Norway hedges against Washington while bracing for Moscow

For most of the past decade Norway's foreign policy ran on two assumptions: a friendly United States anchored NATO, and Russia could be managed at the Barents Sea border. Both broke this spring. President Donald Trump's demand for control of Greenland, his ten-percent tariff on Norwegian goods and his message to Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store linking the price tag to a Nobel Peace Prize grievance turned Washington into a pressure source rather than a backstop. Oslo's answer was to thicken every other tie at once: Europe, the Nordics, Ukraine, and the NATO presence on its own northern flank.

The Arctic moves carried the heaviest weight. In March, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte flew to Bardufoss to watch Cold Response 26, a 14-nation exercise that put roughly 32,000 troops through Norwegian and Finnish terrain. Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide and Defence Minister Tore Sandvik used the visit to recast Norway as the alliance's northern anchor, a role Russia's Northern Fleet sortie into the Barents in April only made easier to argue. Store also dispatched a small Norwegian contingent to Greenland under the Danish-led Arctic Endurance mission, a tripwire force as much aimed at Trump as at Moscow.

The European tilt ran in parallel. Norway joined seven other NATO capitals in a joint statement rejecting the Greenland-linked tariffs as a threat to transatlantic relations. In early May, defence ministers from the five Nordic states met in Trondelag and signed the first revised Nordic Defence Cooperation agreement since Finland and Sweden joined NATO, formalising a regional bloc within the alliance. Store visited Kyiv to confirm Norway's eighty-five billion kroner Ukraine package, the largest single national contribution, with most of it earmarked for drones, air defence and a Ukrainian brigade Norway is helping to train.

The one place the squeeze produced a retreat was the sovereign wealth fund. Parliament's pause on ethical divestments, ordered after the U.S. State Department called the Caterpillar exit illegitimate, is now under a government review that civil-society groups fear will be softened to placate Washington. The finance minister, former NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg, has said openly that the fund faces a dilemma over how transparent it can afford to be. That is the shape of the spring: confident on Arctic defence and Ukraine, careful on anything that gives Trump a fresh grievance.