Given that the company says its mission is to create less harmful tobacco products, Mr. Hildingsson conceded that it was a “fair question” whether it was hypocritical to sell cigars and also distribute cigarettes for other companies in Sweden.

Mr. Roerty’s opinion is that cigars are different from cigarettes because they “are not inhaled” — and besides, he said, the cigar business is needed to subsidize the snus effort, “which is currently losing tens of millions of dollars in the U.S.” He added: “We use them at political fund-raisers. Members of Congress and the senators smoke cigars, the same ones who say they hate tobacco.”

The American snus retail business is puny — perhaps $200 million for the overall category, versus $90 billion for cigarettes. Swedish Match had total sales of snus and snuff of about $700 million in 2013, with more than two-thirds in Scandinavia and most of the rest in the United States.

Invoking these sorts of business realities — putting profits first while saying they have the public interest in mind — might make these executives sound little different from those at tobacco companies whose products they say they want to make obsolete.

But Mr. Abrams, from the Legacy Foundation, says Swedish Match is a different kind of tobacco company, one that stopped making cigarettes and works to limit nitrosamines. “They actually decided to stop selling a lethal product so they wouldn’t have a conflict,” he said. “That’s really something to be said.”

Still, Mr. Hildingsson sees a world arrayed against the idea that nicotine addiction should be accommodated.

“The most preventable disease we have in the world is tobacco, perhaps besides sugar,” he said, “and imagine that you had the answer and there are so many people who, for political reasons, are proactively working against it.”

“We’re coming to a point where regulators and politicians need to adjust,” he added. “Nicotine will never go away.”