When the King visited Greenland in April\u2014looking jaunty and at ease while cruising on a fjord with the Prime Minister, and taking a coffee-and-cake break with locals at a cultural center in Nuuk\u2014the contrast with Vance\u2019s gloomy trip couldn\u2019t have been starker. Shortly before the royal visit, the King had issued an updated coat of arms for the Kingdom of Denmark in which the symbols for Greenland and the Faroe Islands, the other Danish territory, take up more space. In the new flag, it\u2019s easier to see that Greenland\u2019s polar bear is roaring.<\/p>\n
Denmark recently pledged to give Greenlanders an additional quarter of a billion dollars in health-care and infrastructure investments. Trump\u2019s nakedly imperialistic rhetoric has also prompted Danish leaders to look more honestly at their own role as a colonial power. In August, for example, Frederiksen issued an official apology for a program, started in the nineteen-sixties and continued for decades, in which Danish doctors fitted thousands of Indigenous Greenlandic women and girls with intrauterine birth-control devices, often without their consent or full knowledge.<\/p>\n
Such reckonings are overdue. In 2021, Anne Kirstine Hermann, a Danish journalist, published a pioneering book, \u201cChildren of the Empire,\u201d in which she chronicled how little say Greenlanders had in Denmark\u2019s decision to incorporate the former colony into its kingdom, rather than granting it independence. Hermann told me, \u201cDanes aren\u2019t used to being the villain\u2014we\u2019re do-gooders. But Greenland has a whole different experience.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pernille Benjaminsen, a human-rights lawyer in Nuuk, said that Danes have always compared themselves, favorably, \u201cto what happened in North America\u2014putting Indigenous people in reservations, killing them.\u201d But, she noted, \u201ca lot of bad things also happened in Greenland\u2014we had segregation between white Danish and Greenlandic people, we had eras when we were asked to leave stores when Danish people wanted to enter.\u201d She added, \u201cWe need to kill the narrative that there can be a \u2018good\u2019 colonizer.\u201d<\/p>\n
Benjaminsen credited Prime Minister Frederiksen for being more forthright about the colonial past. Around the time that Trump returned to office, Frederiksen posted online that Danes and Greenlanders \u201chave some dark chapters in our history together, which we, from the Danish side, must confront.\u201d<\/p>\n
Some people in Copenhagen told me that, for younger Danes, the Black Lives Matter movement in the U.S. had spurred soul-searching about their own country\u2019s racism toward Inuit Greenlanders. But Denmark\u2019s sudden attentiveness to Greenland was also an inadvertent gift from Trump. H\u00f8rlyck, the photographer, told me, \u201cHe has activated Danish people\u2019s connection to Greenland.\u201d Danes of his generation were asking themselves, in a way they hadn\u2019t before, \u201cWhat do I really know about Greenland? Have I really talked to Greenlanders?\u201d He went on, \u201cIt\u2019s quite funny that the strategy over there from Trump opens up something positive here.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s antagonism toward Greenland has also changed Danish views about European unity. In the past, Danes had been soft Euroskeptics. They joined the E.U. in the nineteen-seventies, but they kept their own currency, the krone, and in 1992 they voted against the Maastricht Treaty, which tightened European conformity regarding security, citizenship, and other matters. When Frederiksen recently called for more defense spending, she acknowledged, \u201cEuropean co\u00f6peration has never really been a favorite of many Danes.\u201d They\u2019d grumbled, she said, about everything from \u201ccrooked cucumbers and banning plastic straws\u201d to open immigration policies, which Frederiksen\u2019s government had rejected.<\/p>\n
Ole W\u00e6ver, a professor of international relations at the University of Copenhagen, told me that Danes have long had a \u201ckind of anti-E.U. sentiment, with a lot of the same arguments that you saw in Brexit\u2014\u2018Oh, it\u2019s big bureaucracy,\u2019 \u2018Brussels is far away,\u2019 \u2018It\u2019s taking away our democracy.\u2019\u00a0\u201d Such attitudes, W\u00e6ver said, had helped to make Denmark \u201cgo overboard\u201d in its allegiance to America. Elisabet Svane, a columnist for Politiken, told me, \u201cOur Prime Minister used to say, \u2018You cannot put a piece of paper between me and the U.S., I\u2019m so transatlantic.\u2019 She\u2019s still transatlantic, but I think you can put a little book in between now.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When the King visited Greenland in April\u2014looking jaunty and at ease while cruising on a fjord with the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":401005,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,193482,1766,3,28946,29995,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":["post-401004","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-letter-from-copenhagen","tag-magazine","tag-news","tag-onecolumnnarrow","tag-splitscreenimagerightfullbleed","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/401004","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=401004"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/401004\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/401005"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=401004"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=401004"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=401004"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}