homogeneity of the European space controlled by the EU.

Moreover, both projects compete with existing EU regional initiatives and complicate the EU-US transatlantic dialogue. The supranational elites of the European Union are only beginning to understand the mentioned trends. On the other hand, for the national elites of the new EU member states, which are geographically located in the region from the Baltic to the Adriatic and Black seas, both projects are an additional guarantee of the American presence in Europe. It is all the more important that the «Three Seas Initiative» has de facto become a bipartisan project of the American political elite. Russia is primarily reacting to the Mizhmorya initiative, which it considers another attempt to build a «sanitary border» between Russia and the European Union.

In the absence of rapid preventive diplomacy, it is difficult to maintain the current order. If some countries build up their muscles and are ready to use force, while others weaken or are less ready to use force, then the room for diplomatic maneuver is reduced. Economic interdependence does not guarantee peace. What makes the state weak is that it does not control the situation inside the country. A failed state is an extreme case of a weak state, where the government has lost real power, which has led to chaos and the emergence of various armed groups and militias that have taken over real power in a part of the country. The diplomatic process reflects the real situation, rather than changing it. The goal of diplomacy should be to preserve and even expand the zone of cooperation in the midst of inevitable zones of disagreement. Old threats have not disappeared, and new ones regularly arise.

On May 17, 2021, a Memorandum of Understanding was signed between the Ministries of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova regarding the initiation of in-depth cooperation on European integration issues - the Associated Trio.

With the start of the coronavirus pandemic, the world plunged into a hybrid global war. The defining trends were: the drop in oil and gas prices, the beginning of a cyclical economic recession, the deterioration of the military and political situation in key regions, the collapse of the arms control system, and the aggravation of the American-Chinese confrontation. The beginning of the global systemic crisis covered the epidemiological, economic, political, military-strategic, civilizational dimensions of world politics. The structural crisis of the world economy is accompanied by socio-political instability, the strengthening of political radicalism and populism, the intensification of the offensive of authoritarian tendencies, as well as the actualization of the risks of the return of heated phases of regional conflicts. Economic processes in the world are increasingly politicized. The greater the risk of a global US-China armed conflict, the more frequent the processes of aggravation of local regional conflicts have become.

Andrii Martynov - expert of the Intermarium Institute