Negotiating a Greenland Deal: The Role of the Allies
It is early days, and anyone writing about this agreement should say so plainly. The signed text has not been made public, the parliaments in Copenhagen and Nuuk have yet to weigh in, and the dynamics now unfolding will take months, perhaps years, to become clear.
Caution is warranted about what this deal is and what it will become. That said, I have visited Denmark many times over the past two decades, and I have always been impressed by the ability of the Danes to navigate the world of big powers and to work hard to protect their interests. This deal appears no different.
This is the second of two pieces on the agreement.
In the first, I argued that my colleague Ed Timperlake’s February analysis of Greenland’s place in the kill web identified the interests the agreement now appears to rest on, and that those interests were compatible long before the politics allowed anyone to say so.
This piece asks the companion question. If the interests were compatible, how did a small kingdom and its self-governing territory keep them in view while the rhetoric turned a defense problem into a contest over title?
My answer is that Copenhagen and Nuuk acted on a proposition that Washington’s public position obscured. What the alliance needs from Greenland is reliable access, resilient infrastructure, and integration with allied systems, and all three are easier to obtain from a willing host than from a territory taken from an unwilling one. Danish statecraft was the art of making that proposition operational.
On last Friday afternoon, President Trump announced on Truth Social that the United States, the Kingdom of Denmark, and Greenland had concluded an Arctic security agreement. He called it “very important, historic, and special,” and said it gives the United States “permanent control over security, and all other needs, in Greenland, completely addressing ALL of our many U.S. concerns” (The Guardian). He described it as an “Infinite Life” agreement with no expiry date and no cost to the American taxpayer, and promised that Washington would “immediately begin the process of developing a large Military presence in the appropriate part of Greenland” (CNN).
Set that announcement beside the Danish and Greenlandic statements issued the same afternoon, however, and a different document comes into view. Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen’s office said the agreement “recognizes the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Kingdom and the Greenlandic people’s right to self-determination,” and that it would be “great for NATO and Europe as well” (The Guardian).
Greenland’s Prime Minister, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, said it “recognizes Greenland’s interests and our place in the international cooperation,” and suggested that in substance it may simply reiterate rights the United States already holds through NATO and the 1951 defense agreement (The Guardian). The Associated Press offered the plainest summary available: the deal expands the American military presence “while leaving island in Denmark’s hands” (AP, via the Twin Cities Pioneer Press).
Consider how far the ground has shifted. Eight months ago, the President of the United States was threatening tariffs against eight European states and declining to rule out force to acquire the territory of a founding NATO ally. Now he has announced an access agreement, with signature expected next week at the UN General Assembly, that leaves Danish title untouched and writes Greenlandic self-determination into the text.
That outcome was not luck. It was the product of a deliberate, patient, negotiation.
The problem itself is not new, and I have been working it for some time.
In May 2014, in the wake of Russia’s actions in Ukraine, I was in Copenhagen presenting to the Centre for Military Studies and writing about the need to “work the problem” of Greenland’s defense (Second Line of Defense, May 23, 2014).
What made Greenland tricky then is what makes it tricky now. Denmark is responsible for security and defense, yet Greenland is quasi-independent, aspires to development and prosperity, and is being opened to outside influence, above all through mining and foreign investment.
The question I posed was how Greenland would actually be defended, in practical terms, given Nuuk’s ambitions, Copenhagen’s responsibilities, and Washington’s uncertain policies. The agreement announced last week is a provisional but substantive answer to that question.
What the agreement actually contains
According to Reuters and a State Department official briefing reporters, the agreement provides for a significant expansion of the U.S. military presence. It prohibits non-NATO states, explicitly including China and Russia, from establishing bases or stationing troops on the island; restricts “sensitive investments” to the United States and its allies, subject to American written approval; and grants permanent access, basing, and overflight rights. Secretary of State Marco Rubio framed Greenland as “forever” part of the strategic defense area of North America (Reuters). A U.S. official added that under the prior status quo, any country, adversaries included, could in principle have been permitted to build a base or send troops to Greenland (CNN).
Three observations follow.
First, most of the military content is not new.
The 1951 Defense of Greenland Agreement already granted the United States extensive operational rights (Defense of Greenland Agreement, 1951). Christine Nissen of Think Tank Europa described them as “very extensive operational rights in Greenland pertaining to construction, movement and logistics,” while stressing that the arrangement “is not territorial, and sovereignty sits with Denmark and Greenland’s self-government” (Al Jazeera). CNN noted in January that the framework Trump was then trumpeting “sounds a lot like an already-existing” 1951 deal that permitted an American presence in perpetuity (CNN). And Reuters observed on Friday that the United States already holds near-total overflight and basing rights under that treaty (Reuters).
