After Nord Stream, resilience starts with repair

The damage to the Nord Stream pipelines has forced a neglected security question into public view. In its statement of 29 September, the North Atlantic Council described the available information as indicating sabotage and expressed concern about the consequences for shipping and the environment. It did not establish responsibility for the incident. [1] Europe should preserve that distinction between assessing an event and attributing it.

Attribution matters for deterrence and accountability. It is not a prerequisite for restoring an essential service. A system that can function only after governments agree who caused its failure is a fragile system. The immediate lesson is therefore broader than the protection of any particular pipeline: Europe needs to organise resilience around the time required to recover, as well as the effort devoted to preventing disruption.

The pipeline is not the point

Security planning commonly starts with a list of important assets. That is necessary, but incomplete. A pipeline, cable or terminal matters because of the service it supports and the alternatives available if it fails. The loss of one heavily photographed installation might be manageable; a less visible failure at an intermediate node could be much harder to absorb.

Authorities should begin with essential functions and work backwards through their dependencies. Which services must continue? How long can they operate through alternatives? What resources would be required to restore them? These are appropriate questions for confidential planning and aggregate public accountability. They do not require publication of precise vulnerabilities or instructions that could facilitate an attack.

The distinction also prevents symbolic protection from crowding out practical investment. A visible patrol or additional barrier may reassure the public, yet a reserve part, a contractual repair arrangement or an alternative route may contribute more to continuity. Security expenditure should be judged by the reduction in plausible disruption, not by how easily the measure can be displayed.

A chain of responsibility

Cross-border infrastructure typically involves operators, regulators, insurers and several governments. Each actor may have a rational but incomplete view of the risk. An operator has incentives to maintain availability within its commercial obligations. A regulator may focus on consumer prices. Security agencies assess threats. None automatically owns the full consequences of a prolonged international interruption.

This fragmentation becomes especially important where the benefit of resilience extends beyond the party paying for it. A company may not receive the full social value of holding scarce repair capacity available. A government may hesitate to fund a reserve that could be used first in another country. Markets cannot always solve those problems without an agreed framework for sharing costs and access.

A European arrangement should assign a clear convening responsibility for each major category of cross-border service. It need not create a new institution for every asset. It does need to establish who gathers information, coordinates an exercise and resolves competing claims on limited restoration resources. Leaving that question open is itself a planning decision, usually a bad one.

The skills nobody can stockpile

A repair plan can fail because the necessary equipment, qualified personnel, permits or transport are unavailable when several incidents occur together. The appropriate response is not to assume that private suppliers will always have spare capacity. Authorities and operators should assess whether commercial arrangements provide enough reserve for a wider emergency, then procure additional availability where the public benefit justifies it.

Such arrangements should be designed as services with performance obligations. Paying for availability is different from purchasing an item and hoping it will be usable later. Maintenance, training and periodic exercises matter. A nominal reserve that cannot be mobilised under realistic conditions contributes little beyond an entry in an audit report.

Cross-border agreements also need rules for priority. If two services require the same scarce restoration resource, allocation should reflect essential needs and the consequences of delay, rather than the nationality of the resource's owner. Those rules will be politically easier to negotiate before an emergency than after governments are facing outages and angry constituencies.

Acting before the picture is complete

The uncertainty surrounding responsibility for infrastructure damage creates an opportunity for speculation. Governments should resist filling gaps in the evidence with confident public narratives. False certainty can harm diplomatic credibility and divert investigators. It can also lock decision-makers into an escalation path before the evidential basis is strong enough.

A better approach is to separate four activities: service restoration, evidence preservation, public communication and decisions about responsibility. They interact, but they have different standards and timescales. Restoration should begin on the basis of operational need. Public attribution should depend on a considered assessment. Neither should be used as an excuse to neglect the other.

Communications should explain what is known, what remains uncertain and which protective actions are being taken. There is no need to disclose sensitive methods. A regular, bounded update can be more reassuring than repeated dramatic statements. Citizens are capable of understanding uncertainty when officials explain why it exists and how it affects decisions.

Recovery and deterrence

Critics of an emphasis on repair say it risks accepting attacks as inevitable. Why invest in recovery rather than make an aggressor fear consequences? This is a false choice. Credible protection, the possibility of accountability and the ability to recover can reinforce one another. If disruption produces only limited effects, the expected benefit of causing it may fall.

Still, restoration cannot answer every threat. Some losses are irreversible, some interruptions produce severe immediate harm and repeated incidents can exhaust reserves. Europe therefore needs prevention and deterrence alongside recovery. The argument is about balance: a strategy that concentrates on punishment while neglecting continuity leaves a major part of the security problem unresolved.

Nor should resilience be used to normalise poor maintenance. An incident attributed to external hostility may involve ordinary operational weaknesses as well. Independent investigation should remain able to examine those weaknesses. Security language must not become a shield against commercial or regulatory accountability.

Who pays for resilience

Resilience investments often look inefficient under ordinary conditions because they are deliberately underused. A spare route or reserved repair service may have little commercial revenue until something fails. Regulators accustomed to minimising routine costs need a transparent way to recognise the insurance value without accepting every proposed expense as necessary.

One method is to compare alternatives against a common set of service-continuity scenarios. The calculation should include the duration of interruption, the consequences for essential users and the availability of substitutes. It should also consider low-cost measures such as administrative agreements and shared exercises before assuming that new physical infrastructure is the only answer.

Funding should follow the distribution of benefits. Where an investment protects several countries, a purely national contribution can be politically difficult to justify. Shared support can correct that mismatch. In return, participants should accept common performance tests and access rules. A collective fund without collective obligations would invite free riding rather than reduce it.

The practical agenda

European governments should ask operators of essential cross-border services to review restoration arrangements, identify shared dependencies and participate in exercises involving civilian authorities. Public reporting can state whether plans exist and have been tested, while keeping operational detail confidential. Oversight should focus on gaps between a written commitment and a capability demonstrated under realistic conditions.

Exercises need an uncomfortable feature: they must be allowed to fail. A rehearsal designed to prove that an existing plan works will discover less than one designed to expose its assumptions. The purpose is to identify missing decisions, unrealistic response times and unassigned responsibilities before those weaknesses matter in an actual interruption.

There should also be an explicit procedure for bringing smaller operators into the system. Large infrastructure companies can maintain specialist security teams; smaller utilities and service providers may struggle to interpret requirements or obtain scarce expertise. Shared training, standard contracts and coordinated access to technical advice can strengthen the network without requiring every operator to reproduce the same administrative capacity.

Finally, the response should avoid equating security with the elimination of international connections. Interconnection can spread disruption, but it can also provide alternatives and mutual support. The relevant distinction is between dependence without options and interdependence governed by tested arrangements. A disconnected Europe could be less efficient and, in important cases, less resilient.

Insurers should be included in preparedness discussions without being asked to define public priorities. Their contracts can influence incentives for maintenance and restoration, but their financial exposure is not identical to the social cost of interruption. A joint review should identify where commercial coverage supports continuity and where a public arrangement is needed to protect essential services beyond the insured asset.

The Nord Stream incident should change what governments ask when they inspect preparedness. Alongside who might cause damage and how an asset is protected, they should ask how an essential service would continue and how quickly it could recover. Responsibility for the incident must be established through evidence. Responsibility for improving Europe's resilience need not wait.