Until recently, we here in Norway blamed Putin for almost everything but bad weather. That is, of course, because our EU-centric media have framed foreign affairs in such a way that we know next to nothing about the real world outside our borders. You may ask: Why is that? Have the Norwegian media been given orders? Or are they merely incompetent, misinformed or plainly stupid?
To be frank: I don’t know.
Today Reuters quoted the Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov on the issue of “dialogue”. There was every reason to welcome dialogue, he agreed. However:
“The Europeans have a very serious misconception: They assume that negotiations with Russia must be conducted from a position of strength and based on Russia’s weakness. This is the biggest mistake… Such talk will lead nowhere. …Does this stem from European incompetence, misinformation, or stupidity? We don’t know for sure, but it’s a fact.”
Putin has said that he is open to talks with European governments but that they should make the first move because they were the ones to cut off ties. The EU has imposed 20 rounds of sanctions on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine.
Most Norwegians do not get even this little titbit in their news feeds. So they have no way of knowing that the reason there are no peace talks between Europe and Russia is that European leaders refuse to discuss the root causes of the war.
Of course Norwegians could read RT, because it is actually not blocked in Norway. But no Norwegian in his or her right mind would be caught dead reading “Putin talking points” (code speak for “Russian “propaganda”). The implication being, of course, that on our side, we don’t do “propaganda”.
I must really urge my fellow countrymen to challenge his/her super-ego and read RT. Today for instance, I found a mildly ironic review of a newly published book about the sabotage of the Nord Stream Pipeline and the former Ukrainian erotic model, ‘Freya’, “the bravest diver in the whole group”. I briefly scanned the page and caught the word “Norwegian”. When I zoomed in to it, this is what I saw:
As images of bubbling gas leaks [after the destruction of Nordsream] hit international media, a separate story went almost entirely unreported: less than 24 hours after the second round of blasts, Poland and Norway celebrated the opening of the Baltic Pipe, a gas pipeline transiting Norwegian gas to Poland via Denmark, passing over Nord Stream just south of Bornholm.
“Thank you, USA,” Poland’s now-foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski, tweeted. Sikorski deleted his tweet two days later.
You may remember, but then again, if you are Norwegian you will probably not even have heard about him, Seymour Hersch and his famous article, according to which the US with the assistance of Norway took down Nordstream. His substack articles require a paid subscription, so I have directed you to the Helsinki Times for a discussion of it. Democracy Now’s conversation with Sy Hersch himself is surely also worth listening to (and there is a transcript).
Nor, to my knowledge, has the Norwegian press said a word about the controversy between Poland and Ukraine over the recent state burial of a Nazi collaborator and war criminal. Reuters didn’t devote much space to the matter, but enough to trigger curiosity.
Although Norwegians have been prevented from understanding the role played in Ukraine by successive US administrations, some Norwegian ire has shifted from Putin to Trump.
***
Personally, though, I find Trump rather more entertaining than the stony-faced Sir Keir, the rubber-faced Macron or the German fellow who looks and sounds as though he has just escaped from an insane asylum for former war criminals, I do not – repeat – not – approve of Trump’s policies. I believe that inter-state matters should be handled by adults. Alas, neither the members of his administration nor those handling EU foreign policy qualify as such, although I suspect they may have taken a course in “How to get rich, quick!”
I admit that I rather liked Trump’s comment that not everybody who lives in an apartment building is a member of Hezbollah. I liked his outburst that “Everybody hates Israel because of this!” Above all, I recognise that his MAGA voters hoped he would concentrate on improving conditions for ordinary US Americans.
Moreover, there is no denying that the US on Trump’s watch has lost face due to the Iran debacle. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is very good news indeed, though you may disagree with me.
Bear with me, though: You see, I claim – and again you may disagree – that USA has been, for decades a malevolent global force. And Trump, who has dismantled what little remained of a semblance of Democracy in his own country, with his ICE and unconstitutional extravagances, has merely allowed US hubris abroad to break US legs. Again. (Remember Afghanistan?)
Ordinary US citizens are paying the price. I am sorry. However, EU citizens are also paying the price.
BUT TRUMP IS JUST A SYMPTOM, NOT THE CAUSE
(to be continued)
***
So let’s take a look at the Iran debacle:
Yes, Trump, not Biden, not Obama, was the one who attacked Iran, out of the blue during on-going negotiations. He was pressured by a homicidal maniac, it is true. (Mind you, Naftali Bennet will be no better than Netanyahu!)
History books will say that he, Trump, was to blame for the underhanded attack on Iran on 28 February.
