Prologue

When you have read my blog post (below), you may conclude that the author (me) of today (2025) really dislikes America. So let me refrain you from that thought right away, as I truly love the United States! On two occasions in my life, I have had the privelege of living in the US. The first time (in the early 2000s) I was staying in Boulder, Colorado, during my PhD studies, working at the High Altitude Observatory (HAO) at NCAR. A most unbelievable time! A few years later, I moved to Florida, to work at the Florida Space Institute, which was located at the legendary Kennedy Space Center. I still look back at these two periods of my life with great excitement, as it was a real adventure to experience the American way of life. I found the people I met just fabolus, and wish them all the best!

However, today I truly fear for my old friends and their amazing country. E.g. to watch how a guy like Elon Musk destroys the livelihood for people with federal jobs is truly disgusting, and to further see President Trump ruin the US economy with his meaningsless trade wars is simply unbelievable. I consider myself part of the resistance movement, even though I cannot really do much, living a continent away. But I do my best to stay informed, and I listen almost every day to podcast’s like MeidasTouch, No lies, Political beatdown, Legal AF, the George Conway/Sarah Longwell podcast, The Bulwark, The Lincoln Project, The enemy list, Talking Feds, Lawrence, Sister’s in law, The new abnormal, Rachel Maddow show etc…

BUT; in this blog post below, the focus is the big crises we currently experience here in Europe due to the bromance between President Trump and President Putin.

Back in the days…

When I grew up in Norway in the late 70s and 80s, it was the era of the Cold War: The United States of America vs The Soviet Union. I remember feeling that war growing up. For most Norwegians (and Europeans), the Soviet Union was considered a true nightmare and a most horrible enenmy. USA, on the other hand, was viewed as a beacon of hope.

You may wonder why a small country as Norway (about 4 million people in 1980) was afraid of a giant neightboor like the Soviet Union (almost 300 millions), as we didn’t pose any military threat to them. However, consider if Norway had been invaded and implemented into the Soviet Union – that would have allowed them to e.g. put naval and air power into the North Atlantic. So strategically I think a Soviet invasion of Norway would make a lot of sense.

The NATO alliance

Therefore it has always been essential for Norway to seek alliances, to become stronger than we are alone. And in 1949 we were one of the 12 signatories when the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was established! Today NATO consists of 32 member states; 30 European states plus USA and Canada. The most famous NATO agreement is probably their Article 5, that commits member nations to come to the defense of any other member state in the event of an attack. This simple agreement felt like a lifeline when I grew up: All Norwegians knew that our NATO friends would show up if the Soviet Union tried to invade, and by NATO friends we immediately thought about our ultimate NATO ally – the United States! With such a great country to look out for us, we were safe! That said, the Soviet Union was not alone during the Cold War. The Warsaw Pact was a collective defense treaty signed between the Soviet Union and the following seven East/Central European countries: Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and East Germany.

A Norwegian spying for the Soviet Union

I will now illustrate how it was like back in the 80s with an incident of international ramifications that shocked Norway to the core. But first a few words about my father. He has always been a pretty calm man, I barely remember him being enraged at all. Except for one day – January the 20th 1984. This day the news reported that the Norwegian Bureau Chief Arne Treholt at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had been arrested. He was suspected to provide Top Secret documents to the KGB General Gennadij Titov. During those days, KGB was the intelligence and security service of the Soviet Union, and I still recall my father’s unusually harsh words (for him to say out loud) when a picture of Treholt filled the TV screen: “He deserves the death penalty for this unthinkable crime” my father stated, which was enough to freak out the eight year old boy that is now me in 2025.

