Terrorists attacked the people of the United States on September 11, 2011. But those attacks--and their reverberations--were felt by peoples all around the world, including in places like Norway, for years to come. This episode explores how Norway's leaders experienced September 11, and crucially, how they navigated Norway's alliance with U.S. in the years following as American leaders moved toward war in Afghanistan and Iraq.
For more on our podcast "Firsthand History" and this season "Cross Currents," visit the SMU Center for Presidential History at https://www.smu.edu/Dedman/Research/Institutes-and-Centers/Center-for-Presidential-History/Podcasts/Firsthand-History
Terrorists attacked the people of the United States on September 11, 2011. But those attacks--and their reverberations--were felt by peoples all around the world, including in places like Norway, for years to come. This episode explores how Norway's leaders experienced September 11, and crucially, how they navigated Norway's alliance with U.S. in the years following as American leaders moved toward war in Afghanistan and Iraq.
For more on our podcast "Firsthand History" and this season "Cross Currents," visit the SMU Center for Presidential History at https://www.smu.edu/Dedman/Research/Institutes-and-Centers/Center-for-Presidential-History/Podcasts/Firsthand-History
Season 1 – Cross Currents: Navigating U.S.-Norway Relations After 9/11
Episode 1: 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Release Date: May 26th, 2022
Hosts:
Dr. LaYee Leong
Fellow, SMU Center for Presidential History; Senior Fellow, John G. Tower Center for Political Studies
Polina DeClue
Student Research Assistant, SMU Center for Presidential History
Editorial Note and Disclaimer:
This transcription has been prepared according to the strictest practices of the academic and transcription communities and offers our best good-faith effort at reproducing in text our subject's spoken words. In all cases, however, the audio of this interview represents the definitive version of the words spoken by interviewees.
Citation:
Leong, LaiYee, host. “Norway’s Balancing Act.” Firsthand History, Season 1, Cross Currents: Navigating U.S.-Norway Relations After 9/11 (podcast). SMU Center for Presidential History. 9 June 2022. Accessed [date, month, year]. https://www.smu.edu/Dedman/Research/Institutes-and- Centers/Center-for-Presidential-History/Podcasts/Firsthand-History/Season-1---Cross-Currents--- Navigating-US-Norway-Relations-After-9-11
[Begin Transcription]
DeClue: Hello, I am Polina DeClue. Welcome to “Cross Currents: Navigating US-Norway Relations after 9/11” a podcast where we examine how 9/11 shook up diplomatic relations between the United States [00:00:30] and our European allies as seen through the lens of the US- Norway alliance during the Bush presidency. In this episode we are talking about how 9/11 was perceived in Europe and some of the early fallout in international diplomacy. Whatever foreign policy priorities that President George W. Bush might have outlined when he came into office, 9/11 upended them in short order. What did that mean for American allies, especially those in Europe? How did it lead to one of the lowest points in transatlantic relations in a generation? [00:01:00] Dr. LaiYee Leong, a fellow at the SMU Center for Presidential History, is with me to discuss these questions. Dr. Leong is the lead scholar who conducted the oral history interviews that provide the material for our podcast.
DeClue: For the people of New York City and Washington DC, 9/11 was an earth-shattering day. Everywhere else, many Americans say they remember the moment they heard about the attacks. It’s one of those memories seared into our collective memory. But Dr. Leong, set the stage. How was it for the rest of the world?
Leong: Hi Polina. Yes - the notion of an attack on American soil, at the beating heart of New York City – with everything the city represents to the world, [00:02:00] cosmopolitan, prosperous, dynamic – it was unfathomable not just to Americans but also to non-Americans, people outside the US. Those of us who had friends abroad at that time can testify that people were calling and relaying what they saw on TV. The sense of disbelief was palpable. Everyone I spoke to when I did my project in Norway had no hesitation in recalling that day. Kristin Halvorsen, leader of the Socialist Left or SV Party, [00:02:30] described the moment she heard the news of the attacks.
Kristin Halvorsen: “And I was in the parliament, in my office in the parliament, preparing for a debate in television, NRK, the same evening, together with all the party leaders. And then someone knocked at my door and said, “You have to turn on the television; this is really scary and frightening.” [00:03:00] And I did, and I was of course terrified. At first, we didn’t understand what was actually going on, but then we saw that there was a catastrophe. And I had friends staying at Manhattan at the time, so I tried to call them and find out what was going on. And we felt terrified. [00:03:30] It was shocking, and we also felt attacked.”
Leong: 9/11 did not only bring about a tectonic shift in American foreign policy. It also had profound effect on the politics of other countries. As we just heard from the clip, the 9/11 attacks reverberated well beyond the borders of the US and shook the halls of political power across the world.
