In an extensive interview with Norges Forsvarsforening, former Chief of Defence and now Chief Research Scientist at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (Forsvarets forskningsinstitutt, FFI), Sverre Diesen, says that “Europe may have to prepare for a far more insecure future without a credible American security guarantee.”
That is not difficult to agree with. What is remarkable about the interview, however, is not what history itself long ago brutally established, but what Diesen does not say – that which years of failed defence planning based on weak analysis and naïve notions regarding our security-policy environment seek to pass over in silence.
Diesen, who previously was, and still is, one of the central professional military agenda-setters in Norwegian defence planning, says nothing about the fact that the dismantling of approximately 85 per cent of the Norwegian Armed Forces at the turn of the millennium was built upon a fundamental fallacy concerning lasting peace in Europe, and that future threats to Norway after the Cold War had been reduced to “minor crises and conflicts of limited scope and limited duration”.
The war has now raged in Ukraine for a fifth year. The number of dead is counted in the hundreds of thousands. The material damage is enormous. The danger of further escalation and the use of nuclear weapons is greater than ever before.
Diesen says nothing about the many warnings against dismantling the national Armed Forces on the basis of the completely ahistorical assumption that solidarity within NATO was absolute and without limitations, and that the United States would come to our aid regardless should we need it.
Diesen believes Donald Trump is the problem, without taking into account the fact that the United States is a great power that in any existentially important situation will prioritise its own interests. Nor does he take into account the many previous shifts in American foreign policy between interventionists and isolationists. There is, generally speaking, something touchingly naïve in Diesen’s and Norwegian defence planners’ conception of alliances and alliance solidarity. They can hardly have read their Machiavelli.
Diesen also skilfully avoids mentioning his earlier claims that a military-technological paradigm shift had taken place with the development of long-range precision weapons and sensors, which he believed had largely rendered land forces redundant.
He says nothing about the fact that this line of reasoning largely formed the basis for the dismantling of the Norwegian Army, most of the Home Guard, universal conscription, and the mobilisation defence system we previously had.
And he says nothing about the fact that experiences from the Middle East and Ukraine have shown that his reasoning was fundamentally flawed. Diesen is more concerned with Donald Trump as an explanatory factor.
He actually manages to claim that “Trump does not understand America’s interests”, thereby revealing that he can hardly have read either the National Security Strategy, issued by the White House in November 2025, or the National Defence Strategy, issued by the United States Department of Defense in January 2026.
These two documents constitute the core of American security strategy. In contrast to corresponding Norwegian documents, they appear grounded in realpolitik and highly consistent with overarching, long-term American national interests.
Diesen believes that Trump does not understand that the United States depends on European allies in connection with the power struggle with China and Russia. Diesen seems to have difficulty grasping that the Trump administration has repeatedly expressed a desire to strengthen Europe as an important ally, and that the United States is concerned about Europe’s weakened position as an ally, as a consequence of the globalisation policy, immigration policy, and defence policy that have weakened Europe industrially, politically, and in security terms.
It is, in reality, this purely factual and correct criticism of the European NATO countries that Diesen and those like him are unable to absorb. Presumably because it exposes the fact that they themselves have been wrong and have put Europe’s prosperity and security at risk.
Diesen’s assertions that Trump “both admires Putin personally as a strong man he can relate to, and as the leader of the type of state he wishes the United States were”, represent an embarrassing form of personification and psychologisation of heads of government and international politics that stands up poorly academically and serves only to obscure the realpolitik drivers behind the positioning of the great powers.
Such nonsense is far below what one should be able to expect from a Chief Research Scientist at FFI, and from a former Chief of Defence. It says much about the academic level of the retired general’s speculations.
“In the worst case, the United States could end up as a ‘rouge state’ if the current administration’s course is continued,” says Diesen. This is, of course, also merely nonsense and an attempt to explain away his own misconceptions.
Diesen believes that how aggressively Russia will behave in the future will largely depend on how the war in Ukraine ends. He claims that “A Russian perception of victory may influence future Russian risk assessments in the direction of a more offensive use of force”, and that it is scarcely realistic to believe in peaceful coexistence with the current Russian regime based on mutual understanding, because the real problem is the old Russian notion that the West wishes them harm and that we represent a threat to Russia and everything Russian.
As long as that perception of the West persists, “Russia will be a European security problem”, according to Diesen. He therefore believes that change in Russia must come from within, and consequently argues for a more offensive Western information strategy directed at the Russian population.
It may well be that the Russians believe that the West wishes them harm and that we represent a threat. If so, we must, hand on heart, admit that there are good reasons for that.
Russia has been invaded from the west three times and has repeatedly lost large portions of its population. The Russians have not forgotten that.
Russia is a great power and, as a great power, has legitimate geopolitical and security-policy interests to safeguard on an equal footing with the United States and Europe. That can scarcely be denied.
Russia itself attempted to join a common European security architecture in the 1990s and was promised that NATO would not expand eastwards if East Germany were integrated as part of Germany. That promise was broken by the NATO countries.
The United States has 47 forward-deployed bases in the Nordic countries alone, all directed against Russia. Russia has no bases in the Western Hemisphere directed against the United States. That is a fact, which is likewise difficult to deny.
I do not share Diesen’s fatalistic attitude that peaceful coexistence with the Russian regime is impossible. Such coexistence must, however, be based on our having a realistic understanding of Russia’s security interests in particular and of our security-policy environment in general.
It cannot be based on rationalisations, escapism, lack of knowledge, and a lack of ability and willingness to understand our surroundings, our friends as well as our possible enemies.
It is time to settle accounts with old generals. They live in a world that has never existed. They are probably far more dangerous to Norwegian security than the Russians.