Vienna, August 20th, 1983: Arne Treholt (left) in secret meetings with Gennadij Titov and Aleksandr Lopatin from the Soviet Union. Photo: The Police / NTB

Glasnost and Perestroika

In the late 80s, things finally took a turn for the good, with Mikhail Gorbatsjov and Ronald Reagan as Presidents for the two superpowers. Gorbatsjov wanted to bring reforms to communism, famously using the terms glasnost (transparency) and perestroika (restructuring), in order to bring more liberal economy into the Soviet Union. That eventually led to the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, when the country collapsed into 15 new countries. They are listed beneath the map below, and from the same map we realize that one particular country among these 15 are almost as large as the old Soviet Union, namely the Russian Federation!

List of countries in map above: 1. Russian Federation, 2. Ukraine, 3. Belarus, 4. Uzbekistan, 5. Kazakhstan, 6. Georgia, 7. Azerbaijan, 8. Lithuania, 9. Moldova, 10. Latvia, 11. Kyrgyzstan, 12. Tajikistan, 13. Armenia, 14. Turkmenistan, 15. Estonia. From Wikimedia/Donk.

Another memorable moment from the late 80s, leading up to the fall of the Soviet Union, is undoubtedly the famous speech by Ronald Reagan on June 1987, when the current President of the USA says: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” (referring to the Berlin Wall in Germany that eventually was opened November 9, 1989). This speech by Reagan was given in West Berlin, and from the famous recordings below, we may note that the passage that finally culminates with “tear down this wall” begins around 11:10 into the video:

It was not only the fall of Soviet Union we were witnessing in the early 90s. Also several communist regimes in Eastern Europe went through a democratization process. Germany finally reunited as one country, while Czechoslovakia was divided into two countries (Czech Republic and Slovakia). Also the Warsaw Pact was dissolved in 1991, and today all the former East/Central European members of the Warsaw Pact has become members of Nato. This also includes three of the new nations that grew up in the ashes of the fall of Soviet Union in 1991; namely the Baltic countries Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Below is a map of all NATO members, including the timeline when they joined the alliance:

Vladimir Putin – the strong man of Russia

For those of you who are old enough to remember the turn of the millennium, you may recall what people were mostly afraid about those days; namely whether the computer systems could handle the transition from year 1999 to 2000. Also known as the Y2K problem. However, what we should have paid attention to, was what happened in Russia in 1999. This year Vladimir Putin became the Prime Minister of the country, before stepping up as President the next year. Since then Putin has for all purposes been the leader of Russia (except for the years 2008-2012 when he was forced to go back as Prime Minister because of technicalities I will not spend time explaining here; I will only note that Putin fully supported his “puppet” Dmitrij Medvedev that took office during the Putin-free years).

As a President of the Russian Federation, Putin has shown great aggression towards his neighboors. During the first decade of 2000, Russia fought in what is referred to as the “Second Checken War”, taking place in Chechnya and the border regions of the North Caucasus. The result was a Russian victory, with Chechnya reincorporated back into Russia. Another military success took place in Georgia in 2008, when the regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia tried to leave Georgia. Russia interferred and today these two regions (South Ossetia and Abkhazia) are under Russian military control.

During the 90s, there were some signs that Russia could move in a more democratic direction. However, with Putin as President, the country has become more and more an authoritarian regime. For many years, Putin has been criticized by Western countries and human rights organizations for undermining democracy and human rights in Russia. But he doesn’t seem to care much about criticism; instead he and Russia continue the military agression towards their surroundings, and in 2014 Russia invaded and occupied Crimea, a region of Ukraine. 8 years later, Russia took on a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

To justify the attack on Ukraine, Putin has explained that Russia wants to help the population against all the Nazis infiltrating the Ukrainian society. Such a lie may work in an authoritarian regime where the media and the politicians cannot be trusted. So if the russian population actually believes Putin’s Nazi-accusations, that is somewhat understandable.

Luckily, we in Europe don’t have to accept such nonsense. We are (for the most part) good democracies, with reliable media outlets that give us the facts. Most of us have faith in our politicians and the rule of law, and we have no problem to see the Russian attack for what it truly is: An illegal invasion of an innocent country. So Europe decided from day one to stand should by shoulder with our Ukrainian neighboors, and now in 2025 we still support them wholeheartedly.

