Twenty thousand people in Copenhagen and five thousand in Nuuk hold the largest protests in Greenland's history.

The march in Nuuk drew an estimated five thousand people. The population of Nuuk is fifty-six thousand. The math, for those who do not have it at hand, places nearly one in eleven Greenlanders in the street on Saturday afternoon, in the dark, in fourteen-degree cold, holding a flag.

The march in Copenhagen drew twenty thousand. They walked from the Christiansborg Palace to the United States Embassy, where they laid down signs reading Hands off Greenland and Yankee, Go Home and Make America Go Away. The Danish prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, said the country would not be “blackmailed.”

These are, for two countries that ordinarily produce small marches about cycling lanes, very large marches.

The American response, the same evening, was a Truth Social post announcing 10 percent tariffs on goods from Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Finland, effective February 1. The post said the tariffs would rise to 25 percent on June 1. The stated condition for removal was an agreement on “the Complete and Total purchase of Greenland.”

It is worth pausing on the construction. The United States, which has spent eighty years describing itself as the leader of the post-war alliance, was on Saturday evening proposing to economically punish eight of its closest treaty allies until they delivered, by sale, a self-governing territory that is not theirs to sell. The Greenlandic government, which is the only government with the legal authority to negotiate on Greenland, was not in the post.

The eight countries replied by joint statement on Sunday. They condemned the tariff threat. They referenced the NATO obligation, which is a treaty obligation. The treaty obligation, in the case of armed attack on a member, requires the others to come to its defense. Denmark is a member. The United States is a member. The treaty does not contain a clause about coercive territorial purchase between members, because the post-war drafters did not anticipate the case.

The crowd in Nuuk dispersed by midnight. The crowd in Copenhagen marched past the embassy and continued to the parliament. The signs went home with the people who carried them. The Truth Social post stayed up.

Calmly documenting the decline.