It is an almost unreal spectacle we are witnessing when Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre now seeks shelter under the Pope’s mantle to speak about peace and military restraint.

In NRK Nyhetsmorgen he recently gave his full support to Pope Leo’s strong outburst against world leaders and the use of military force as an automatic solution to conflicts. Støre believes that the Pope is onto something when he describes the world as “marked by tyrants and warns against the use of weapons”.

It is a touching concern for peace from a man who himself has stood in the midst of one of the most fateful military interventions in modern Norwegian history.

We must not forget that it was Jonas Gahr Støre who served as Minister of Foreign Affairs when Norway in 2011 threw itself headlong into the bombing of Libya. At that time there was no talk of either deep moral qualms or concern for the long-term repercussions of military force. On the contrary, Støre was one of the foremost architects behind the Norwegian participation, in which we dropped as many as 588 bombs over a country that today lies in ruins.

The decision was taken in a kind of SMS democracy in which the elected representatives were kept at arm’s length while the fighter aircraft were prepared for sorties without a single formal prior debate in the Storting.

The Libya war left behind a chaos from which Europe and Africa are still bleeding. The country was transformed into a haven for human traffickers and Islamic extremists, and it is to a large extent this war that opened the floodgates for the waves of migration across the Mediterranean. That the same Støre now nods in agreement with the Pope’s condemnation of leaders who resort to weapons appears as nothing less than political double standards of historical proportions.

It is easy to moralise about wars in Sudan or the Middle East when one has gained the necessary years of distance from one’s own responsibility for the destruction of an entire state.

The Prime Minister also mentions Ukraine and President Zelenskyj in his argumentation, and seeks to draw a line from the defence of a “neighbouring country” to the Pope’s general criticism of tyrants. It is a deft way of shifting attention away from his own history. For the Pope, this concerns those who use religious or moral language to justify war, and here he hits the nail on the head when it comes to Støre’s own rhetoric from 2011.

At that time, the bombing was presented as a humanitarian necessity to protect civilians, while the result was the exact opposite.

When Støre now says that he is “quite close to yes” to the Pope’s characterisation of tyrants, it is tempting to ask whether he includes himself in that group of leaders against whom the Pope warns. One cannot first participate in bombing a country back to the Stone Age, without a plan for the future, and then present oneself as a pacifist friend of peace on the state broadcaster. This is the typical power elite in Oslo in a nutshell, where one always seeks the moral high ground, while conveniently forgetting the human suffering one has helped to create. The people see this hypocrisy, and they remember that those who today speak about peace were the same who only a few years ago were most eager to send Norwegian aircraft to war.

It is not Trump who constitutes the danger here, but left-leaning politicians such as Støre.