DeClue: What was going on in Norway at the time of the attacks?
Leong: [00:04:00] Well the Conservative Party in Norway, Høyre, had just won the biggest vote share the day before and were in the midst of forming a coalition government. Here’s the leader of the Hoyre party and soon-to-be foreign minister, Jan Petersen, explaining the impact.
Jan Petersen: “We saw what had happened, but we didn't know what we didn't see. I mean, we had problems really understanding fully what had happened [00:04:30] and if there was something which we hadn't seen on the television, so what was behind it, who were they, would there be more attacks, I mean, things like that. So the interesting -- I mean, for us, then everything just turned around, and we forgot about the elections and focused on this. And this was, of course, on everyone's mind in the -- during the following days and weeks, which actually -- it is quite strange, but it actually [00:05:00] left us a little bit of quiet to think about the formation of government and the political issues because the focus was different.
DeClue: It sounds like there was awareness immediately that something was going to change in the international arena and that the US would likely take extraordinary action. But did anyone expect that US allies would be asked to step up?
Leong: Well, as we mentioned in the introductory episode, there was a great deal of sympathy for the US. [00:05:30] And our allies recognized the significance of such large-scale terrorist acts inflicted on home ground, so to speak, on the world’s superpower. Listen to what Kristin Krohn Devold, Norway’s Defense Minister at that time, said about it:
Kristin Krohn Devold” “It made a great impression on everybody and we realized that for the Americans, this was like Pearl Harbor, or it was like it was for Norway back in 1940, [00:06:00] when the Germans entered our borders. So, some of the sentiments and the deep fear and the shock...”
Leong: There we hear the Defense Minister putting 9/11 side by side with her country’s experience of World War II. And also expressing her understanding of the national trauma, which she compared to the Nazi invasion of Norway.
DeClue: That’s putting it quite strongly. Was this type of sentiment [00:06:30] typical among European leaders?
Leong: It was. The 9/11 attacks were a complete and utter shock. It rattled the world, and called into question the security of many countries. If the world’s only superpower could suffer such an attack, then what could be next and WHO would be next? It created a sense that everyone was in it together. Hence this strong feeling of solidarity across Europe, and especially among our NATO allies.
DeClue: [00:07:00] NATO has a collective defense clause called Article 5 that basically says an attack on one is an attack on all. And NATO quickly invoked it, right?
Leong: Yes, but the US didn’t take it up. The US decided NOT to work through NATO. Instead, the Bush administration launched Operation Enduring Freedom in early October 2001, in joint combat operations with the UK, but not through NATO itself. Here’s the thing – this choice [00:07:30] raised some eyebrows among NATO allies, even when they understood why it was done that way. Here’s Norway’s Foreign Minister again acknowledging the rationale behind the US decision.
Petersen: “Well, actually, I think it is a very pragmatic approach from the US. I mean, they need something which can work, can work fast, and the point is that they got contributions from members of [00:08:00] the Atlantic community.”
DeClue: Were there any countries that particularly pushed for the invocation of Article 5?
Leong: Yes, certainly. You see, it wasn’t just about solidarity. There were actually strategic reasons too why some NATO allies wanted the US to act through NATO. Kristoffer Egeberg, a Norwegian journalist puts it this way:
Kristoffer Egeberg: “Big countries, as I believe and my sources tell me, Canada [00:08:30] was the point for doing. They wanted to invoke Article 5, in order to make sure that the U.S. would kind of do things within their lines and not on their own. This was the rest of the world's, or the rest of NATO's effort, in order to make sure that this would be done in an orderly fashion.”
DeClue: And meanwhile, across the ocean, in Washington DC, what was going on in [00:09:00] diplomatic circles?
Leong: Norway’s ambassador to the US at that time was Knut Vollebæk. He was in Washington DC on 9/11 itself. Here he is describing to me what it felt like the first days after the attacks.
Knut Vollebæk: “I was a very, very odd feeling, because of the -- after this drama, and all of a sudden, this silence that was not normal for a place like DC.”
Leong: But this silence – which was both literal and metaphorical [00:09:30] as the world waited to see how the US would respond – this silence soon turned into an unspoken expectation for open demonstrations of solidarity both big and small, including one at least that wasn’t too subtle. Ambassador Vollebæk recalls this particular norm that quickly developed:
Vollebæk:“Even as a politician, my short time, I didn’t wear pins. But of course, I had to wear pins [00:10:00] in Washington at that time. I had a Norwegian and American flag together. Because that was the first things people looked at when we had our meetings in the State Department and other official residences. They looked, does he have a pin or not? Because that was a sign of solidarity. As you may recall, people were having huge flags on their cars. It was a very strong manifestation of, we are standing together, we are fighting this, we are overcoming.”
