Anne Applebaum on Trump v Denmark:

What did Donald Trump say over the phone to Mette Frederiksen, the Danish prime minister, on Wednesday? I don’t know which precise words he used, but I witnessed their impact. I arrived in Copenhagen the day after the call—the subject, of course, was the future of Greenland, which Denmark owns and which Trump wants—and discovered that appointments I had with Danish politicians were suddenly in danger of being canceled. Amid Frederiksen’s emergency meeting with business leaders, her foreign minister’s emergency meeting with party leaders, and an additional emergency meeting of the foreign-affairs committee in Parliament, everything, all of a sudden, was in complete flux.

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In private discussions, the adjective that was most frequently used to describe the Trump phone call was rough. The verb most frequently used was threaten. The reaction most frequently expressed was confusion. Trump made it clear to Frederiksen that he is serious about Greenland: He sees it, apparently, as a real-estate deal. But Greenland is not a beachfront property. The world’s largest island is an autonomous territory of Denmark, inhabited by people who are Danish citizens, vote in Danish elections, and have representatives in the Danish Parliament. Denmark also has politics, and a Danish prime minister cannot sell Greenland any more than an American president can sell Florida.

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Trump’s demands are illogical. Anything that the U.S. theoretically might want to do in Greenland is already possible, right now. Denmark has never stopped the U.S. military from building bases, searching for minerals, or stationing troops in Greenland, or from patrolling sea lanes nearby. In the past, the Danes have even let Americans defy Danish policy in Greenland.

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The Danes were loyal U.S. allies [in 1957], and remain so now. During the Cold War, they were central to NATO’s planning. After the Soviet Union dissolved, they reformed their military, creating expeditionary forces specifically meant to be useful to their American allies. After 9/11, when the mutual-defense provision of the NATO treaty was activated for the first time—on behalf of the U.S.—Denmark sent troops to Afghanistan, where 43 Danish soldiers died. As a proportion of their population, then about 5 million, this is a higher mortality rate than the U.S. suffered. The Danes also sent troops to Iraq, and joined NATO teams in the Balkans. They thought they were part of the web of relationships that have made American power and influence over the past half century so unique. Because U.S. alliances were based on shared values, not merely transactional interests, the level of cooperation was different. Denmark helped the U.S., when asked, or volunteered without being asked. “So what did we do wrong?” one Danish official asked me.

Obviously, they did nothing wrong—but that’s part of the crisis too. Trump himself cannot articulate, either at press conferences or, apparently, over the telephone, why exactly he needs to own Greenland, or how Denmark can give American companies and soldiers more access to Greenland than they already have. Plenty of others will try to rationalize his statements anyway. The Economist has declared the existence of a “Trump doctrine,” and a million articles have solemnly debated Greenland’s strategic importance. But in Copenhagen (and not only in Copenhagen) people suspect a far more irrational explanation: Trump just wants the U.S. to look larger on a map.

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Of course, Trump might forget about Greenland. But also, he might not. Nobody knows. He operates on whims, sometimes picking up ideas from the last person he met, sometimes returning to obsessions he had apparently abandoned: windmills, sharks, Hannibal Lecter, and now Greenland. 

Could we combine them somehow? Sharks living in windmills with Hannibal Lecter while singing songs about life in Greenland? Maybe throw in a narwhal or two?

H/t Tim Harris