Newsletter: There ain't no vaccine against Donald Trump

Dear reader,

"There is so much noise", Norwegian Foreign Minister Ine Eriksen Søreide said with a sigh the other day. She was challenged by Norwegian daily Aftenposten about the relationship to Donald Trump.

I have in later years asked the same of both the foreign minister and the defense minister.

Every single time, the answers have been characterized by our security policy and economic dependence on the USA. Evasive, vague, stressing that the USA is more than Donald Trump.

In Brussels, the Norwegian Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg conducts the same exercise on a nearly daily basis. He tries to balance phrases to cover NATO’s frustration without stirring a storm from the American president towards the defense allilance.

Foreign Minister Eriksen Søreide’s interview with Aftenposten goes to show that the band is on the verge of rupture. What goes on right now in the White House in Washington D.C. makes us almost forget the underlying and serious threats laying beneath Trump’s insane Twitter world.

The Foreign Minister herself points to climate issues, trade politics and the nuclear agreement with Iran. Three key challenges placed at risk by a president who is convinced he is still the anchor of a reality show, not leader of the powerful USA.

The world holds its breath while the pandemic and Donald Trump rage on. There will never ever be a vaccine against the latter.

In a High North News op-ed this week, a series of internationally recognized researchers describe an Arctic summer characterized by giant ice shelves collapsing, extremely high temperatures in Siberia and thawing permafrost leading to a massive diesel spill in Russia. They call for strengthening international cooperation between countries, people and science in the Arctic.

We have a separate article about the conflicts following in the wake of this diesel spill. You can also read about the new Russian icebreaker Arktika, which sailed all the way to the North Pole on its maiden voyage through the Polar ice.

We have also interviewed Russian journalist and editor of a Northwest Russian news site Svetlana Prokopyeva about the conditions for the press in Russia. The courageous journalist risks seven years in prison after having covered terrorism in Arkhangelsk.

You can read all this, and much more, in High North News.


Have a great weekend, everybody!
Arne O. Holm,
Editor-in-Chief, High North News