Denmark is struggling to stay calm in the crisis over Trump’s threat to seize Greenland

The gloomy January weather in Copenhagen matches the mood among Danish politicians and business leaders.

“We take this situation very, very seriously,” Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen said of Donald Trump’s threats to take over Greenland – and punish Denmark with high tariffs if it gets in the way.

But, he added, the government had “no ambitions to escalate a war with words”.

Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen played down Trump’s own suggestion that the US might use military force to seize Greenland. “I have no fantasy to imagine that it will ever come to that,” she told Danish TV.

And Lars Sandahl Sorensen, CEO of Danish Industry, also said there was “every reason to stay calm… nobody has an interest in a trade war.”

But behind the scenes, hastily arranged high-level meetings have been taking place in Copenhagen all week, reflecting the shock of Trump’s remarks.

Greenland Prime Minister Mute Egede flew in on Wednesday to meet with the Prime Minister and King Frederik X.

And on Thursday night, party leaders from across the political spectrum gathered for an emergency crisis meeting with Mette Frederiksen in the Danish parliament.

Faced with what many in Denmark are calling Trump’s “provocation”, Frederiksen has generally tried to strike a conciliatory tone, repeatedly calling the US “Denmark’s closest partner”.

It was “quite natural” that the US was preoccupied with the Arctic and Greenland, she added.

However, she also said that any decision about the future of Greenland should be solely up to its citizens: “Greenland belongs to the Greenlanders… and the Greenlanders themselves must define their future.”

Her cautious approach is twofold.

On the one hand, Frederiksen wants to avoid an escalation of the situation. She was burned before, in 2019, when Trump canceled a trip to Denmark after she said his proposal to buy Greenland was “absurd.”

“Then he only had one more year in office and then things went back to normal,” veteran political journalist Erik Holstein told the BBC. “But maybe this is the new normal.”

But Frederiksen’s comments also speak to Denmark’s determination not to interfere in the internal affairs of Greenland – an autonomous territory with its own parliament and whose population is increasingly leaning towards independence.

“She should have been much clearer in rejecting that idea,” said opposition MP Rasmus Jarlov.

“This level of disrespect from a future American president to very, very loyal allies and friends is a record,” he told the BBC, although he admitted that Trump’s violence “surprised everyone”.

The conservative MP believes that Frederiksen’s insistence that “only Greenland… can decide and define the future of Greenland” is putting too much pressure on the island’s inhabitants. “It would be wise and smart to stand behind Greenland and just say clearly that Denmark does not want to [a US takeover].”

The Greenland issue is a delicate one for Denmark, whose prime minister only recently formally apologized for leading a social experiment in the 1950s in which Inuit children were separated from their families to be re-educated as “model Danes”.

Last week, Greenland’s leader said the territory should be freed from the “shackles of colonialism”.

In doing so, he tapped into a growing nationalist sentiment, fueled by the interest of Greenland’s younger generations in indigenous Inuit culture and history.

Most commentators now expect a successful independence referendum in the near future. While this would be seen as a victory for many, it could also lead to new problems, as 60% of Greenland’s economy depends on Denmark.

An independent Greenland “should make decisions”, said Karsten Honge. The Social Democrat MP now fears his preferred option of a new Commonwealth-style pact “based on equality and democracy” is unlikely to materialise.

Sitting in his parliamentary office decorated with poems and drawings depicting scenes from Inuit life, Honge said Greenland would have to decide “how much it values ​​independence”. She could cut ties with Denmark and turn to the US, Honge said, “but if you value independence, then it doesn’t make sense.”

Opposition MP Jarlov claims that although it makes no sense to force Greenland to be part of Denmark, “it is already very close to an independent country”.

Its capital, Nuuk, is self-governing but relies on Copenhagen for currency management, foreign relations and defense – as well as significant subsidies.

“Greenland today has greater independence from the EU than Denmark,” Jarlov added. “So I hope they think it over.”

As Mette Frederiksen has the unpleasant task of responding decisively without offending Greenland or the US, the sharpest rebuttal to Trump’s comments so far has come from outside Denmark.

The principle of the inviolability of borders “applies to every country … whether it is very small or very powerful,” German Chancellor Olaf Scholz warned, while French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said the EU would not allow other nations ” are attacking its sovereign borders”.

Their comments reflected deep concerns within the EU about how to deal with Trump’s upcoming presidency. “This is not only very serious for Greenland and Denmark – it is serious for the whole world and Europe as a whole,” said MP Karsten Honge.

“Imagine a world – which we may be facing in just a few weeks – where international agreements do not exist. That would shake everything up, and Denmark would only be a small part of it.”

Denmark’s trade sector was similarly engulfed in deep nervousness after Trump said he would “impose very high tariffs on Denmark” if it refused to cede Greenland to the US.

A 2024 Danish industry study found that Denmark’s GDP would fall by three points if the US imposes 10% tariffs on EU imports into the US as part of a global trade war.

Extracting Danish products from the flow of goods from the EU would be nearly impossible for the US, and would almost certainly result in retaliatory measures from the EU. But experts in the trade industry are taking few risks, and in Denmark, as elsewhere on the continent, vast amounts of resources are being spent internally on planning the potential outcomes of Donald Trump’s second term in the White House.

As his inauguration approaches, the Danes are preparing to weather the storm. There is a hidden hope that the newly elected president may soon shift his focus to complaints against other EU partners, and that the Greenland issue may be temporarily shelved.

But the unease caused by Trump’s refusal to rule out military intervention to seize Greenland remains.

Karsten Honge said that Denmark would suffer whatever decision the US made.

“They just need to send a small battleship to travel up the coast of Greenland and send a polite letter to Denmark,” he said, only partly in jest.

“The last sentence would be: well, Denmark, what are you going to do about it?

“It’s a new reality in relation to Trump.”