The 2004 update, moreover, already allows Washington to increase its troop deployments so long as Denmark and Greenland are informed in advance.
Much of what Washington has announced, in other words, is access it already enjoyed. The legal architecture for a larger American presence existed before the crisis, and what the negotiation needed was clarity, trust, and a political frame all three governments could accept.
Second, the genuinely new material is the exclusion regime.
A formal bar on adversary bases, adversary troops, and adversary investment in sensitive sectors is a substantive addition, and it speaks directly to the competitive backdrop Ed Timperlake described: Russia’s expanded Arctic presence and China’s self-declared status as a “near-Arctic state”. In kill web terms, it decides who may touch the network’s critical nodes. I
t is also an addition Copenhagen could accept at little cost, because it aligns with Danish and Greenlandic policy anyway. Denmark spent the winter arguing, correctly on the evidence, that there has been little to no Chinese or Russian military activity around Greenland over the past decade.
Norwegian Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide reinforced the point by observing that the real Arctic presence sits on the Russian side of the basin, at the Kola Peninsula bases far nearer to Norway’s coast (RUSI). Denmark thus conceded a prohibition on something that was not happening militarily, in exchange for the retirement of an existential threat to the Kingdom’s integrity.
That is a good trade.
The investment restriction has a longer history and a more concrete target. When I was in Copenhagen in 2014, the worry was less Chinese warships than Chinese money. Large mining projects that needed foreign capital were seen in Greenland as one of the few routes to a sustainable economy, and therefore to the independence promised by the 2009 Self-Government Act, which followed a referendum in which about 75 percent of voters said yes.
Danish analysts at the time tied China’s Arctic aspirations directly to the future of the Danish-Greenlandic relationship (Second Line of Defense). The clearest illustration came in 2018, when a Chinese bid to fund airport construction in Greenland was blocked under U.S. and Danish pressure/ A clause that screens sensitive investment through American written approval is the contemporary form of that old concern.
Third, and this deserves careful attention from anyone tracking Greenlandic politics, Reuters reports that the agreement continues to apply even if Greenland becomes independent (Reuters). Greenland has held the right to declare independence by referendum since 2009 (Al Jazeera). Copenhagen secured the Kingdom’s territorial integrity today; Nuuk, in return, accepted a constraint that would survive its own eventual statehood.
That clause will be litigated in Greenlandic politics for years, and it will test a proposition at the center of this whole affair: that an alliance node is most durable when its host has consented to it.
It is also a clause with a long intellectual pedigree.
In 2014 I summarized the argument of Mikkel Vedby Rasmussen, then head of the Centre for Military Studies, that Greenland could be a sovereign, independent country only by providing stability and control over its own territory in a way that assured the United States of access while confidently denying access to potentially hostile powers. Anyone arguing for independence, he said, would have to be able to address that. Rasmussen added that Washington had its own reasons to care, since a stable Greenland matters to Canada–U.S. relations.
Rear Admiral Nils Wang of the Royal Danish Defence College and Damien Degeorges made a complementary point: Greenland’s quest for sovereignty would unfold in a period of sharply rising outside pressure, which was a reason, as I put it then, for Nuuk to consider working closely with Denmark on defense arrangements (Second Line of Defense).
The new agreement writes that logic into a text. What Rasmussen described as the price of eventual sovereignty has been agreed in advance, before independence has even been put to a vote.
Why the fight over title was never the point
Ed Timperlake’s February article, “Greenland and the High Ground of the Kill Web,” did not join the argument over who owned what. It asked what the Arctic is for. Drawing on the framework we developed in A Maritime Kill Web Force in the Making, he set the traditional kill chain, a sequential and centralized process that a capable adversary can disrupt, against the kill web, in which any sensor can cue any shooter and decision authority flows from shared awareness rather than rigid hierarchy.
On that logic, Greenland matters because the Arctic has become the shortest route for missiles, hypersonic glide vehicles, and long-range strike; because Greenland anchors the Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom Gap, once an anti-submarine problem and now an air, space, cyber, and missile defense problem; and because high-latitude sensors compress the decision timelines of commanders across NATO and U.S. commands (Timperlake).
Three of his points bear directly on the negotiation.
- The first is that early detection is the real prize, and that it has value only when it is fused into a network of interceptors, command systems, and allied decision-makers. The current American footprint is thin for that purpose. At the height of the Cold War the United States reportedly had more than 10,000 troops and 17 installations in Greenland. Today it maintains one, the Space Force’s Pituffik Space Base, which supports missile warning, missile defense, and space surveillance, and the administration believes a larger presence could eventually play a role in the planned Golden Dome system.