BUT former presidents have been waging economic war on Iran ever since Iran got rid of the US puppet — a pompous, fascist “shah” — in 1979. In fact, Iran was the most sanctioned country in the world until it was surpassed by Russia after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
Take a good long look at the so-called Timeline of U.S. Sanctions. The US thought it would be able to force the country to its knees, and obviously now thought it had succeeded in so doing. After all, economic sanctions amount to warfare. They don’t merely hurt the targeted country’s “regime” (a popular word these days for all governments pursuing policies that do not serve “US national interests” – which is a euphemism for the “financial interests of a limited number of people”).
I repeat for emphasis: “US national interests” is normally used as a euphemism for the “financial interests of a limited number of people“.
The Lancet wrote in 2025:
All economic sanctions ultimately function as sanctions on health. Through their direct effects on access to medical products, provision of health-care services, and civilian mental health, as well as their indirect effects on determinants of health such as food security and socioeconomic development, sanctions inevitably or even intentionally undermine people’s right to health. Moreover, the adverse effects of sanctions on health are most pronounced among children, women (versus men), and the most marginalised populations.
With a low efficacy rate and a significant and uneven impact on health, it is questionable whether economic sanctions meaningfully reduce the number of deaths relative to military aggression.
[all highlighting by Pelshval]
In other words, since “it is questionable” whether the number of civilian deaths caused by sanctions is “meaningfully” lower than that caused by military warfare, sanctions are relatively cheaper for the US taxpayer, but no less devastating for the affected country.
So the US has been actively and fiercely engaged in warfare against Iran for decades. Why? Forget about “terrorism”. The US has itself actively engaged in terrorism whenever and wherever it has seen fit, just like Israel; still does.
Not even tangentially does the matter of human rights enter into US equations.
The US would like to have, once again, a puppet regime in Iran, simple as that. The oil, of course, the minerals. Now, though, in 2026, there is the additional pressing need to prevent the strengthening of Iran’s ties with China, before it is too late.
Trump has been doing to Iran what any president would have been pressured into doing, not so much by Israel as by the “limited number of people” who basically run USA behind the scenes. As things have turned out, it is too late.
So the problem is not Trump. It’s the system. Trump was the product of a system that since the introduction of increasingly neoliberal policies from the 1970s on (reversal of progressive taxing, deregulation – e.g. the repeal of the Glass Steagal Act – etc.) has dramatically degraded the living conditions of the greater part of the US and UK populations and shrunk the middle class of the two countries.
As Trump has had to admit defeat, Dems in Congress are as furious as Republicans in Congress. Obviously, most of these people – the people in Congress – do not have the interests of the majority of US citizens at heart.
Their purely political problem is that what the US is doing in the Middle East is increasingly unpopular with US voters, in spite of suppression of criticism of genocidal Zionism. So they happily use Israel as both a scapegoat and an excuse for lingering in the Middle East, while plotting how to “end aid to Israel” and replacing aid with something worse.
AS Trita Parsi writes:
Trump owns this failed war, but if the Democrats help torpedo the MOU and war resumes, then they will co-own the next war.
Wars become interminable when leaders convince themselves that ending them without victory is politically more costly than continuing them without hope. Once that trap is sprung, every setback becomes an argument for one more deployment, one more escalation, one more year. The objective shifts from achieving a realistic political outcome to avoiding the admission that the original objectives were unattainable.
That last paragraph describes exactly what is going on in Europe now. Alas. But let me not digress from my agenda today, which is, I repeat:
Trump is not the problem. The system is.
***
So, by way of a very brief conclusion – because were I to recite the entire litany of US war crimes over the past 150 years, I would have to write an entire book (such books have been written, though, ref. William Blum) — I quote the article Democratic Party’s Corollary to the Donroe Doctrine:
Beneath the rhetoric of inter-party conflict lies a broad bipartisan consensus in favor of promoting US hemispheric hegemony and crushing governments that resist it – with Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua at the forefront. While Democrats frequently portray Trump as reckless, they generally accept the underlying premises of economic coercion, political intervention, and regime-change pressure. Their objections mainly focus on the execution of policy rather than its legitimacy.
The rest of the article is well worth your attention, as is the website where I found it: https://www.antiwar.com/regions/
As for the system, ladies and gentlemen, you can call it rotten, if you wish, but that is not exactly clarifying. I maintain that there are two characteristics of the system that are particularly egregious:
- It is, and has been ever since WWII, hegemonic, i.e. it claims the right to call the shots globally with or without the endorsement of the UN.
- Consequently, it does not play by any other rules than those that it lays down arbitrarily, according to its needs.
- It is Neoliberal. Now the Wikipedia article about Neoliberalism is very confusing, but most critics of Neoliberalism stress the following policies:
- market fundamentalism,
- deregulation of capital markets and the corporate sector,
- low taxation on capital income
- privatisation of the public sphere, and above all:
- accelerating financialisation
- => All of which leads to “austerity”,
- i.e. the lowest 90 % of the population suffer the consequences while the top 10 % thrive.
That is the problem.
Trump is merely the symptom of his country’s malaise