DeClue: Were there calls [00:10:30] for bigger and maybe more tangible expressions of solidarity as well? And how did US allies respond?
Leong: Yes, US allies did step up in bigger and more tangible ways too, even though they didn’t do so under through NATO. After the initial US-UK airstrikes and troop movement into Afghanistan, our allies gave support both in terms of personnel and materiel. This started in November 2001, [00:11:00] a few weeks after the US-UK invasion began. Canada, Germany, France, NATO allies, one by one – they contributed boots on the ground, from a few hundred to several thousands. And equipment. For example, Norway sent F-16s as well as their highly trained special forces. In all, some 60 countries joined the US coalition in Afghanistan eventually. But this was a US-led mission, not [00:11:30] a NATO one.
DeClue: NATO did take over later, didn’t it? How did that happen?
Leong: That’s right. NATO assumed responsibility for Afghanistan in December 2001, following a UN Security Council Resolution and after the overthrow of the Taliban. It was called ISAF, that’s the International Security Assistance Force. Its job – to put down remaining Taliban insurgents and train [00:12:00] Afghan troops to restore security, so that a new government could get established. ISAF was led by NATO command and that was important to our European allies because it affirmed a multilateral approach to military action in Afghanistan. There are many reasons for such a focus on multilateralism. There’s a saying goes that NATO [00:12:30] came into being to keep the Soviets out, the Germans down, and the Americans in. NATO functioned – and still functions – to keep US and Europe closely aligned. And in 2001, when the US had no rival on the world stage, NATO members were even more keen to move in lockstep with the US. But it wasn’t just about keeping up with the US. It was also about moderating the US, about making sure the US didn’t go it alone and move too far outside the circle of common interests with its allies. As Norwegian foreign policy scholar [00:13:00] Asle Toje told me, it didn’t take long for NATO allies to set constraints on US action in Afghanistan:
Asle Toje: “The Afghan conflict started off as a coalition of the willing, where it was quite clear that the Americans wanted to call the shots and they wanted to tell other countries what to do, when to do it and where to do it. And after some initial back and forth, we started to get the problem of the caveats. [00:13:30] You've got European countries with their parliaments stepping in and saying well, we can deploy our troops in this way but not in that way, our fire drills, our rules of engagement will be different from those of the United States, we'll do this or we won't do that.”
DeClue: Was it a stretch for NATO to intervene as far afield as Afghanistan?
Leong: Well, in the 1990s, NATO had authorized action in the Balkans, the first formal war involving the alliance. [00:14:00] In brief, this followed the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the conflict sparked by Serbia’s aggression. A quarter of a million people had been displaced and thousands of homes destroyed. Ground troops went into Kosovo in 1999, which NATO justified as a response to the humanitarian disaster. Notably, the US did not agree to send troops in that war – we participated in air strikes instead. In any case, Kosovo at least lay on the edge of Europe. [00:14:30] So you’re right to ask whether Afghanistan represented a stretch. I think one way to understand NATO motivation at that time was, in addition to keeping the US inside the tent, so to speak, involvement in Afghanistan gave NATO a renewed sense of mission. At the end of the Cold War, NATO struggled to articulate a purpose, a reason for being. Kosovo represented its first so-called “out-of-area” operation and really [00:15:00] hadn’t gone too well. It revealed decision making problems and political divisions within NATO. So Afghanistan offered something of a do-over. From a strategic perspective, Afghanistan also provided the opportunity for acting on a so-called Strategic Concept that NATO had developed in 1999, which endorsed the alliance projecting power outside of Europe. This reconceived [00:15:30] the purpose of NATO’s military posture beyond its Cold War rationale. Maybe you could say in simple language that it was a security alliance looking for new objectives. And compared to Kosovo, Afghanistan proved politically much easier for governments to sign on to, given the immense goodwill that the US had after 9/11.
DeClue: So what happened then when the Bush Administration turned its attention [00:16:00] to Iraq? Was the goodwill still there?
Leong: No, by the time the US turned to Iraq, the feelings towards the US were quite, quite different. Iraq proved a major stress test for NATO at many levels. Even ISAF in Afghanistan ran into political roadblocks and operational difficulties – and that was a UN mission with a great deal of consensus.
DeClue: Let’s hold back a little bit on that because we’re planning another [00:16:30] podcast episode to talk more about NATO operations in Afghanistan.
Leong: Right! So Iraq. The Bush administration turned its attention to Iraq in January 2002, during his State of the Union address.
George Bush: “Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror. The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax and nerve gas and nuclear weapons for over a decade. This is a regime that has already [00:17:00] used poison gas to murder thousands of its own citizens, leaving the bodies of mothers huddled over their dead children. This is a regime that agreed to international inspections then kicked out the inspectors. This is a regime that has something to hide from the civilized world. States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace [00:17:30] of the world.”
