This time, King Frederik Montpezat—two years into a bloodless succession from his mother, Margrethe Glücksburg—delivered his second such address.

Outside the royal compound, conscripts from the Royal Guard were goose-stepping around, cosplaying in 19th-century costumes, barking orders at eachother and performing for the assembled crowd. Inside a TV studio, state television had convened a gaggle of festively dressed court stenographers—who for reasons defying human understanding still call themselves journalists—to comment on the spectacle and gas one another up between reverent nods.

The broadcast cut to an exterior shot of the royal compound in Copenhagen: an imposing cluster of rococo edifices erected in the 1700s with profits from the slave trade. An announcer intoned that "His Majesty the King" would now speak.

The camera then cut to Mr. Montpezat seated at a desk. Last year, viewers had been subjected to a carefully choreographed but amateurishly executed sequence in which the king walked into the room and sat down, as if auditioning for community theater. This year, wisdom prevailed. He was already seated. Growth had occurred.

If the British monarchy dresses its pageantry in golden hats and silly costumes—ridiculous, yes, but at least committed to the bit—the Danish version is austerely underproduced. The king sat at a modestly sized wooden desk. Behind him, a mural depicted a map of the nation in white on black, executed in a kind of cyberpunk-meets-map-based-strategy-game aesthetic. Mr. Montpezat commissioned the piece himself, with an insurance company picking up the tab. Perhaps the king is a closeted gamer.

At the desk sat a bearded, bespectacled man in a three-piece suit who looked less like a statesman than someone's uncle about to give a wedding toast. His public speaking skills reinforced that impression. Margrethe Glücksburg may have been an insufferable snob, but she understood television. She made the performance look natural and effortless and possessed a voice that under more democratic circumstances might have found dignified employment narrating audiobooks.

Mr. Montpezat inherited the titles and the wealth, but not the stagecraft. For years it has been common knowledge that he struggles with opening his mouth in public. This year, the monarchy received a massive funding increase to expand its communications budget—millions poured into this black hole of charisma. One imagines a competent PR apparatus deploying professional coaching, intensive rehearsals, perhaps even a voice coach. If any of that happened, it left no visible trace. The delivery remained wooden and stiff, eyes glued to the manuscript, engagement with the audience strictly theoretical. It was not a speech so much as a royal homework assignment completed under duress.

He began in a slightly nasal register.

After some soft-focus chit-chat about family birthdays, he moved to the evening's main event: the perpetuation of Western Europe's geopolitical delusions.

Officially, the Danish monarchy is "non-political." The monarch is meant to say something so bland and low-conflict that no one can reasonably object. In practice, the New Year's address has become a gentle but unmistakable nudge toward acceptable opinion. This year, as in recent ones, the envelope was pushed.

The speech is the product of committee writing, shuttled between palace staff and the prime minister's office. This section bore the unmistakable fingerprints of Mette Frederiksen's team—her paranoid, hawkish crusade to raise "crisis awareness" had found the perfect ventriloquist's dummy in the king.

Mr. Montpezat spoke at length about Ukraine. The conflict, he explained, was about "the right to security, independence, and sovereignty—on our continent and beyond." Something fundamental was at play, he declared.

What was not at play in the speech: NATO expansion, Western rejection of diplomacy, delusional maximalist demands, or years of Western interference in Ukrainian politics. The conflict was presented with the moral clarity of a Marvel movie—clean-cut heroes versus cartoon villains.

"The Ukrainians never wanted war, therefore they deserve peace," Mr. Montpezat intoned, serenely ignoring everything that led up to the war. The Palestinians never wanted war either, but the ongoing genocide against them—some of it carried out with weapons manufactured in Denmark—did not merit a mention.

Then came Finland. Finland, we learned, "with its harsh history manages to keep the worst in mind without putting life in parenthesis"—a metaphor guaranteed to make English teachers weep. Finland lives with "the threat from the east." Why Finland? Because the king had recently visited, and the guided sightseeing tours his hosts provided had clearly made a deep impression.

Continuing his travelogue, he recalled visiting Latvia in 1992. The entire history of the Latvian SSR was compressed into "50 years of occupation" that had "made its mark" on the population, whose "reality put my own in perspective." Combining words into sentences is evidently not among the king's many talents.

In Latvia, he had learned "what it would say when freedom was not a given." What "it" was remained unexplained.

This sensation, he claimed, now pervades Denmark. We should be afraid. "Not everyone means us well." Anonymous attacks lurk in "the grey area between peace and unrest," seeking to "create disturbance, sow division and scare us."

The air thickened with paranoia. Were we under siege? Bombed? Blockaded? Was Sweden finally making its move? Fortunately, no. The examples of anonymous attacks turned out to be websites crashing, misleading videos, and drones "appearing in the sky as diffuse warnings."

It was a pristine example of a peculiar Western elite trait: living among the most coddled and secure people in human history while insisting on centering their own imaginary victimhood, inflating a slow day on the internet into an existential threat.

We were urged to follow the news without "dancing to the wrong people's tune" and to prevent discord. Coming from the head of state of an increasingly militarized imperial statelet, this amounted to a polite royal reminder to swallow official narratives whole.

Loyalty to American imperialism was reaffirmed: we must stand united within the Danish kingdom, within Europe, and within NATO. Danish troops in Latvia, we were told, are carrying out "our common defense for peace in the Baltic region" by "keeping the bar high and keeping hopes up." Should the perfidious Swede, whose heart lusts for conquest of our ancestral homeland, ever set boots on our sacred soil again, perhaps we can send the king to read his speeches at them. They will die from secondhand embarrassment.

From there, the king pivoted seamlessly from imperial militarism to a saccharine hymn to the draft. The Danish state, struggling to recruit volunteers for its militaristic ambitions, has recently expanded forced military service: more conscripts, conscription for women, longer terms. The king sent New Year's greetings to the conscripts, thanked them for "punching in and doing their part," and described this erosion of personal liberty as a "strengthening."

"The right to defend has become the duty to defend," he said, before wandering into an unconvincing attempt to frame ordinary civic virtue and neighborly responsibility as a moral extension of the draft.

Having devoted over half his airtime to cheerleading militarism, he pivoted to another reactionary favorite: a brief, incoherent invocation of "our Christian cultural heritage" demanding we love "not only our closest but also our neighbors"—oratorical palate-cleansing before the next topic.