Hundreds of Danish demonstrators—many of them military veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan—held a protest in Copenhagen on Saturday outside the U.S. Embassy.
The group was protesting the president’s push for the U.S. to acquire Greenland from Denmark and his Davos remarks that NATO forces “stayed a little back” while fighting alongside the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“They feel betrayed,” Carsten Rasmussen, president of the Danish Veterans Association, told The Associated Press. “And of course, this angers them. They deployed. They fought with Americans. They fought with Brits. They stood together. They bled together. And as you’ve heard here today in front of the American embassy, 52 of them never came home.”
Forty-four Danish troops died in Afghanistan—the highest per capita death toll for a NATO country in that war—and eight more in Iraq. Denmark’s population as of 2025 was just over 6 million.
During the protest, demonstrators laid 52 flags bearing the names of the fallen outside the embassy.
“Behind every one of these flags is a person, a soldier, a young man,” Lt. Col. Niels Christian Koefoed, a Dane who served in Afghanistan, told Reuters.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer called Trump’s comments about staying “a little back” “insulting and frankly appalling,” to which Trump wrote on Truth Social: “The of the United Kingdom will always be with the United States of America!”
He did not, however, acknowledge the sacrifices of other .
“Denmark has always stood side by side with the U.S.—and we have shown up in the world’s crisis zones when the U.S. has asked us to,” Danish Veterans & Veteran Support, the group that organized the protest, said in a statement. “We feel let down and ridiculed by the Trump Administration, which is deliberately ignoring Denmark’s combat service alongside the U.S.”
The group added, “Words cannot describe how much it hurts that Denmark’s contributions and sacrifices in the fight for democracy, peace and freedom are being forgotten in the .”
Digital has reached out to the White House for comment.
Earlier this month, U.S. Ambassador to NATO Matthew Whitaker told Digital that NATO has a “tendency to overreact.”
Whitaker said Greenland’s importance has been clear for years as melting ice reshapes the Arctic and opens new routes. “The security of the High North—which I’ve talked about a lot before any of this happened—is the most important issue,” he said. “As the ice thaws and routes open up in the Arctic, Arctic security, and therefore the , which is the northern flank of the continental United States, is crucial.”
He stressed that Greenland’s location makes it central to U.S. defense planning. “If you think about Greenland’s role in accessing naval assets, the monitoring, awareness and fortification of that part of the Western Hemisphere is crucial for the long-term security of the United States,” Whitaker said.
He said recent diplomacy shows the issue can be addressed without escalation. “I know there was a very with the Danes, Greenland, Vice President Vance and Secretary of State Rubio, so I think it’s going to be constructive.”