The Oslo Stock Exchange tumbled, salmon exporters were reeling and Norway’s prime minister called it “very bad news” after US President Donald Trump confirmed punitive reciprocal tariffs on all imports from countries around the world. Norway will be slapped with a 16 percent tariff on goods exported to the US, higher than the 15 percent initially announced.
“This is very serious,” Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre said on Thursday, just as he was convening his Labour Party’s annual national meeting in Oslo. “For a country like Norway, which lives off its exports, it will have consequences for many Norwegian companies and jobs.”
Only around 8 percent or less of Norwegian exports go directly to the US, but as much as 80 percent goes to countries in the European Union (EU), which has been slapped with a 20 percent tariff, plus a 25 percent tariff on European cars. That can force cuts in Europe’s automobile industry, to which Norway is a major exporter of steel, aluminum and autoparts.
Støre’s trade minister, Cecilie Myrseth, called Trump’s new US tariffs “bad for the world economy” and “critical for Norway.” She’s been told that the tariffs are due to take effect sometime between April 5 and April 9, pending further calculations and possible negotiations with US officials. The US, meanwhile, ranks among the countries from which Norway imports the most, a point its leaders will stress when responding to the new US tariff that they find unreasonable.
Norwegian Finance Minister Jens Stoltenberg, who got along well with Trump when he led NATO and was invited to Trump’s inauguration, called Trump’s long-threatened tariffs “the most massive increase in tariffs in many decades.” Both he, Myrseth and Støre indicated that Norway will work hard to head off or at least ease the trade war that some economists including Professor Karen Helene Ulltveit-Moe fear will be the worst since the 1930s, and only ended with World War II.
“This (Trump’s trade war) is completely counterproductive and creates even more geopolitical friction,” Ulltveit-Moe told state broadcaster NRK. Stoltenberg seemed to agree, calling Trump’s tariffs “the most serious setback for open and free world trade since the period between the two World Wars.”
Other economists and investment managers think and hope Trump may just be spurring negotiations with his tariff targets, while warning them against countering with new tariffs in return. Prime Minister Støre stressed that the Trump Administration has itself “opened up” for negotiations over the new tariffs and he’s keen to enter into some, while Stoltenberg warned that Norway won’t be among the first invited to the table.
Norwegian government officials are also planning to travel to Brussels on Monday, as soon as their party’s annual meeting is over, and promote the importance of Norway’s 30-year-old trade agreement with the EU. “We have close contact with key officials at the EU,” Stoltenberg said, even as Støre stressed on Thursday that he still doesn’t want a new debate on actual EU membership at this time.
Officials in China, which has long been Trump’s biggest trade enemy, equated his new punitive reciprocal tariffs to both “protectionism and bullying,” and many agreed, also in Norway. While some US commentators in Norway think Trump seems intent on changing the world order, Norwegian Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide suggested that the US president is defying not only long-standing international trade agreements (put in place in the decades following World War II to ward off more wars) but also NATO’s Article 2. It calls on all NATO members to resist conflicts within economic policy, and encourages economic cooperation instead.
“If you want to have a strong NATO, all members should seek the greatest economic development within NATO countries,” Eide told NRK while at a NATO meeting in Brussels on Thursday. He said he intended to mention that, when discussing Trump’s trade war with the new US Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the NATO meeting.
NewsinEnglish.no/Nina Berglund