Real Men Steal Countries: Inside Trump’s Absurd Greenland Obsession

The American crisis is domestic in nature, a crisis of confidence. The way we provide housing, education, and medicine is broken, while tax cuts have ensured we’re funding meager services through debt. Americans are in a scarcity mindset, and that’s the perfect time to destroy something like USAID, if you’re so inclined. To invert Bill Clinton, what’s wrong with America is eating what’s right with America alive.

The Sunday after the Vances leave the country, Nuuk is getting back to normal. The high is 18 degrees, and the low is 14. The HDMS Lauge Koch putters back into the fjord from a deployment, sliding past the happy birds at the chocolate factory and toward the industrial port. No Russians here yet. The sun is setting in the west, casting a pink and orange glow on the mountains. At Daddy’s, a bartender from the Philippines, of all places, is serving Carlsberg to a drunk Inuit who leans on me and says, pointing at the Filipino’s neck tattoo, “You’re a gangster? I’m a gangster, too.” Roy Orbison is playing on the stereo.

The National Museum of Greenland, through a presentation about the Danish movie industry, inadvertently diagnoses current American delusions. The Greenlanders above all know that their land is a canvas for the psychological projection of outsiders. Danish “films often stage Greenland as the country where you experience life as meaningful and epoch-making, and where one sees a search for identity in the wild landscape as the solution to the problems that life in the towns and modernity have entailed.” Kevn Cøstner in Dances With Seals.

Greenland is, among other things, a useful tool to produce conflict and division between Europe and the United States—to end or overhaul the postwar order. So are the tariffs. Why are the Americans doing this? My worry is that the answer is simple: We’re bored. “Life swings in a constant pendulum between pain and boredom,” said Arthur Schopenhauer, 174 years before Francis Fukuyama warned in The End of History that future generations would “struggle for the sake of struggle.”

In the old days, expansion could be done in the name of strategic interest or economic imperative, but it usually served a domestic political purpose, too. The Trump administration may be frying its own state capacity as it lurches from self-created crisis to crisis, but it can offer a foreign policy to provoke, to entertain, to reassure the masculine energies. It can burn the house down. And in the future, when more entertainment will be necessary, this immense, powerful bully of a country may find itself chasing a stronger high.

In Køge, southwest of Copenhagen, I meet Søren Knudsen, a retired colonel of the Danish armed forces. Knudsen lives in a converted farmhouse with his American wife, Gina, born in Dallas. They keep me fed and a little drunk: Still, the night feels ever so slightly like a funeral. Knudsen has been living with an idea of America all his life that he now sees may need a rewrite. JD Vance’s repeated statements about the Danes—that they were not a “good ally,” lazy, incompetent—caused him to take his Bronze Star, given by the Americans for his service as part of the NATO mission in Afghanistan, off his wall.

Knudsen’s life sums up the passing era much more than Trump’s. His relationship with the United States begins in 1939. The hero in his childhood hometown was the captain who sailed the HDMS Danmark into New York Harbor for the World’s Fair—the one that promised “The World of Tomorrow”—putting him safely out of reach when the Nazis marched on Denmark in 1940. He gifted the ship to the U.S. Navy and went off to fight. “He was the war hero in town,” Knudsen said, a precious commodity in a nation whose war of resistance famously lasted six hours. As a child, he grew up in a country that had been buttressed by the Marshall Plan: He joined the army in 1979, when it was armed with surplus American equipment and the order of the day was to prepare for Soviet paratroopers and tactical nuclear weapons.

In the 1990s, he became a diplomat—here he opens a bottle of vodka, a gift from his diplomatic years. He joined DANIDA, the Danish equivalent of USAID, and became a foot soldier of the new nation-building European mission. He met Gina at a party at the U.S. Embassy in Tirana, Albania, where he was working development aid, and she was a lawyer with the American Bar Association’s overseas aid program.

If these were not happy times, exactly, there had been much sadder ones in living memory. Europe, the miserable slaughterhouse of the first half of the twentieth century, was an open garden at the turn of the millennium, and that was largely backstopped by U.S. power. The 9/11 attacks did not initially seem to have changed this. Knudsen watched the towers fall from the Danish Embassy in Tirana. This was not what NATO was for, as an alliance to maintain the peace in Europe. But it was immediately clear the Danes would help, that they would be stepping up because of the “inherited” debt of the transatlantic relationship. “We sent the best young ones we had, and some of them died,” he said, sent them knowing they would come home with “wounds on their souls and on their bodies, because the Americans asked us to do so.”

The Danes deployed to Afghanistan. Knudsen won his Bronze Star for his work supporting the Afghan legal system, but the Danes did the dangerous stuff, too: Denmark lost more soldiers there on a per capita basis than any other NATO country. The American mission dragged on, and on, even after it grew to include Iraq, which squandered Europe’s goodwill. A sense of irony and futility crept in. During his first winter in Kandahar, he said, his base was garrisoned by the Hawaiian National Guard, who couldn’t handle the weather. They were replaced by Alaskans in the summer, who fared worse. As the vice president of the Danish veteran’s association, he meets regularly with soldiers who struggle with trauma from the American wars. When Vance called the Danes cowards, he didn’t just insult national pride: “It feels like those guys are stomping on everything we have believed in and worked for for most of our adult lives,” Gina said.

America is very lucky to have such friends as Søren Knudsen; and it has them all over the world—people who respect us more than we’ve earned, perhaps. It would be very foolish to throw them away. The vodka and goulash gone, the sun fully set, Knudsen brings out his medals and the U.S. flag that used to hang on his wall and lets slip, in a more optimistic note than he’s voiced so far, that he’ll be able to put them back up someday.

This is a common sentiment among the Danes I spoke to. No matter how slighted they feel by Trump and particularly Vance, who seems to have a pathological hatred of Europe, they suspect their old friend America is going through a phase. I am considerably less optimistic, particularly after returning home on “Liberation Day.” It feels as if the United States—the most powerful nation in history—is walking off into the tundra in ill-fitting clothes. The angel of history beckons; the masculine energies are returning. Be careful what you wish for.