Denmark Is Sick of Being Bullied by Trump

When the King visited Greenland in April—trying jaunty and comfortable whereas cruising on a fjord with the Prime Minister, and taking a coffee-and-cake break with locals at a cultural heart in Nuuk—the distinction with Vance’s gloomy journey couldn’t have been starker. Shortly earlier than the royal go to, the King had issued an up to date coat of arms for the Kingdom of Denmark during which the symbols for Greenland and the Faroe Islands, the opposite Danish territory, take up extra space. Within the new flag, it’s simpler to see that Greenland’s polar bear is roaring.

Denmark lately pledged to provide Greenlanders a further quarter of a billion {dollars} in health-care and infrastructure investments. Trump’s nakedly imperialistic rhetoric has additionally prompted Danish leaders to look extra actually at their very own function as a colonial energy. In August, for instance, Frederiksen issued an official apology for a program, began within the nineteen-sixties and continued for many years, during which Danish medical doctors fitted 1000’s of Indigenous Greenlandic girls and ladies with intrauterine birth-control gadgets, typically with out their consent or full data.

Such reckonings are overdue. In 2021, Anne Kirstine Hermann, a Danish journalist, revealed a pioneering guide, “Kids of the Empire,” during which she chronicled how little say Greenlanders had in Denmark’s determination to include the previous colony into its kingdom, reasonably than granting it independence. Hermann advised me, “Danes aren’t used to being the villain—we’re do-gooders. However Greenland has an entire completely different expertise.”

Pernille Benjaminsen, a human-rights lawyer in Nuuk, mentioned that Danes have at all times in contrast themselves, favorably, “to what occurred in North America—placing Indigenous individuals in reservations, killing them.” However, she famous, “plenty of unhealthy issues additionally occurred in Greenland—we had segregation between white Danish and Greenlandic individuals, we had eras after we have been requested to depart shops when Danish individuals needed to enter.” She added, “We have to kill the narrative that there generally is a ‘good’ colonizer.”

Benjaminsen credited Prime Minister Frederiksen for being extra forthright concerning the colonial previous. Across the time that Trump returned to workplace, Frederiksen posted on-line that Danes and Greenlanders “have some darkish chapters in our historical past collectively, which we, from the Danish aspect, should confront.”

Some individuals in Copenhagen advised me that, for youthful Danes, the Black Lives Matter motion within the U.S. had spurred soul-searching about their very own nation’s racism towards Inuit Greenlanders. However Denmark’s sudden attentiveness to Greenland was additionally an inadvertent present from Trump. Hørlyck, the photographer, advised me, “He has activated Danish individuals’s connection to Greenland.” Danes of his technology have been asking themselves, in a approach they hadn’t earlier than, “What do I actually learn about Greenland? Have I actually talked to Greenlanders?” He went on, “It’s fairly humorous that the technique over there from Trump opens up one thing optimistic right here.”

Trump’s antagonism towards Greenland has additionally modified Danish views about European unity. Previously, Danes had been gentle Euroskeptics. They joined the E.U. within the nineteen-seventies, however they saved their very own forex, the krone, and in 1992 they voted in opposition to the Maastricht Treaty, which tightened European conformity concerning safety, citizenship, and different issues. When Frederiksen lately known as for extra protection spending, she acknowledged, “European coöperation has by no means actually been a favourite of many Danes.” They’d grumbled, she mentioned, about every thing from “crooked cucumbers and banning plastic straws” to open immigration insurance policies, which Frederiksen’s authorities had rejected.

Ole Wæver, a professor of worldwide relations on the College of Copenhagen, advised me that Danes have lengthy had a “type of anti-E.U. sentiment, with plenty of the identical arguments that you simply noticed in Brexit—‘Oh, it’s large paperwork,’ ‘Brussels is way away,’ ‘It’s taking away our democracy.’ ” Such attitudes, Wæver mentioned, had helped to make Denmark “go overboard” in its allegiance to America. Elisabet Svane, a columnist for Politiken, advised me, “Our Prime Minister used to say, ‘You can’t put a bit of paper between me and the U.S., I’m so transatlantic.’ She’s nonetheless transatlantic, however I feel you may put a little bit guide in between now.”