As recently as January 2019, Norway signed a Bilateral Maritime Arrangement with the United States. According to an official release by the Kingdom, the arrangement that “advances maritime threat response collaboration between the two nations.” The arrangement has far reaching applications and may indicate a critical pivot for the Norwegian nation on the international stage.

The move is pivotal as Norwegian intelligence levied incendiary threats of spying against Chinese mobile technology manufacturer Huawei . This coming on the heels of Canada’s arrest of Huawei CFO, Meng Wangzhou in December of 2018 and legal charges by the U.S. Government against the technology giant. Huawei, which is on target to be the first 5G manufacture has also gotten push back from New Zealand, Australia, Japan, Taiwan; with the possibility of German, the EU and the UK joining the fray.

While obvious changes give clues to geopolitical alliances and dominance theories, internal changes may not be as clear. In the past few weeks of the new year, Norway has made a number of major shifts in ministerial secretaries, appointments and political advisers. Such mechanization are of vital interest as it appears there may be an impending economic, political or other standoff brewing between Western states and BRICS nations. We are left to reflect on how such posturing affect the global economy or formulate the coming new world order.

According the official release by the Noway government, “The innovative Arrangement between the national level operations and coordination centers of the United States and Norway will improve the response to maritime terrorism, piracy, drug and human trafficking, maritime cyber attacks, public health threats, marine pollution, and related wide ranging Arctic challenges the release stated.