Our friends are worried

A winter evening in Stockholm, lights glinting in the harbor, snow falling outside. “And what about us,” I am asked, “up here in the North? What happens to us?”

My Swedish companions are journalists, analysts and civil servants, people who care about their country’s national security. Though neither elite nor wealthy, they share a worldview. They think their country’s prosperity depends on the European Union and its open markets. They also think their safety depends on the United States’ commitment to Europe. And since President Donald Trump took office, they suddenly find themselves staring into an unfathomable abyss.

These are conservatives by Swedish standards, and Republican presidents have suited them in the past. Trump’s tweeting and bragging don’t bother them much either, though they find it unseemly. The real problem is deeper: Sweden’s economic and political model depends on Pax Americana—the set of American-written and American-backed rules that have governed transatlantic commerce and politics for 70 years—and they fear Trump will bring Pax Americana crashing down. Nor are they alone. Variations of this conversation are taking place in every European capital and many Asian capitals, too.

The Swedes do have specific, parochial concerns, and one of them is Russia. For the past several years, Russia has played games with their air force and navy, buzzing Swedish air space and sending submarines along the coast. Jittery Swedes have brought back civil defense drills, and until November, it looked like other changes were coming.

The health of the European Union worries them too. Sweden is a small country but it has big companies, all of which have major investments and trading arrangements all across Europe. But what now? If the United States is dedicated to America First, then American diplomats are hardly going to help Sweden wave the flag for free trade, as they did in the past.

What worries them most of all, though, is something else: Over and over again, they ask me about Stephen K. Bannon. But in the course of the evening, it becomes clear that they’ve read more about him and know more about him than I do. White supremacist ideology is alive and well in Scandinavia; Anders Breivik, who killed 77 people in a 2011 attack in Norway, is its most famous exponent. Sweden also has a home-grown populist party, the Sweden Democrats, who share Bannon’s pro-Russian and anti-Muslim sympathies. My Swedish companions think their country has absorbed and assimilated large numbers of refugees in the past couple of years pretty well, but of course there are tensions, and tensions can be exploited. Will the U.S. administration, consciously or unconsciously, now help Nordic nationalists make their case?

“We are on our own here,” one of them writes to me the next day. Which pretty much sums up how the rest of our allies feel right now, too.

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