COMMENT: The Oslo playbook returns to the Middle East

On May 12, the deputy foreign minister of Norway, Andreas Motzfeldt Kravik, sat across from Abbas Araghchi at the Iranian foreign ministry in Tehran. It was the first visit by a Western political delegation to the Iranian capital since the United States and Israel began their war on Iran on February 28. There were no joint statements, no photo opportunities staged for Western consumption, no ceremonies of arrival. Norway's foreign minister, Espen Barth Eide, confirmed the visit by email to the Norwegian news agency NTB, and stressed that Oslo "does not have a formal role in negotiations" but was "trying to contribute to solutions" where it could. The wording was the policy. Norway has done this before.

The week prior, Kravik had been in Islamabad and Muscat, the two regional capitals through which the Iranian and American sides have been triangulating since the war began. Norway, on the public account, is not a mediator. It does not propose terms. It does not represent the Americans, the Israelis, the Iranians or the Europeans. It listens, then reports back, then listens again. The technique is older than the country's North Sea wealth. It is the technique that produced the Oslo Accords of September 1993, the Sri Lankan peace process of the 2000s, the Colombia-FARC mediation, and the back-channels in Venezuela and Sudan of the past decade. The premise is that a small, energy-rich, treaty-bound NATO state without imperial baggage can act where larger powers cannot.

What is striking about the present round is that no one else is doing it. The European Union, on its current trajectory, has effectively ceded Middle Eastern diplomacy to bilateral national initiatives. The United Kingdom and France have positioned warships, sent minesweepers to the Red Sea, and signalled support for the American line, but neither has sent a senior official to Tehran. Spain has been preoccupied with its Gaza embargo. Germany is paralysed by its own coalition arithmetic. The Gulf monarchies, having been targeted by Iranian missile strikes on US bases in Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE, are in no position to mediate. The Chinese, on the evidence of the Trump-Xi summit of May 14-15, are unwilling to spend political capital. The Russians are belligerents in their own war. That leaves Norway.

The substance Kravik carried into Tehran was subtle and also direct. He told Araghchi that Iran's actions in the Strait of Hormuz were "completely unacceptable," that the strait must be reopened, and that Tehran's claim to charge tolls or restrict transit was incompatible with the law of the sea. Roughly 25 Norwegian-flagged or Norwegian-operated vessels are among the ships currently stranded in the strait, on Eide's figures.

The closure since February has driven Brent crude above $100 a barrel and European natural gas prices up by more than 80%. Norway, as the largest single supplier of pipeline gas to the European Union, accounting for roughly 30% of EU gas imports, has been the principal Western beneficiary of the disruption and the rest of Europe is well aware of that. Its sovereign wealth fund, already the largest in the world, has expanded its hydrocarbon receipts at a pace not seen since the 2022 shock. The country's interest in a reopened strait is therefore not abstract. Oslo wants the war ended, and it wants its ships out.

What Kravik brought back was less encouraging and does not bode well for Trump's attempt to impress in Beijing. Iran, on his account to Norwegian broadcaster NRK, "will not retreat." Araghchi told him that the "excessive approach and threatening and provocative rhetoric of the American side, and the lack of goodwill and dishonesty of the US," remained the principal obstacles. Iran's chief negotiator, parliamentary speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, has stated there is no alternative to the offer Donald Trump described as "garbage" and refused to finish reading. American intelligence assessments leaked to The New York Times indicate that the majority of Iranian missile launchers and ballistic stocks survived the opening phase of the war. The arithmetic of military pressure has produced diminishing returns. The corridor for a negotiated settlement, however narrow, is now the only one with traffic in it.

There is a domestic dimension that should not be ignored. Norway's Labour government, led by Jonas Gahr Støre, has spent the past year under sustained pressure from civic organisations over what they characterise as Norwegian complicity in American and Israeli operations. The principal complaint is that Norway, unlike Switzerland, has declined to suspend arms exports to the United States despite the 1959 Storting resolution prohibiting exports to states at war. Switzerland froze its US licences in March citing neutrality. Norway has not. The foreign ministry's justification, articulated by state secretary Eivind Vad Petterson, is that exports to NATO allies "are based on long-term foreign policy and security cooperation." The Tehran visit lets the government demonstrate to a sceptical domestic audience that Oslo is not a silent partner to American policy. Doing the diplomacy is, in part, what enables Norway to keep doing the arms exports.

The energy calculus is more ambivalent. Støre, in an interview with Aftenposten, warned Norwegians that the war's consequences would persist for "an extended period" and that the country must be prepared to live with them. The honest reading is that those consequences are a windfall. Norwegian gas is being sold into a European market that lost its Middle Eastern alternatives the day the strait closed. The European Commission's gas purchasing programme has rerouted demand toward the North Sea. Norwegian LNG cargoes that would, in peacetime, have competed with Qatari and Iranian supplies now have effectively no peer. A peace settlement that reopens the strait would compress Norwegian margins by an order of magnitude. The country is therefore in the unusual position of running a peace mediation whose success would cost it money.

That contradiction does not invalidate the effort. It frames it. Norway is not Switzerland; it is a country whose strategic interests run through the Atlantic alliance, whose hydrocarbon revenues run through the European energy market, and whose civic conscience runs through Labour Party constituency politics. The Tehran visit is a way of holding all three together. It also reflects a deeper Norwegian wager, articulated through every back-channel since 1993, that small states with the right combination of confidentiality, modest stakes and patient diplomats can move negotiations that the great powers have lost the credibility to conduct.

The wager is not always rewarded. The Oslo Accords delivered a handshake on the White House lawn in 1993 and a generation of disappointment thereafter. The Sri Lankan process collapsed. The Colombian one produced a settlement only after twenty years. There is no guarantee the Iranian one will produce anything at all. Kravik returned from Tehran with the assessment that the Iranians are not bluffing when they say they are ready for a longer war if Washington wants one. That is not an outcome. It is a clarification, and clarifications, in this kind of diplomacy, are the unit of progress.

The wider lesson is what the Norwegian visit reveals about the rest of the Western alliance. There is, as of May 13, no other NATO capital with a senior official in Iran. The European foreign policy machinery, the British, the French, the German, the Polish, the Italian, has produced declarations and warship movements but not diplomats with mandate. The Trump administration has chosen to handle the war through Steve Witkoff, a real estate agent not a diplomat. Beijing has chosen not to spend capital with Trump. Moscow is a combatant in the background. Doha has been bombed. Riyadh and Abu Dhabi are too exposed, and the latter is currently having a deeply embarrassing spat with Israel about whether Netanyahu and other senior officials secretly visited. The Israeli PM and officials say they did. The diplomatic field has narrowed to a country of five million people (not Israel) with a long memory and a penchant for back channels