Apologies for another! Trump and Denmark thread, but I saw this image today,
74% of insulin in the USA comes from Denmark
100% of Ozempic in the USA comes from Denmark
15% of all shipping containers arriving in the USA come from a Danish Company.
Google says this is pretty much true, do you think they will stop providing pharma? And if they stop selling ozempic, then what do you think the American people will do?
https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2026/01/19/denmarks-real-defence-mechanism-is-its-pharmaceutical-trade/
If Denmark interrupts insulin exports to the US, the impact would be fast and severe. Insulin is a daily-necessity medicine. US insulin inventories are almost certainly not designed for an abrupt shock, and substituting between insulin types is likely to be both clinically difficult and not instantly scalable. So the likely chain of events is straightforward. Shortages would appear quickly, rationing would follow, clinical distress would quickly become news, and the issue would land on the desk of US politicians who could not ignore it. That is what leverage looks like, even if it is morally dangerous leverage, because it would harm ordinary people long before it harms the political class, although let's be clear, war always does that.
It would also be politically combustible. Trump would frame Denmark's action not as self-defence but as attacking Americans or holding patients hostage, even if the action was a direct response to his own insane and wholly unjustified threats of an attack on Denmark's sovereign territory, whilst the underlying truth would be that the US had made itself dependent, and Denmark did not ask it to become so. The problem is that what the reaction to this situation would be is hard to foretell. In that case, it is certainly not the option of first choice, but something to leave on the back burner.
For that reason, if Denmark were to use pharmaceutical supply as leverage, the GLP-1 route is a much more plausible option. Ozempic and Wegovy are not trivial medicines, but they are also not akin to insulin. The immediate health impact of a disruption in their supply would be lower. People would not be at medical risk, but the political impact could still be substantial, precisely because these drugs reach influential demographics and because shortages of them are already well known. A GLP-1 disruption might generate anger, litigation, lobbying pressure, and maybe an intense corporate response, but from the point of view of Denmark, the product is saleable elsewhere, and the noise that would be created in the US, without triggering the same immediate life-and-death moral backlash that an insulin shock would create, would be of massive value if Trump pushes ahead with his threats, so long as the messaging was very carefully managed.