Former U.S. diplomat Stephen Helgesen, who now lives in Denmark, has an interesting post today describing public sentiment in Denmark, which is almost universally, and quite hatefully, opposed to President Trump. He writes that it’s little different in Greenland, having access to their presses from his perch in Denmark as well.
For Americans, it’s become obvious enough from second lady Usha Vance’s planned visit to Greenland, which was greeted with an amazing amount of rage and paranoia from the Danes, some of the Greenlanders, and anti-American eurotrash all over the rest of Europe.
Helgesen writes:
… the Danish and Greenlandic press were quick to point out that they saw the arrival of two Hercules air transport planes show up at their civilian airport a few days ago as a bridge too far. To mix metaphors, America had crossed the Rubicon. The optics were, admittedly, bad for America. It looked like an invasion, albeit a benign one with armored vehicles and a few dozen security personnel. The Danes ended up sending a hundred or so Danish police from mainland Denmark seemingly as a countermeasure.
All this, to view an annual dogsled race on a remote iceblock island with a population of 59,000.
Now, one could argue that the incidental security sent might have seemed overdone to the Danes and Greenlanders, given that the locals are not used to this kind of attention, and might not even need major security.
Yet it was an overreaction, all the same. The security was likely standard operating procedure for the U.S. in this age of multiple assassination attempts on President Trump and the Secret Service can’t be too careful.
So instead of just dismissing it as Americans in action and going about their business, the Danes and their coevals decided to go bonkers, reading the big entourage from a major public figure from a major nation as an invasion force.
They howled. They organized protests. And they treated Mrs. Vance, who only wanted to make friends with them in a public diplomacy mission, as well as learn about their culture, as a menace to their existence.
Hellbound and Down 