DeClue: How did NATO allies react to the speech?
Leong: This speech – especially the idea of the axis of evil – proved highly divisive. The view of most NATO allies was, look, we are still stabilizing the situation in Afghanistan. Osama bin Ladin remained at large. The Taliban government had been overthrown, but the new government under Hamid Karzai – still extremely weak. The job wasn’t [00:18:00] done. Why are we talking about Iraq, which to many seemed like it had nothing to do with 9/11?
DeClue: Some of our listeners probably remember that tense period. So how did the United States link Iraq to 9/11?
Leong: Some attempt was made to suggest Saddam Hussein hosted the 9/11 attackers at some point, but the main argument concerned the Iraqi leader secretly building weapons of mass destruction. The Global War on Terror, which now encompassed Iraq as well, [00:18:30] became an umbrella term for much more than what our allies signed off on in 2001. The use of the quote “War on Terror” unquote to justify action against Iraq began to alienate our allies. France and Germany took the lead in resisting the drumbeat for war. I won’t rehash the extended and angry debates that took place at the United Nations at that time. All of that is well- documented and, as you say, [00:19:00] many of our listeners will remember the events. France and Germany absolutely rejected the efforts of the US, led by Secretary of State Colin Powell, to make a case for attacking Iraq.
DeClue: So this made for a low point in US alliances with traditional European allies?
Leong: Yes, it did – and a very low point at that. It didn’t help that American messaging became more and more confused, at least as seen or heard in Europe. According to journalist [00:19:30] Kristoffer Egeberg, the Bush administration was selling the war to the American public. At the same time, it seemed to be telling allies that it didn’t really want war but Iraq was forcing its hand. Here’s what as Kristoffer Egeberg said:
Egeberg: “I told you, the aftermath of 9/11, this kind of trying to speak one voice to the public and one voice internationally and one voice to the foreign policy, not being in war, being in war. This whole [00:20:00] kind of split and different ways of explaining the world we're in to different publics. Someone would call it two-faced or even three or four-faced, someone would call it diplomacy, someone would call it, I mean a very hard balance to make.”
DeClue: So France and Germany came out strongly against the US – how did this situation put smaller allies like Norway between a rock and a hard place? What did smaller countries [00:20:30] like Norway do?
Leong: Smaller allies in NATO went different ways. A few like the Netherlands and Denmark stuck with the US and joined the Coalition of the Willing that eventually invaded Iraq. Others stood with France and Germany and strongly condemned what they called a flagrant violation of sovereignty. A mix of foreign policy and domestic reasons explained the choice in each case. For Norway, the decision was not to participate in the invasion [00:21:00] of Iraq. It tested the Norwegian government at the time. It was a coalition government that included political parties pulling in different directions about what to do. And once leaders made the difficult decision not to participate in the Iraq invasion, they felt great apprehension about possible fallout for US- Norway relations. In fact, all this came together in one big moment when President Bush called Norway’s prime minister on the phone and asked point blank [00:21:30] if Norway would send troops.
DeClue: That sounds like a dramatic moment in international diplomacy. I’m looking forward to diving into the details of that event in our next episode. We started our conversation today discussing the immense unity that Europeans felt with the United States right after 9/11. Now we’re pausing at the point where dependable allies in Europe were chafing at US efforts to broaden the War on Terror.
In the next episode, we will discuss how NATO faced a strategic dilemma and how Norway’s leaders used close personal [00:22:00] relations with senior members of the Bush
administration in its diplomatic efforts. Thank you for listening and please join us again in our next episode.
Brian Franklin: That’s it for “9/11 and Its Aftermath” – Episode 1 of our first season of Firsthand History. Thank you to Dr. LaiYee Leong, our project leader for the oral history collection this podcast is based on, “Transatlantic Diplomacy after 9/11: The U.S. and Norway.” [00:22:30] And thank you to Polina DeClue and Wardah Alvi, both former research assistants with the Center for Presidential History. Season 1 of Firsthand History, “Cross Currents,” is a production of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University. Our thanks to the Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences for their support. Thank you to Pro Podcast Solutions, who helped edit and produce this episode. Theme music—entitled “Endless Story”— was written by Nick Petrov, [00:23:00] and licensed through PremiumBeat. For more information on this podcast, and the oral histories it is based on, visit our website at www.smu.edu/cph. Stay tuned for the next episode of Season 1, “Cross Currents,” as we assess the diplomatic and security dilemmas Norway found themselves in when they questioned and resisted the U.S. call to join the coalition of military forces in Iraq. [00:23:30] Thanks for listening, and we look forward to bringing you more episodes very soon!
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