The Danes and The Donald

I looked around before I walked in the door and saw no life at all on the street where I lived here in the U.S. It felt like I was in an alien land. Outside my friend’s apartment in Copenhagen, there were old people on the street, walking to the grocery store with small baskets on wheels behind them. There were groups of kids in bright parkas following a day care teacher. The street abounded with life.

I had gotten a bad flu when I arrived in Denmark that time, and when I came out of it, pulling in sleep and rest like it was oxygen, I had completely switched over to the vibrant life of my hip friends in the streets, bars and cafes of a cool European city.

I missed it with a full, deep ache as I pushed my door open. I wanted to be back there.

But I had a business that was growing and my folks and the rest of my family were here. I stayed. I looked back maybe a little too often but the sugary high of those happy times faded and I came back to the reality here in America.

I have at the same time kept a deep and fond place in my heart for Denmark and the Danes. They look on life with a kind of lightness, quick with wit — in English — and go on in their rainy, snowy, cold climate with a lack of gloom. While direct and sometimes abrupt, they are almost universally friendly, especially toward Americans.

I am signed up for regular news releases from the EU, replete with graphs, showing productivity, levels of green energy, income per capita and other measures of societal health. I look for DK’s spot on those charts and generally find it at or very near the top of the good measures of societal progress and fairness, and low on the bad ones.

And after granting asylum to a large population from Iraq during that nation’s war with Iran, I understood why the effect of that population on their small, liberated and prosperous nation brought the rise of an anti-immigrant party which became part of the nation’s ruling coalition and enforced its policies from that position of power.

So it is not a surprise that our current government is willing to credibly threaten seizure of a huge region that is part of the Danish kingdom. Not a surprise because nothing from the current U.S. government is a surprise. But the willingness to take territory from a long-loyal ally while abandoning support of a European nation that is under attack from a Cold War enemy is perfidious.

I checked on the definition of the word in Merriam-Webster and it describes the actions and the man better than I can. “Perfidy: the quality or state of being faithless or disloyal : TREACHERY.”

The Danish government and the rest of Europe have reacted to the threat from the nation long considered the ally and indeed the wartime savior of its people with a move that I think will work. They have brought a large group of NATO troops to the island to act in its defense.

So would our current president and his defense chief consider sending American troops against NATO troops. Yeah, then I would be surprised.

When you see a map of Greenland, you see why it is coveted by the real estate developer in the Oval Office. It looks like an enormous amount of territory.

He said that taking the NATO ally’s territory is “psychologically important for me,” in a remarkable interview with The New York Times.

The threat puts the EU in a two-front confrontation with two of the world’s great powers, one to the east, and now one to the west. It must help defend against an invasion from Russia, and now it must turn to also defend territory from a takeover by America ‘‘the easy way” or “the hard way.” Putin must be laughing his derriere off.

On the whole, recent administration actions point to a coming year of tumult, given that it is most likely the last year the president can act without being checked by Congress.     

So there is more spectacle to come. Psychologically — we should all fasten our seatbelts. It’s going to be a crazy ride.