By Vanesa Valcheva
On November 12, 2025, Professor Krzysztof Pelc delivered the inaugural Lester B. Pearson Lecture at Oxford's Department of Politics and International Relations, centred around a provocative thesis about the nature of sovereignty and power in international relations. Pelc argued that states counterintuitively enhance their bargaining position by constraining their own future actions through international commitments. Like Odysseus binding himself to the mast to resist the Sirens' call, states that credibly tie their own hands through treaties and institutional memberships gain strategic advantages that more than compensate for the loss of short-term flexibility. When other actors recognise that a state genuinely cannot reverse course, they recalibrate their expectations and behaviour, generating trust among allies and credibility with adversaries. But Pelc emphasised a crucial caveat that effective self-binding requires "optimal imperfection," including verifiable escape clauses for genuinely unforeseeable circumstances, because without these pressure valves, commitments become brittle.
Just days before Pelc's lecture, Bulgaria and Romania, two NATO and EU member states, were frantically working to undermine the very sanctions regime their memberships ostensibly committed them to support. Bulgaria and Romania were racing against a November 21 US sanctions deadline to secure exemptions for Russian-owned Lukoil refineries that provide 80% and 20% of their respective fuel supplies. The Trump administration's late October 2025 restrictions on entities transacting with Rosneft and Lukoil suddenly imperilled these facilities, forcing what European capitals had avoided confronting for years. What makes Bulgaria and Romania particularly instructive is that both countries performed every ritual of Euro-Atlantic integration while quietly exempting the one dependency that rendered those commitments hollow.
The November scramble signals a deeper problem. Incomplete or selective self-binding creates vulnerabilities that are demonstrably worse than maintaining full flexibility. The half-bound state finds itself trapped between competing commitments, unable to credibly fulfil either one.
The Architecture of Incomplete Commitment
Romania and Bulgaria bound themselves extensively to Euro-Atlantic institutions between 2004 and 2007, with both joining NATO in March 2004 and the European Union in January 2007. The commitments were comprehensive, the sovereignty costs substantial. NATO membership subordinated their judgement about when to go to war to Article 5’s collective defence logic; EU membership required absorbing tens of thousands of pages of community law, accepting the supremacy of European jurisprudence in specified domains, and submitting to monitoring mechanisms that could compel compliance through infringement procedures. Both states spent years seemingly restructuring domestic institutions, harmonising legal frameworks, building capabilities that consumed enormous political and financial resources. They bound their hands tightly and deliberately in pursuit of security and prosperity.
Yet throughout this entire process, both countries left untouched the energy infrastructure that contradicted everything else they were building. Bulgaria’s Burgas refinery, under Lukoil ownership since 1999, expanded to process approximately 190,000 barrels per day—one of the largest facilities in the Balkans. The PETROTEL-LUKOIL refinery in Ploiești, privatised to Russian control in 1998, handles 2.4 million tons annually. For more than 15 years after accession, Sofia and Bucharest handed Moscow-linked entities carte blanche over the refineries that power their economies and armed forces.
Pelc's framework illuminates why the arrangement was always unsustainable. Binding generates credibility only when it changes how other actors perceive your future actions. When you promise to defend allies against Russian aggression while depending on Russian infrastructure, you have made commitments that cannot simultaneously hold. The defence pledge rings hollow if Moscow can shut down refineries when its strategic interest requires it. Rather than enhancing bargaining position through strategic self-binding, this configuration creates a structural vulnerability that both adversaries and allies can exploit, signalling unreliability to both camps. How can collective defence function when the adversary controls the fuel that powers the defence? This outcome is demonstrably worse than the flexibility that might come from maintaining genuine neutrality, because these states have accepted the costs and constraints of institutional membership without securing the benefits that credible alignment is meant to provide.