- The second point is that resilience beats centralization. Greenland works best as a hardened, mission-focused node, not as a sprawling hub that becomes a single point of failure in combat.
- The third is that the purpose is defensive: sustained awareness and decision capability under stress, not offensive exploitation of infrastructure.
Set those requirements against the dispute over title and something becomes clear.
A kill web needs reliable access, secure and hardened infrastructure, integration with allied systems, and the political stability to sustain all three. Ownership adds none of these and can subtract from them. A node imposed on an unwilling population is a vulnerability, because it invites political pressure, sabotage, and information operations that an adversary will gladly exploit. A node hosted by a willing partner, whose sovereignty is respected and whose citizens see a stake in the arrangement, is far more resilient. Respect for Greenlandic self-determination is, in this sense, an operational requirement of the network as well as a courtesy to an ally.
Diplomats separate positions from interests. The American position, at its height, was ownership. The Danish and Greenlandic position was firm on sovereignty and self-determination.
Underneath, the interests were compatible.
Washington needs reliable sensing, missile warning, space surveillance, freedom of action in the Arctic, and assurance that no adversary can plant itself on the island. Copenhagen and Nuuk need their sovereignty and territorial integrity respected, a voice in decisions that affect Greenland, and a credible answer to a real security threat.
None of these is zero-sum.
I do not suggest that Danish negotiators worked from Ed Timperlake’s framework. The operational logic he described is a property of the geography and the technology, and a skilled negotiator does not need the vocabulary to act on it. What Denmark and Greenland did was hold the line on title, which cost the network nothing, while making it easy for Washington to see that its operational interests could be met on that basis.
Five instruments of Danish statecraft
Behind the outcome lies a set of choices that, taken together, amount to a method. Five instruments stand out, and read through the kill web logic each did the same job: it kept what the network requires and what the host consents to pointing in the same direction.
Confront directly, then institutionalize. In mid-January, Frederiksen and Nielsen sent their foreign ministers to Washington rather than seeking a leaders’ summit. Lars Løkke Rasmussen emerged to say publicly that a “fundamental disagreement” with the United States remained, while describing the talks with the Vice President and Secretary of State as “frank and constructive” (BBC).
RUSI characterized the meeting as ending in an “agreement to disagree,” and noted that its real product was the high-level working group that would become the negotiating vehicle for the next eight months (RUSI). By naming the disagreement rather than burying it, Copenhagen preserved its credibility at home and in Nuuk, and it bought the one thing small states most need against a larger power: time inside a process, in a forum where interests could be separated from positions.
Destroy the neglect narrative with a checkbook. The core American public argument was that Denmark was failing its constitutional duty to defend Greenland. Copenhagen answered with numbers. The Danish Ministry of Defence records a 2025 decision to invest more than DKK 88 billion, roughly $13.7 billion, in Arctic and North Atlantic capability (Danish Ministry of Defence), and a further 42 billion kroner was pledged specifically for Greenland. The results are already becoming visible. Ground-based air defense has arrived, and the first coastal radar for Nuuk was due in July 2026.
Construction of a new port and a military headquarters was set to begin this year, and arctic vessels, icebreakers, drones, maritime patrol aircraft, aerial refueling, and an eastern Greenland nuclear monitoring station and air-warning radar are all programmed, with the build-out running to 2033 (The Straits Times). RUSI’s account of the Danish campaign lists “reclaiming the narrative” first among four pillars, alongside strength in numbers, cultivating support inside the United States, and maintaining Denmark–Greenland unity (RUSI).
Look at that shopping list as Ed Timperlake would. Radars, air defense, maritime patrol, aerial refueling, drones, and an air-warning station are overwhelmingly sensing, warning, and reach: the capabilities he identified as the real prize of a high-latitude presence. Denmark was not only rebutting a charge of neglect. It was building nodes, and it was doing so on its own account, which is the surest way to establish that Copenhagen was a partner in the network rather than an obstacle to it.
The contrast with the past is striking. When I wrote in 2014, the Danish presence in Greenland was largely a naval and coast guard affair: search and rescue, fisheries inspection, a few air force platforms for logistics and surveillance, and the Sirius Patrol’s sled patrols across the north. Then Defence Minister Nick Hækkerup had predicted in 2012 that Arctic operations would be an area where Denmark would spend more money in the years to come (Second Line of Defense). The 2025 investment decisions are that prediction coming due.
