On the 13th of December, 2025, a small group of antifascist demonstrators met at the Triangeln metro station in Copenhagen’s chic Østerbro district. Winding their way down Dag Hammarskjölds Allé—named after the Swedish Peace Prize laureate, who was likely assassinated by a Belgian breakaway colonial state in the Congo—the protestors, bearing ACAB banners and Palestinian flags, ended up at the American embassy in short order.
Shortly thereafter, the police escort informed demonstrators that they were to stop chanting into megaphones, and to move off the cordoned-off section of the street, and onto the pavement. Some demonstrators refused. In response, the boys in blue—upstanding, professional representatives of the state’s monopoly on violence—readied their batons, bruised and bloodied several protestors, and forced the demonstration to a close.
High above this well-rehearsed choreography, catching the last of the afternoon sun, proudly bearing witness to the brutality of Copenhagen’s constabulary on this wintry afternoon, fluttered a single, lonely star-spangled banner.
***
It is difficult to overstate the Ameriphilia that suffuses daily Danish urban life. Most (white) Danes speak English with the comfort and fluency of an Englishman in New York. Affluent hipsters, dressed in Carhartt hoodies and baseball caps, spend their evenings frequenting the diners (“The Midwestern”) and hamburger chains (“Gasoline Grill”) dotted all over the city, ending their nights discussing the latest season of Pluribus at one of the city’s many microbreweries that serve endless insipid iterations of New England IPAs.
This superstructure goes hand-in-hand with the base: with pragmatic, material reality. Denmark goes above and beyond the “standard” Atlanticist rhetoric in Europe that rambles on about support for NATO and free trade at annual conferences, and modern Danish history has been characterised by full-throated, unquestioning support for American foreign policy as a core tenet. Thus did Denmark distinguish itself among nations, by being one of the earliest and most vocal members of the coalition of the willing that led the invasion of Iraq. The (centre-left) Danish government has also stood out from its counterparts in Norway and Sweden, through its consistent economic and rhetorical support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza, prompting rare critique from Norwegian political parties. Closer to home, Danish intelligence, supremely unconcerned with such petty issues as neighbourly ties, spent a solid two years wiretapping politicians in Sweden, Norway, France and Germany—including Angela Merkel and Frank-Walter Steinmeier—together with the NSA. And in Greenland itself, Denmark signed away the right to construct and maintain military bases to the United States back in 1951.
This uncritical “super-Atlanticism” goes hand-in-hand with some of the most unsavoury aspects of Danish domestic policy. The Euro-American love story—built upon a legacy of racism, colonialism, and genocide—has long relied upon the reification and constant reinforcement of the idea of a white, Western, Christian civilisation, constantly threatened by the barbarians at the gates; a motley crew of conniving Chinamen, scheming Russians, and the miscellaneous racialised migrant hordes looking to plunder and pillage this veritable garden of Eden. These sweeping civilisational narratives see shocking legitimacy in liberal Danish circles, well eclipsing how acceptable they would be in the United States or Britain.
Indeed, Denmark has been rather ahead of the curve as far as racism goes. The Danish state has been rather successful in its efforts to legally entrench and reify the statistical categories of “Western” and “non-Western” as stand-ins for racial markers; and as if this racial binary were insufficient, it has spent years attempting to create a separate category for Muslims, the prime victims of Danish foreign policy. The related “ghetto laws” passed by a recent Danish centre-left coalition were recently ruled potentially illegal by the European Court of Justice; these laws would also, in principle, explicitly infringe upon the Civil Rights Act in the United States. And the extreme precarity that Danish citizenship laws subject migrants to makes it far riskier to organise than nearly anywhere else in Western Europe.
All of this makes the events of the past few weeks particularly tragic for the diverse assortment of bien pensant academics, journalists, tech workers, policy wonks, and miscellaneous experts that collectively shape Danish discourse. Few amongst this class possess the intellectual honesty to own up to the fact that the events of the past year are Denmark’s chickens coming home to roost; discourse has rather remained every bit as delusional and chauvinistic as it has ever been.
To curb America’s worst impulses, Danish politicians have spent the past year pulling a number of tricks out of their hat. They have attempted to use international law as a shield, only a year after the Prime Minister declined to answer whether she would respect the ICC’s arrest warrant against Benjamin Netanyahu. They have attempted to display their unwavering commitment to Atlanticism by granting the American military access to its airbases. They have attempted to appeal to America’s moral fibre, pointing to how many Danish soldiers were killed fighting America’s wars (of lesser import, no doubt, are the lives of the Iraqis and Afghans that the Danish military helped slaughter). They have claimed that comparisons to Venezuela could never be drawn, since Denmark is a plucky Gryffindor, and not some Latin American Hezbollah-adjacent communist shithole. And finally, unable to temper their cartoonish worldview, they have defaulted to informing Trump that these petty squabbles between white countries are beneath him, and that they ought to join hands and focus on the Russians and the immigrants instead.
***
Rapid developments have taken place over the past few days at Davos. A compromise has been reached, between NATO’s General Secretary Mark Rutte, and the man that he once called daddy. Trump is as capricious as a politician can get, and changes his mind based on the last person that he talks to; Rutte is as bland and ineffectual a politician as ever set foot into European politics. From what we know of it, their agreement appears to grant Americans sovereignty over “some parts” of Greenland. Discourse has settled, with remarkable alacrity, upon two framings of this. Europeans concerned about ceding ever-larger chunks of sovereignty to the United States frame this as a cheap surrender on part of NATO; while market liberals, immersed in their warm, comfortable, nostalgic Atlanticist baths exchange knowing smiles, reassuring one another that Trump always chickens out.
Both these framings—not to mention all the “poor Denmark” consolations—miss the real detail here. For the people of Greenland, this backroom deal between the United States and an assortment of middling European powers to carve up their home is a gigantic step backwards. Greenland’s journey from being a formal Danish colony, to today’s partial sovereignty has been arduous. This deal marks a reversion to a darker era of unbridled imperialism.
There is no doubt that we live in a time of crisis, which brings with it certain opportunities. Indeed, the waning of Pax Americana appears to be a near certainty. As Mark Carney—the last realistic liberal—pointed out at Davos, the capitalist compromise at the end of history was a fiction, which worked because everyone played along. Describing with uncharacteristic honesty the one-sided nature of this system, Carney admitted that Canada bought into this fiction because American hegemony “helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security and a framework for resolving disputes”. His speech, now viral all over the internet, featured very little by way of acknowledgement—let alone sympathy—for the victims of American hegemony.
Europe today faces three choices. The first is to continue to cede the last dregs of national sovereignty to the United States, to continue to cling onto the material benefits of the U.S. military’s dominance over the planet. The second (Carney’s vision, no doubt) is to come to terms with reality, and to tighten the screws and re-enter the race to the bottom that is global capitalism; to keep European economies “competitive” by shredding what is left of labour movements, dismantling the welfare state, and subjecting Europeans to increasingly harsh austerity measures.
The final path is to acknowledge that Europe no longer possesses the unilateral ability to force the entire planet into subjugation to stop domestic capitalism from running out of steam; and that perhaps this may not be such a terrible thing after all. Perhaps we once again find ourselves confronted with the same binary choice that we were a century ago, on the eve of Europe going up in flames: socialism or barbarism?
