UNDER THREAT

The Danes were America's most loyal ally. Now they feel targeted—and terrified.

- BY MARGARET TALBOT

Some Danes offended by Trump's claims on Greenland are boycotting U.S.goods.

Once upon a time—before the U.S. began threatening to take over Greenland and treating European democracies as enemies—the Danish politician Ida Auken was a deep admirer of America. Hanging on the wall of her office at the Folketing, the Danish parliament, where she has served since 2007, are framed photographs of two U.S. Presidents, John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama, both seated in gently curving Danish-modern chairs. The images stand out in a setting that otherwise resembles a Scandinavian mood board: a boldly striped black-and-white couch, modular bookshelves stocked with texts on climate change, red snow boots standing sentinel in a corner.

Auken, a gregarious forty-seven-year-old, visited America for the first time as a teen-ager, attending school for a semester in Charlotte, North Carolina, while living with a local family. Over the years, and especially when she served as her country’s environment minister, between 2011 and 2014, Auken regularly travelled to the U.S., and she counts Republicans and Democrats, evangelicals and environmentalists among her many American friends. She even became fond of quoting Ronald Reagan's invocation of the U.S. as a shining city upon a hill. Now, though, some of her constituents were telling her that they were more afraid of the U.S. than of Russia. For Auken, the photographs of J.F.K. and Obama had become reminders “of the United States I used to look up to.” Wistfully, she called them “my old friends.”