Something is rotten in America

Unfortunately, not all democracies in the world have remained “good”, as something rotten is truly going on in America these days. We saw the first glimpses of the madness when Donald Trump became the 45th President in 2016. But that time, he had a cabinet filled with reasonable people that managed to keep Trumps authoritarian traits under control. This time, as the 47th President, all hell is loose in Trumps America. For us Europeans, it is with shock and despair we realize that “the land of the free” have adopted many of the traits we only find in an autrocracy like Russia: (1) Absolute power is held by Trump (checks and balances in the court system cannot work when the supreme court has been corrupted by men like Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas), (2) Media outlets like Fox News and Newsmax support Trump and have been lying to the public for years (I know, as I have paid attention for more than a decade!), (3) Other media outlets may still provide facts, but nevertheless adjust their focus so that they do not upset “Dear Leader Trump”. Is there any other explanation to the depressing X-message that was published recently by Jeff Bezos regarding “his” Washington Post (se below); (4) The politicians in the Republican party are only loyal to Trump, and cannot in general be trusted about anything.

About a month ago, the US Vice-President JD Vance attended the Munich Security conference in Germany to give a speech. One would think that he would use such an opportunity to highlight the great friendship between Europe and North America, as well as addressing how to solve the Ukrainian war. Instead he spent his whole speech attacking European democracies, saying the greatest threat facing the continent was not from Russia and China but “from within”. Apparently, the way we Europeans welcome immigrants, as well as dealing with “free speech” is a recipe for disaster. Then came a few days when Trump posted on X/Truth Social to explain for the whole world that only himself and Putin would meet for Peace talks. Also, the Ukrainian President Zelensky was apparently a dictator that didn’t want the war to end.

Finally we all watched in horror the last Friday of February the now infamous White house meeting where Zelensky was more or less bullied by Vance and Trump (as well as the stupid journalist boyfriend of Marjorie T. Green that ridiculed the dress of Zelensky).

Something happened with me after that horrendous scene in the Oval Office. I was suddenly back in my childhood, experiencing the Cold War once more. But now some of the roles had shifted: The prior enemies (Soviet Union and America) had become best friends, and we Europeans had been left out to dry. It gives me a chill when writing this, but also it fills me with seriousness and determination. Ukraine desperately need help, and we Europeans are the only ones they can trust.

When I went to the store the next day, all people I met talked about the fact that Trump seem to do whatever Putin wants. I have seen in some social media posts that there are speculations about Trump being a Russian asset named Krasnov. To be honest, I really don’t care whether he is a spy or whether he is just a big Putin-supporter. The effect is the same: Trumps America and Putins Russia are now for all purposes “partners”. Consequently the NATO alliance is effectively dead. And so is Ukraine, if we Europeans are unable to step up.

Hopefully we will meet the challenge this situation requires. It will probably take some time for us Europeans to adjust to the new world order. But make no mistake, we will keep Ukraine free. If not, it will be the doom of Ukraine, and also a carte blanche for Putin to attack and invade the next European country.

Epilogue

Excerpt from a CBS article from March 7, 2025: “President Trump suggested Thursday that members of the U.S.-led NATO transatlantic military alliance would not come to the aid of the U.S., should America come under attack. NATO members are bound to back each other militarily in the face of any aggression under the collective defense clause in the alliance’s founding treaty. “Do you think they’re going to come and protect us? Hmm. They’re supposed to. I’m not so sure,” Mr. Trump said as he addressed reporters at the Oval Office. “

FTI (For Trumps Information): Article 5 in the NATO charter states that an attack on one (NATO member) is an attack on all, and that all NATO will strike back. The invoking of Article 5 has happened one time in history; on Sept 12, 2001, “one day after Al-Qaeda killed almost 3,000 people in its unprecedented terrorist attack on Washington and New York“.