Norway, pick up the phone is urgent

Norway just got a reality check from Brussels, and it is time we stopped playing the victim.

The EU has officially slapped safeguard measures on Norwegian ferroalloys. The diplomatic narrative in Oslo is that we are being unfairly treated by a protectionist partner. We are acting like the heartbroken lover who doesn’t understand why they were locked out of the house. But if you look at the economic reality, this isn’t a romance gone wrong. It is a receipt for a bill we have been dodging for three years.

Let’s be brutally honest about why this is happening. It is not because the EU hates Norway; it is because we are currently out-competing them to death. Our ferroalloy industry runs on legacy hydropower that costs pennies. Their industry runs on a continental grid that was broken by the energy crisis. We are selling solid electricity in the form of metal, undercutting Spanish and Slovakian factories that are literally bleeding out. In a free market, they die and we win. But the EU has decided that security matters more than efficiency, so they are changing the rules to keep their industrial heart beating.

We call this "unfair," yet we are simultaneously playing a ruthless game of resource hoarding with our electricity. We have explicitly cancelled new cables like NorthConnect because we are terrified of "importing" European prices. We are sitting on a surplus of green energy in the North, refusing to pipe it south to our allies, because we want to force German and French companies to move their factories to Narvik instead. That is not "cooperation." That is a strategic hostile takeover of European industry using geography as a weapon.

And then there is the money. We cannot ignore the optics of the last three years. While Europe faced recession, inflation, and de-industrialization due to the war, Norway raked in over 1.5 trillion NOK in excess profits from gas. We became the war profiteers of the continent—saving Europe with gas volumes, yes, but bleeding them dry on price. We acted like the friend who sells you water at a premium while your house is on fire, and then wonders why you don’t want to buy our steel duty-free the next day.

The lesson here is not that the EU is mean. The lesson is that Norway has Main Character Syndrome. We want to be the shrewd capitalist selling gas at crisis prices, the protectionist neighbor hoarding cheap electricity, and the beloved humanitarian partner all at the same time. The ferroalloy tariffs are the EU’s way of telling us that we can’t have it all. We are winning the economic game, but we have lost the right to complain when the other players start closing the doors.