The Daily Populous Monday January 12nd, 2026 morning edition
Authored by newyorker.com and submitted by newyorker

Although Greenlanders have had a sometimes fraught post-colonial relationship with Denmark—in 1953, the island became a part of the Danish kingdom, rather than its colony, and it has gradually adopted more home rule since then—few of them seem eager to be subsumed by a chaotic superpower intent on reviving McKinley-era colonialism. Responding to Katie Miller’s Stars-and-Stripes-stamped map of Greenland, Nielsen called it a “disrespectful” image. According to a 2025 poll, only six per cent of Greenlanders want to become part of the United States. Aaja Chemnitz, one of Greenland’s two members in the Danish parliament, told me that the talk of annexation made her constituents “quite anxious.” She now keeps in her parliamentary office a MAGA-style red baseball cap. Its one-word slogan, “NAAGGA,” means “no” in Greenlandic.

The Trump Administration has also been undermining Denmark economically, launching a sustained attack on wind-power technology, one of the country’s major exports. In August, the Administration ordered work stopped on Revolution Wind, an offshore wind farm in New England which is eighty-seven-per-cent complete, according to its co-developer, the partly state-owned Danish energy company Ørsted. Revolution Wind, which began construction in 2023, was expected to power some three hundred and fifty thousand homes in Connecticut and Rhode Island, to reduce carbon emissions by eleven million metric tons, and to create about a thousand unionized jobs. After the project was halted, Ørsted’s stock fell to an all-time low, and the company, which announced that it had spent five billion dollars on the project, sued the Trump Administration. In October, Ørsted revealed that it would be cutting a quarter of its workforce in the next two years.

Danes feel proud of Ørsted, which has succeeded financially while combatting climate change, a national priority. Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at the Columbia Business School who has co-written a case study on Ørsted, told me that wind power can generate up to a hundred and forty per cent of Denmark’s electricity demand. Ørsted, formerly a state-owned fossil-fuel company, underwent a corporate conversion experience about a decade ago, renaming itself and becoming the world’s largest developer of offshore wind power. Berthelsen, the Danish political consultant, told me, “We think of ourselves as having developed this energy and spread it across the world.” Wagner warned that the abrupt reversal on Revolution Wind would have knock-on effects for the U.S. “What European company’s board is going to sign off on a billion-dollar investment in the U.S. right now?”

Provocatively, the Trump Administration’s stop-work order cited “national security” reasons for cancelling Revolution Wind. On CNN, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum offered this rationale: “People with, you know, bad ulterior motives to the United States would launch a swarm drone attack through a wind farm.” This struck many experts as silly. Wind farms can interfere with radar-detection systems, but the wind industry has developed effective methods for countering that interference. James Rogers, an expert on drone warfare at Cornell University, told me, “The industry works closely with ministries of defense and with those responsible for air and coastal defense to make sure mitigation measures are in place.” The Pentagon approved the Revolution Wind project in 2023.

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The far likelier reason for quashing the project is Trump’s aversion to green energy in general, and to wind in particular. (In 2011, he failed to shut down an offshore wind farm that, he thought, marred the view from a golf course he owns in Scotland.) Over the years, he’s offered, without evidence, a motley array of objections to wind power—that it’s increasing cancer rates in humans, that it’s driving whales “loco.”

The Trump Administration, again citing national security, also initiated a federal investigation of foreign-made wind turbines. The argument was that, because most turbine components are manufactured abroad, America could be held hostage by nations seeking to “weaponize their control over supplies of wind turbines and their parts.” The investigation could produce a recommendation for heavy tariffs on foreign turbine equipment, of which Denmark is a major supplier.

André Ken Jakobsson, a professor at the University of Southern Denmark, is a scholar of “hybrid warfare,” in which a country uses economic punishment, cyberattacks, and other aggressive means to harm another country, sometimes in concert with military operations. He told me, “The U.S. has been using all of its means short of conventional war in its campaign to try to get Greenland. We’re uncertain—and that is how hybrid warfare works—how to interpret some of the actions.” He mentioned Trump’s successful demand that the Danish pharmaceutical firm Novo Nordisk lower the prices of its popular GLP-1 drugs (or “fat shots,” as Trump calls them) by thirty per cent. Novo Nordisk has been another major driver of Denmark’s economy, which has been robust in recent years. So far, despite the Trump-led trade wars that Berlingske called “a frontal attack on the foundations of the Danish economy,” Denmark has proved resilient. Yet many of its citizens feel both whiplashed and confused. As Jakobsson put it to me, “Do Trump’s trade actions and criticism serve a tactical purpose with regard to Greenland? Or is this just what he wants trade-wise?”

vic-q on January 11st, 2026 at 21:08 UTC »

By asserting that national security and resource control justify overriding the sovereignty of a democratic ally, Washington hands Beijing a perfect rhetorical shield for its ambitions in Taiwan. China can weaponize this logic, arguing that if the U.S. can claim a "sphere of influence" over an island for strategic depth, China has the sovereign right to do the same in its near-abroad, and that can provoke a supply shock that the American industry is not yet ready to absorb.

ObjectiveMall on January 11st, 2026 at 19:33 UTC »

While there is probably nobody who is not sick of being bullied, it is worth noting that Trump's constant harassment is part of his tactics. This allows the US government to monitor the debate, Denmark's level of support, and the likely reaction in the event of a land grab, among other things.

newyorker on January 11st, 2026 at 19:12 UTC »

Since 9/11, Denmark has adhered to so-called Super-Atlanticism, which makes alignment with the U.S. its foreign-policy priority. The country sent thousands of troops to serve in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Among NATO allies, Denmark maintained the highest level of popular support for the mission in Afghanistan, even though it sustained the highest number of fatalities per capita. Because of Denmark’s unusually close coöperation with U.S. foreign policy, it has been “shocking” to see how “serious the U.S. now is about ignoring our territorial integrity,” a prominent political consultant in Copenhagen said. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/01/19/denmark-is-sick-of-being-bullied-by-trump