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In a recent interview with Dagsavisen, former Minister of International Development Hilde Frafjord Johnson moves to defend the lucrative Norwegian peace industry.
In the wake of the scandals surrounding Jeffrey Epstein and the Norwegian diplomatic elite, she now warns against cutting financial support for what she calls «discreet and secret diplomacy». In order to defend the expenditure, she invokes Donald Trump as the great spectre.
Defends lack of transparency
Dagsavisen grants extensive column space to Johnson, who is deeply concerned that the revelations surrounding Terje Rød-Larsen and other top diplomats will lead to the purse strings being tightened. Rød-Larsen headed the think tank IPI, which received hundreds of millions of Norwegian taxpayers’ kroner, marked by poor financial management and close ties to an abuser. Instead of confronting a culture in which enormous sums are distributed without sufficient oversight, the former minister chooses to defend the system itself.
She claims that peace work is almost always secret and that the actors must be allowed to operate quietly, far from the spotlight of public scrutiny. The problem with this secrecy is precisely what the Office of the Auditor General (Riksrevisjonen) and the National Authority for Investigation and Prosecution of Economic and Environmental Crime (Økokrim) are now investigating. The absence of transparency has created an unhealthy culture in which a small elite has been able to build its own international networks at the expense of Norwegian taxpayers.
Attacks Trump’s results
In order to defend the cumbersome and endless processes conducted under the auspices of Western think tanks, Johnson launches a frontal attack on Donald Trump. She claims that his way of resolving conflicts collapses very quickly and calls it a superficial diplomacy.
The facts, however, show an entirely different picture. It was the Trump administration that put the Abraham Accords in place and created real and historic normalisation between Israel and several Arab countries. This occurred efficiently and without the endless and costly round-table conferences in Switzerland on which the international peace elite subsists.
By comparison, the great achievement of the Norwegian diplomatic elite, the Oslo Accords, lies completely in ruins.
Failed peace industry
Johnson herself points out that Norway has supported secret negotiations all over the world. Her own cherished project at the time was the peace process in Sudan and South Sudan. Despite massive Norwegian efforts, billions in aid, and countless conferences, South Sudan today is characterised by deep poverty, bottomless corruption, and unimaginable suffering.
When politicians and the public now rightly question what Norway actually receives in return for financing think tanks and secret processes, the reflex of the aid elite is to sound the alarm that world peace is at stake. The truth is that the Epstein scandal has torn the mask off an industry that for far too long has escaped critical journalism and strict financial oversight.
Dagsavisen nevertheless allows the former minister, unchallenged, to defend this elite.