Haltbakk Bunkers didn’t mince words. The Norwegian company, which supplies fuel to ships, including US Navy vessels, was so upset by the treatment Volodymyr Zelenskyy received in the Oval Office on February 28 that it announced a boycott of the US military.
Of course, the US military has no role in Donald Trump’s and JD Vance’s on-camera attack on Zelenskyy, and likewise, the vast majority of US businesses similarly play no role in enabling Trump’s and Vance’s treatment of Ukraine. But angry citizens in other countries may decide otherwise.
“We have today been witnesses to the biggest shitshow ever presented ‘live on tv’ by the current American president and his vice president,” the Norwegian company said in a Facebook post on March 1. “Huge credit to the president of Ukraine restraining himself and for keeping calm even though USA put on a backstabbing tv show. It made us sick. Short and sweet. As a result, we have decided to immediate STOP as fuel provider to American forces in Norway and their ships calling Norwegian ports. ‘No Fuel to Americans!’. We encourage all Norwegians and Europeans to follow our example. SLAVA UKRAINA.”
Bunkering companies are the floating gas stations that supply ships. Haltbakk may not be a household name, but without its services and those of rivals, there are no ocean journeys.
The post was widely picked up by media, forcing the Norwegian government to say that US naval vessels would continue to receive port services, while Haltbakk clarified that it only occasionally serves US Navy ships. Its statement may have been largely performative — but it may be an indication of what comes next in Europe-US relations.
Haltbakk has a history of taking positions. After Russia invaded Ukraine, the company stopped fueling Russian ships calling Norwegian ports. As a privately owned company, it had the luxury of being able to take a moral stand and refuse certain customers, its owner, Gunnar Gran, explained. Many other companies took similar decisions, while others stopped taking Russian government contracts.
Countless Western consumers launched hashtag boycotts against Western companies still doing business in Russia after the all-out invasion of Ukraine three years ago. Often, their research was imperfect: they targeted companies that were planning to exit the country while missing many that had made no such plans. But what mattered was that they tried to support Ukraine by using the tool available to them: their power as consumers. Using the tools offered by the globalized economy is, in fact, a rare opportunity for businesses and ordinary citizens to voice protest against foreign governments.
Nobody — nobody — would have thought that Western businesses or consumers would use such tools against America. The United States is, after all, the leader of the free world. Or was: its vote with Russia, against Ukraine, at the United Nations last month, combined with Trump’s and Vance’s verbal attack on Zelenskyy, along with Trump’s denunciation of Zelenskyy as a dictator and a refusal to use similar language about the Russian despot, suggests to many that America is no longer an instinctive member of what we term the West.
The Norwegian bunkering firm won’t be the last to draw this conclusion. Indeed, the administration’s hostile engagement with Canada very quickly resulted in new apps allowing citizens to identify those products with a US link to aid a boycott. Social media and smartphone technology put much more power into the hands of motivated consumers.
Companies would be wise to prepare for such protests, and so should the US military, which is present around the world and, as a result, vulnerable to protests. It’s a tragedy that matters should reach this point: a tragedy for Ukraine, for the United States, and for the rest of the world.
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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