In January, Denmark began genuine military preparations for a US invasion of Greenland. Danish soldiers were placed on readiness to shoot at American troops. Anti-aircraft measures at Greenland's airports were considered. This was not a drill.
As "Hvylya" reports, Anne Applebaum described the crisis on the To The Contrary With Charlie Sykes podcast after spending a week in Copenhagen working on a longer project.
"The Danes became convinced, both because of things Trump was saying in public and because of other things they were seeing behind the scenes, that a US military invasion of Greenland was possible," Applebaum said. "They had to have soldiers who were ready to shoot Americans."
The crisis rippled through Europe. Scandinavian countries, Germany, and other close Danish allies went through their own calculations - what happens to NATO if the US attacks Denmark, what happens to the economy, how to prepare for catastrophe. Trump eventually appeared to back off during a Davos speech where he mixed up Greenland and Iceland. But the damage was done.
"In Denmark I was asked over and over again, do Americans understand what happened and how hurt we are," Applebaum said. She had to tell them the truth: Americans do not understand. Denmark - a founding NATO member that had stored US nuclear weapons during the Cold War, with billions in American investments - found that none of it mattered to an administration acting on a whim.
The trauma is now driving concrete policy shifts. Europeans are hedging against US dependence across the board - military, technological, financial. Some are pushing to replace American payment systems like Visa and MasterCard with European alternatives. Applebaum compared the trajectory to Britain's post-Brexit decoupling: no immediate crash, but a slow, steady unraveling of integration that will prove extremely difficult to reverse.
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