The Hungarian Counterfactual
Hungary offers an illuminating counterpoint. Viktor Orbán's government has maintained nominal EU and NATO membership while explicitly refusing to bind itself on energy policy or Russia sanctions. Budapest has blocked, delayed, or diluted multiple rounds of EU sanctions against Russia since 2022, and when the Trump administration imposed sanctions on Russian energy assets in November 2025, Hungary successfully extracted a comprehensive exemption during Orbán's November 7 meeting with President Trump. Orbán's strategy works precisely because most other allies did self-bind on Russia policy, creating a collective commitment structure that Hungary can exploit without contributing fully to its maintenance—the classic free-rider problem.
Bulgaria and Romania, by contrast, chose a middle path that proved worse than either full commitment or full flexibility. Unlike Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania attempted to maintain the appearance of full alignment with Euro-Atlantic institutions, accepting both the formal sovereignty constraints and the informal expectation of policy coordination that membership entails. Unlike the Baltic states—which systematically eliminated Russian energy dependencies through LNG terminals, pipeline interconnectors, and alternative supply arrangements—Sofia and Bucharest never completed their strategic reorientation. They occupied a precarious middle ground, too aligned to maintain Hungary's room for manoeuvre, yet too dependent to match Baltic coherence.
Beyond Bulgaria and Romania
The Bulgarian and Romanian predicament exposes a vulnerability that extends far beyond two relatively small EU member states scrambling for sanctions exemptions. When member states reveal that their binding is incomplete across policy domains, they undermine the entire epistemic basis on which other actors form expectations about future behaviour, which is the currency that makes institutional membership valuable in the first place.
The dependency matters less for what Bulgaria and Romania import than for who controls the infrastructure doing the importing. Russian entities physically operate critical refineries on NATO territory during an active war between Russia and a neighbouring state the alliance supports. The refineries themselves become a form of leverage embedded in allied territory, creating vulnerabilities that extend beyond energy supply to questions of sovereignty and strategic coherence.
Of course, Bulgaria and Romania are not unique. Multiple EU member states maintain varying degrees of dependence on Russian energy infrastructure, banking relationships, or commercial ties that create analogous vulnerabilities. The November 2025 scramble signals to every other state with Russian exposure that incomplete commitment is not only tolerable but negotiable. Bulgaria's state seizure of the Burgas refinery and subsequent US wind-down extension until April 2026, combined with Romania's facilitation of private sale negotiations, establish a precedent that invites replication from member states facing structurally equivalent pressures. Each accommodation appears defensible in isolation—unique circumstances requiring flexible response, pragmatic adjustment to complex realities. But aggregated across multiple member states and policy domains, these accommodations transform the nature of commitment itself. The issue is not whether sanctions are the correct policy instrument, it is that states claiming collective alignment while negotiating individual carve-outs signal unreliability across every domain where coordination matters.
For non-European observers, particularly in the Indo-Pacific, this spectacle provides invaluable intelligence about how European security institutions function under duress. If NATO and EU members cannot maintain basic coherence on energy policy when facing an active territorial war, what does it mean for Taiwan or South Korea to invest in partnerships with European states that prove unable to sever dependencies with adversarial powers even when their own security architecture is directly threatened? The credibility deficit compounds globally, not just regionally.
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The Bulgarian and Romanian scramble demonstrates that partial strategic commitment generates liabilities worse than neutrality itself. By binding themselves extensively to Euro-Atlantic institutions while maintaining dependencies that directly contradict those commitments, both states accept sovereignty costs without securing credibility benefits. The result is a strategic posture that signals unreliability to allies and vulnerability to adversaries simultaneously.
Professor Pelc argued that states gain power by tying their own hands. Bulgaria and Romania discovered that tying only one hand while leaving the other in Moscow's grip generates exploitable incoherence. Pelc's Odysseus bound himself completely to the mast. Bulgaria and Romania bound themselves just enough to restrict their freedom without securing their safety, hostage not to Russian oil alone but to the institutional fiction that commitment and dependency could indefinitely coexist.
