The biennial Exercise Joint Viking, which ended on March 14, is the largest military drill in Norway and the alliance’s most important recurring Arctic war game. Without it, operational cooperation will waste and NATO armies will be less prepared to repel a Russian attack.
Will there be another in 2027? And if there is, will US forces join the 10,000-strong drill? Even as Joint Viking was underway, the US military denied reports it planned to pull out of all NATO exercises from this year. Other reports that the US planned to renounce its 75-year role as Supreme allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) and that as many as 35,000 US troops will be pulled out of Germany (possibly to authoritarian Hungary), have also circulated.
This year, Joint Viking involved personnel from nine different nations — including Norway, the US, Canada, the UK and the Netherlands — from armies, navies, air forces, and the US Marine Corps.
Major General Gjert Lage Dyndal, the Norwegian officer in charge, was pleased with the outcome. “The exercise went very well,” he told me. “It’s extremely important for us to have exercises in Norway — not just the exercises themselves, but also the preparation. And it’s important for Norway and NATO to know that we have troops able and ready to fight in harsh Arctic conditions. That helps deterrence, and it also helps us enhance our interoperability.”
These dual goals are precisely why armed forces exercise. The drills help armed forces perfect their trade, and at the same time allow them to demonstrate their abilities with the hope that doing so will convince adversaries not to attack. And with Joint Viking, held in Norway’s far north, Dyndal said, “we also show that the alliance is able to operate under Arctic conditions. This is about NATO in the High North.”
Rarely has Joint Viking been more important. Russia seems emboldened in Ukraine, while NATO is struggling to bridge internal divisions. “The Russians monitored the exercise as they normally do, but it went according to plan,” Dyndal said. And then there’s climate change, which is more serious in the Arctic than other parts of NATO’s territory, and makes fighting there even more difficult.
“This year we saw rainy weather one day and heavy snowfall the other, interchanged with sunny weather, and the constant shifts are very challenging for the forces,” Dyndal said. “In some areas there was so little snow that our vehicles damaged the ground.” This being Norway, the armed forces worked with locals to repair the damage.
The priceless lessons of Joint Viking and other allied drills would be lost if the United States were to pull out and European forces lacked the will to continue them. Smaller countries exposed to Russian bullying would feel less safe, and extremist parties would make louder arguments for a deal with the Kremlin.
Norway and other European countries are preparing for precisely such a scenario. “Europe’s biggest military powers are drawing up plans to take on greater responsibilities for the continent’s defense from the US, including a pitch to the Trump administration for a managed transfer over the next five to 10 years,” the Financial Times reported on March 20.
“The UK, France, Germany and the Nordics are among the countries engaged in the informal but structured discussions, according to four European officials involved. Their aim is to come up with a plan to shift the financial and military burden to European capitals and present it to the US ahead of Nato’s annual leaders’ summit in The Hague in June,” the newspaper said.
Joint Viking 2025 may indeed have portended US forces’ (hopefully) temporary farewell to exercises with their European colleagues. If that is the case, they will be intensely missed. But during Joint Viking, they showed that the value of an effective military alliance is beyond priceless. Europe’s armies must continue to work together, with or without the US.
Elisabeth Braw is a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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