What did Donald Trump say over the phone to Mette Frederiksen, the Danish prime minister, on Wednesday? I don’t know which precise words he used, but I witnessed their impact. I arrived in Copenhagen the day after the call—the subject, of course, was the future of Greenland, which Denmark owns and which Trump wants—and discovered that appointments I had with Danish politicians were suddenly in danger of being canceled. Amid Frederiksen’s emergency meeting with business leaders, her foreign minister’s emergency meeting with party leaders, and an additional emergency meeting of the foreign-affairs committee in Parliament, everything, all of a sudden, was in complete flux.
The result: Mid-morning, I found myself standing on the Knippel Bridge between the Danish foreign ministry and the Danish Parliament, holding a phone, waiting to be told which direction to walk. Denmark in January is not warm; I went to the Parliament and waited there. The meeting was canceled anyway. After that, nobody wanted to say anything on the record at all. Thus have Americans who voted for Trump because of the putatively high price of eggs now precipitated a political crisis in Scandinavia.
In private discussions, the adjective that was most frequently used to describe the Trump phone call was rough. The verb most frequently used was threaten. The reaction most frequently expressed was confusion. Trump made it clear to Frederiksen that he is serious about Greenland: He sees it, apparently, as a real-estate deal. But Greenland is not a beachfront property. The world’s largest island is an autonomous territory of Denmark, inhabited by people who are Danish citizens, vote in Danish elections, and have representatives in the Danish Parliament. Denmark also has politics, and a Danish prime minister cannot sell Greenland any more than an American president can sell Florida.
At the same time, Denmark is also a country whose global companies—among them Lego, the shipping giant Maersk, and Novo Nordisk, the maker of Ozempic—do billions of dollars worth of trade with the United States, and have major American investments too. They thought these were positive aspects of the Danish-American relationship. Denmark and the United States are also founding members of NATO, and Danish leaders would be forgiven for believing that this matters in Washington too. Instead, these links turn out to be a vulnerability. On Thursday afternoon Frederiksen emerged and, flanked by her foreign minister and her defense minister, made a statement. “It has been suggested from the American side,” she said, “that unfortunately a situation may arise where we work less together than we do today in the economic area.”
Still, the most difficult aspect of the crisis is not the need to prepare for an unspecified economic threat from a close ally, but the need to cope with a sudden sense of almost Kafkaesque absurdity. In truth, Trump’s demands are illogical. Anything that the U.S. theoretically might want to do in Greenland is already possible, right now. Denmark has never stopped the U.S. military from building bases, searching for minerals, or stationing troops in Greenland, or from patrolling sea lanes nearby. In the past, the Danes have even let Americans defy Danish policy in Greenland. Over lunch, one former Danish diplomat told me a Cold War story, which unfolded not long after Denmark had formally declared itself to be a nuclear-free country. In 1957, the U.S. ambassador nevertheless approached Denmark’s then–prime minister, H. C. Hansen, with a request. The United States was interested in storing some nuclear weapons at an American base in Greenland. Would Denmark like to be notified?
Hansen responded with a cryptic note, which he characterized, according to diplomatic records, as “informal, personal, highly secret and limited to one copy each on the Danish and American side.” In the note, which was not shared with the Danish Parliament or the Danish press, and indeed was not made public at all until the 1990s, Hansen said that since the U.S. ambassador had not mentioned specific plans or made a concrete request, “I do not think your remarks give rise to any comment from my side.” In other words, If you don’t tell us that you are keeping nuclear weapons in Greenland, then we won’t have to object.
The Danes were loyal U.S. allies then, and remain so now. During the Cold War, they were central to NATO’s planning. After the Soviet Union dissolved, they reformed their military, creating expeditionary forces specifically meant to be useful to their American allies. After 9/11, when the mutual-defense provision of the NATO treaty was activated for the first time—on behalf of the U.S.—Denmark sent troops to Afghanistan, where 43 Danish soldiers died. As a proportion of their population, then about 5 million, this is a higher mortality rate than the U.S. suffered. The Danes also sent troops to Iraq, and joined NATO teams in the Balkans. They thought they were part of the web of relationships that have made American power and influence over the past half century so unique. Because U.S. alliances were based on shared values, not merely transactional interests, the level of cooperation was different. Denmark helped the U.S., when asked, or volunteered without being asked. “So what did we do wrong?” one Danish official asked me.
Obviously, they did nothing wrong—but that’s part of the crisis too. Trump himself cannot articulate, either at press conferences or, apparently, over the telephone, why exactly he needs to own Greenland, or how Denmark can give American companies and soldiers more access to Greenland than they already have. Plenty of others will try to rationalize his statements anyway. The Economist has declared the existence of a “Trump doctrine,” and a million articles have solemnly debated Greenland’s strategic importance. But in Copenhagen (and not only in Copenhagen) people suspect a far more irrational explanation: Trump just wants the U.S. to look larger on a map.
This instinct—to ignore existing borders, laws, and treaties; to treat other countries as artificial; to break up trade links and destroy friendships, all because the Leader wants to look powerful—is one that Trump shares with imperialists of the past. The Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, has also crowed over the alleged similarity between the U.S. desire for Greenland and the Russian desire for territory in Ukraine. Lavrov suggested a referendum might be held in Greenland, comparing that possibility to the fake referenda, held under duress, that Russia staged in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.
Of course, Trump might forget about Greenland. But also, he might not. Nobody knows. He operates on whims, sometimes picking up ideas from the last person he met, sometimes returning to obsessions he had apparently abandoned: windmills, sharks, Hannibal Lecter, and now Greenland. To Danes and pretty much anyone else who makes plans, signs treaties, or creates long-term strategies using rational arguments, this way of making policy feels arbitrary, pointless, even surreal. But it is also now permanent, and there is no going back.
