The Vikings Are Back

I Left the U.S. Because It Changed. Now Sweden’s Changing, Too

You mess with NATO’s Eastern Flank, you’re messing with me.

I’ve been out of commission for a long while. Hobbled by pain and brain fog from a frozen shoulder, my days have passed with the same fumbling sense of timelessness as in life with a newborn. It was daylight and then dark and then light again. I did whatever I had to do, but otherwise, I mostly dozed. As Robert Penn Warren put it in All the King’s Men, “Sometimes sleep gets to be a serious and complete thing. You stop going to sleep in order that you may be able to get up, but get up in order that you may be able to go back to sleep.”

That’s all winding down now but time stops for no one and I’ve woken up to a changed world. The U.S., my native land, staggers, kneecapped by a mad king. Its hands are dripping with 250 years of blood. And my adopted country, peaceful, neutral, egalitarian Sweden? My new country is suddenly acting a lot like my old one, only in a good way. Very quietly, very quickly, Sweden has become bad ass.

The uncanny thing is that Sweden is reacting to the same appalling shift in the U.S. that I did when I made the decision to leave in 2019. America mauled me and now, in its frantic death spiral, it’s mauling virtually everyone on earth and the sweet haven to which I fled is baring its teeth. This feels like that same bizarre conflation of public and private that I experienced on 9/11, when the whole world knew about my bad day at work. I stood at the window at my office, across Liberty Street from the towers, and watched people dying, the whole world watching with me.

You can run away from America, but you can’t really hide, not anymore. I thought I could. Solving your problems by running away isn’t supposed to work, of course. It doesn’t work because, alas, wherever you go, there you are. But for me, at first, it did work. My relief was intoxicating. Sweden was my salvation. I could have clean water, fresh air, good food and a government that centered its people. My children could have those things. For a long time, I looked at my new country with stars in my eyes. But then the shit that I fled burst its container and flooded the planet.

You know you’re in a time of sweeping geopolitical reconfiguration when countries start changing character. I realized this in May, when Canada announced it would explore a deal to buy a fleet of Saab’s GlobalEye early warning aircraft. This was big news here. It decisively established the new Sweden, a global player in defense. It also cemented Canada’s new policy of pivoting away from American military capabilities (Canada dissed the U.S. by rejecting a competing model from Boeing). Then, the next day, Sweden said that it would sell 20 Gripen fighter jets to Ukraine and also donate 16 more jets from its own Armed Forces fleet. It was around then that I realized this transformation had actually been going on for while.

It started small scale. It started with the eggs.

Not long after the inauguration, Washington started trawling Europe for eggs, badgering the self-same countries they were hitting with punishing tariffs. Radio Sweden interviewed several Swedish egg producers about whether they’d be helping the U.S. out. The answer? Nej.

“We have a lot of people who are disappointed with the U.S. and its politics. Reading about this shortage of eggs in the U.S., consumers have contacted us saying they would not approve if our company did export eggs there,” said one. Furthermore, any “export adventure” of Swedish eggs to the U.S. would likely involve tariffs, so that would be a double nej. “I’m sorry about that, but that’s the way it is,” said Håkan Burlin, CEO of Stjärnägg. In Swedish, this translates as, “Get bent.”

OK, it didn’t really start with the eggs. It really started with Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, in what would become the biggest and deadliest war in Europe since WWII. That landed hard. Sweden and Russia don’t share a border proper, just a tiny, five-mile maritime boundary off Kaliningrad. But Russia does live in the neighborhood. So Sweden did something startling, something that Americans haven’t seen their own government do for over a quarter of a century: They responded.

Many Americans are too young to remember what that feels like. It’s that thing that didn’t happen on 9/11 or Katrina or Sandy Hook or January 6. We didn’t know it at the time, but as a political experiment and as a country, we were already dead in the water. That unsettling silence was the proof of the institutional rot that would be our undoing.

For Sweden, Ukraine was a wake-up call. Stockholm started moving like a country that has decided its industrial base, its energy base and its defense base are all part of the same strategic map. Despite its policy of neutrality since the Napoleonic Wars, Sweden joined NATO. It decided to embrace nuclear power because, as Shankar Narayan of The Concis put it, “Power is now part of national security. More power means less dependence on fossil fuels. Less dependence on fossil fuels means less need to deal with autocrats who use energy as leverage.” In June, the Swedish utility Vattenfall announced a deal with Rolls-Royce SMR for three nuclear reactors (and, in so doing, dissed U.S. rival GE Vernova).

Once my eyes were open, I saw that Sweden was doing things it wouldn’t have done before. For instance, doing its bit for the Sell America trade, a leading Swedish pension fund dumped a shit ton of T-bills, some $8.8 billion. The fund cited the unpredictability of the current administration, swelling budget deficits and growing U.S. debt. In Swedish, this rationale translates as, “Fuck you very much.” And in May, Sweden’s Coast Guard boarded and detained a Russia-facing shadow fleet tanker in the Baltic, part of a burgeoning campaign to stymie a vast fleet of tankers evading Western sanctions. Totally bad ass, all of it.

Maybe Sweden’s been asleep, too, but now we’re all awake. Political culture has changed quickly in this part of the world before. Sweden was a quiet, peaceful agrarian nation until the first astonished Viking found the first unlocked church door in Lindisfarne in 793 AD. There began the Viking Age.

I never really bought Sweden as the pacifist, matriarchal paradise. I feel a live undercurrent. And there’s something about Swedish men that tells me different. Maybe they’ve been waiting. There’s something about them that tells me they’re ready for whatever’s coming next.