At the Power Summit 2026, the annual high-level gathering organised by Eurelectric, of which NordiskPost is a media partner (since it’s part of NordiskBil), Finnish President Alexander Stubb outlined a three-point foreign policy agenda, called for a dramatic expansion of the European Union, and declared himself, with characteristic wit, an “EU nerd.” The conversation was led by Markus Rauramo, President of Eurelectric and CEO of Fortum.
Three priorities for a turbulent world
Just over two years into his term, President Stubb set out the three priorities guiding his presidency: ensuring Ukraine wins the war against Russia, strengthening the Euro-Atlantic partnership between the EU and the United States, and reaching out to the Global South.
“The era of Western dominance is over,” Stubb said plainly. “We have to reach out beyond just the Ukraine-Europe partnership.” The remark reflected a geopolitical realism that ran through his entire address, an acknowledgement that the liberal international order his generation grew up assuming was permanent has been fundamentally destabilised.
Stubb offered a sharp diagnosis of how Europe arrived at its current vulnerabilities. The post-Cold War assumption, that integration and interdependence would bind nations together peacefully, had proven dangerously naive. Europe became energy-dependent on Russia, security-dependent on the United States, and economically dependent on China.
“The very instruments that were supposed to bring us together, energy, currency, technology, information — can also be weaponised,” he warned, citing Russia’s use of gas supplies at the start of the Ukraine war and the role of cyber warfare. It was a point that landed with particular resonance at a summit focused on energy and geopolitics, hosted by the association representing Europe’s electricity industry.
The Finnish model
When Rauramo turned the conversation to resilience, Stubb drew extensively on Finland’s own experience, shaped, he noted, by a 1,340-kilometre border with Russia and roughly 30 conflicts with its eastern neighbour since the 14th century. Finland’s philosophy, he explained, is that “you fight wars on the battlefield, but you win them in the metahole”, which means a comprehensive security framework encompassing military, border control, police, energy supply, and civilian preparedness.
The details he offered were striking. Finland maintains strategic energy reserves whose exact quantity remains classified. The country is 80% self-reliant on food production, underpinned by formal agreements between the government and major food companies. And it operates over 60,000 civilian shelters capable of housing 4.4 million of its 5.6 million inhabitants — facilities that in peacetime serve as car parks, gyms, and swimming pools.
“We’re quite rare in Europe in being completely self-reliant,” Stubb said. “We’re not doing this for ideological reasons. We’re doing it because we’re very pragmatic.” Rauramo noted, in response, that building this kind of resilience takes decades.
Stubb thinks big
The most provocative passage of Stubb’s remarks came when he turned to the future of European integration. Describing himself as a long-standing “EU nerd”, a self-designation he tied to his entire academic and political career, he argued that geopolitical power requires size and scale, and that Europe’s most successful policy has always been enlargement.
His vision was deliberately ambitious. Europe should aspire to create flexible membership structures encompassing up to 40 states, or even non-European nations aligned with the Western camp. The list he sketched ranged across the continent: Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, the Western Balkans (with a pointed mention of Serbia), Iceland, Norway, and Turkey, a country he noted no one is talking about anymore, but which matters enormously from a security perspective.
Most striking of all was his pitch for the United Kingdom. “We need to bring the UK back — if not in, then as close as possible,” he said. And in a remark that drew evident amusement, he raised the prospect of Canada as a 28th EU member state. “Wouldn’t it be lovely if Canada were the 28th state of the European Union rather than the 15th state of the United States?”
The window for bold thinking, he warned, is narrow. Once the war in Ukraine ends and the current US administration eventually changes, political urgency will dissipate. “People are going to take the foot off the gas pedal and start haggling about unnecessary stuff again.”
A realistic optimist
Stubb closed with a defence of what he called “realistic optimism.” Humans, he argued, make three systematic errors: they overrationalise the past, overdramatise the present, and in doing so underestimate the future. By any long-run metric (famine, disease, conflict, quality of life) the world is in better shape than it has ever been.
His optimism rests on two pillars: the ongoing technological revolution, which he views as an opportunity rather than a threat, including artificial general intelligence; and the historical pattern of world orders, which tend to stabilise after five to ten years of turbulence. “Once that settles, I think we will live in a much more stable world.”
He ended, to laughter, by predicting that Finland will again be named the world’s happiest country for the ninth consecutive time next year, a fitting coda from a self-declared EU nerd who insists that optimists simply lead more interesting lives.
