Geo-security new elephant in room in Denmark’s changing foreign, defense policies

COPENHAGEN, Denmark

Denmark announced on May 2 it would give a military donation and financial package to Kyiv estimated at $250 million amid growing calls to restructure its defense and foreign policies in the backdrop of the Russia-Ukraine war.

The move made Denmark a frontline state among Nordic nations in the year-long conflict.

The pacifist country that was once merely focused on global climate change issues is undergoing a serious restructuring of its defense and security policies as the Russia-Ukraine conflict intensifies.

In the recent words of Prince Joachim, the Danish queen’s second son: “To put it quite frankly: we did not want to enter the rearmament between the years 1990 and 2022. Now we have to.”

To underline his point, he added: “We no longer live in peaceful times and the threat is real and not far away.”

Danish foreign policy made a not-so-subtle change without challenges under Foreign Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen’s doctrine of “pragmatic idealism” or “pragmatic realism” -- a clear shift from the “value-based foreign policy” of previous ministers.

In light of the doctrine, Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen visited Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi in March and ended an arms sales ban against Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates that was imposed after the killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi inside a Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018 -- a deviation from yesteryear’s foreign policy doctrine.

“You can be a country that is problematic in our eyes, and still have some legitimate security policy interests,” Rasmussen said regarding the shift. “And my line is that our line must be located in the same place as the lines of other European countries.”

But while Copenhagen has changed its diplomatic standing without any massive hindrance, it faces massive challenges to the restructuring of its once-ignored defense sector.

To show it is committed to NATO, Denmark announced it will reduce its military presence in Iraq in early 2024 to focus solely on Baltic countries. It has offered a battalion ranging between 700 to 1,200 soldiers to NATO to defend the region.

Moreover, despite pressures from within, the three-party coalition government abolished a religious prayer holiday, the Great Prayer Day, to boost finances to meet its NATO target that calls for the defense budget to be 2% of the GDP. But it appears that challenges are still mounting in Copenhagen in terms of defense needs.

Brig. Gen. Henrik Lyhne, the army’s second-in-command, expressed serious doubts about Denmark’s ability to fulfill its NATO targets, saying it will take years to have a combat-ready army.

The military has the world’s most advanced weaponry but faces a lack of soldiers, he told local broadcaster TV2. “This is an emergency call. The situation is extremely critical, especially because we lack soldiers like never before. I have been in the armed forces for 40 years, and it has never looked so bad. Currently, 20% to 25% of positions in the army are vacant, and even if more money is injected soon, it will take years to restore a combat-capable army,” he added.

The most pressing issue for the army remains a lack of battle-ready soldiers. In the 1st Brigade, known as the “Army’s Fist,” at least 1,000 soldiers are needed to be full strength of 4,000, said officials.

“We are obviously heavily dependent on the security guarantee provided by the USA via NATO and if you take a period from 1990 to 2014, we had a long period where the way we were paying for the security guarantee would come in the participation of international interventions so that was the reason why we were engaged in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Libya and also the Balkans in the 1990s. We didn’t have a direct threat back then but in order to make ourselves useful for the United States, we were engaging in these types of operations,” Associate Professor of Political Science at Aarhus University, Rasmus Brun Pedersen, told Anadolu.

Pedersen said now there is a change in US demands as Washington is focusing on Asia and it has told European states to defend themselves.

“We have been quite hesitant to increase our defense budget, in this process we did a little bit but not that much. But then we had the Ukraine war which created that sense of urgency that now we have a direct threat. We never had a direct threat for many years,” he said. “There has been a perception in Denmark that there is an imminent threat that is coming right now but we are also acting based on the pressure that we feel from Washington.”

To expand the point further, analyst Jakob Linnet Schmidt from the Danish Institute for International Studies told Anadolu: “The central Danish priority is to maintain the security alliance with the US through NATO. An aggressive Russia has increased the desire for a d credible deterrence through this security alliance. Denmark is hoping to appear as a credible ally to have its security guaranteed. This has influenced Danish decision-makers’ traditional unwillingness to increase defense spending to the level demanded by NATO and the US.”

While Denmark navigates the new foreign and defense policies against the backdrop of the war, it has become certain that pragmatic geo-strategic security needs are taking center stage on policies linked to domestic and international developments.