Internationalize the question of title. On January 6, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, and the United Kingdom issued a joint declaration grounding Arctic security in the principles of the UN Charter (Opinio Juris). The European Commission confirmed that Greenland is in principle covered by the EU’s mutual assistance clause (Euronews), and the European Parliament’s group leaders declared unequivocal support for Denmark and Greenland (European Parliament). France, Germany, Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom pledged troops for exercises in Greenland (RUSI), and Frederiksen and Nielsen traveled together to Berlin and Paris to shore up that support (CNBC). None of this could have stopped an American operation.
All of it raised the political cost of one, and it supplied Washington with an off-ramp that could be described as allied burden-sharing rather than retreat. It also began work that a purely bilateral framing neglects: bringing European allies into the Arctic network, one of the strategic tasks that still lies ahead.
The legal ground beneath that campaign is unusually firm. Chatham House called the Danish claim “unimpeachable,” citing continuous administration since Hans Egede’s arrival in 1721; the Permanent Court of International Justice’s 1933 ruling against Norway’s competing claim; UN General Assembly Resolution 849 (IX), which recognized Greenland’s integration into the Kingdom; the 1951 agreement, in which the United States expressly recognized Danish sovereignty; and the 2004 update, in which Washington acknowledged Greenland’s status as an equal part of the Kingdom (Chatham House). Denmark was not defending a position of ambiguity. It was defending a position the United States had itself twice signed.
Reframe from sovereignty to shared Arctic security. Rather than let the dispute remain a bilateral contest over title, Frederiksen moved it onto ground where Washington’s interests and Copenhagen’s converged, calling for a “permanent presence of NATO in the Arctic region, including around Greenland” (Reuters). Mark Rutte became the channel. At Davos on January 21, following a meeting with the NATO Secretary General, Trump announced a “framework of a future deal” on Greenland, dropped the threatened tariffs, and ruled out the use of force (BBC). Rutte said he had not discussed Danish sovereignty at all.
That episode also shows the limits of the technique. Greenlanders were furious at being talked about rather than talked to. Danish Defence Minister Troels Lund Poulsen said flatly that Rutte “cannot negotiate an agreement on behalf of Denmark or Greenland.” Deputy Prime Minister Mute Egede wrote that “our country will neither be given away, nor will our future be gambled with,” and a Nuuk skipper, Niels Berthelsen, put it simply: “nothing about Greenland without Greenland” (AFP, via Ahram Online).
The alliance route bought de-escalation at a real cost in Greenlandic trust, and Copenhagen spent the following eight months repairing it. The episode also makes the point about consent in miniature. A deal struck over Nuuk’s head would have produced exactly the kind of node the network can least afford: one whose host feels it was talked about rather than talked to.
Hold the unity, and pay for it. Greenland’s negotiating line was never subtle. Egede, receiving U.S. special envoy Jeff Landry in Nuuk in May, said “we have some red lines” and “we will not sell Greenland, we will own Greenland for all time,” while Nielsen reported progress and insisted on “a solution that is good for us all” (Reuters). Copenhagen backed that line materially.
On September 15, three days before the announcement, the Danish government and Naalakkersuisut signed a partial agreement worth DKK 1.2 billion covering 2026–2029. It provides relief for the most economically vulnerable Greenlanders, funding for the utility sector and the self-rule utility Nukissiorfiit, water supply projects in Ilulissat, and operating funds for the new international airports, along with 2027 feasibility studies for a regional airstrip at Ittoqqortoormiit and a deep-water port at Qaqortoq (The Copenhagen Post). A three-century colonial relationship does not produce automatic solidarity. It has to be bought, and Copenhagen bought it at precisely the right moment.
Ed Timperlake’s test for the network includes a question that is easy to skip: are the people who host these capabilities better off for hosting them?
The DKK 1.2 billion agreement was Copenhagen’s down payment on a yes.
The endgame, and a lesson in leverage
The final weeks show a government that understood the relationship between diplomatic text and physical presence. Through the first weeks of September, some 400 troops from ten NATO countries operated on land, at sea, and in the air near Narsarsuaq and Kangerlussuaq, under the temporary Arctic Shield exercise within NATO’s Arctic Sentry surveillance and deterrence mission. Arctic Command chief Søren Andersen described the objective as turning NATO’s northern flank into a “hard target” running from Alaska across Canada, through Greenland, to northern Norway (The Copenhagen Post). In kill web terms, the phrase describes a connected flank rather than a line of isolated outposts.
Those two place names matter. The New York Times, citing American sources, reported that Washington sought three bases in Greenland, with Narsarsuaq and Kangerlussuaq among the candidate locations. Chief of Defence Michael Hyldgaard noted that Narsarsuaq was an obvious candidate given its southern position and its access to transatlantic routes and the Denmark Strait. Defence Minister Jeppe Bruus sought Folketing support to extend Narsarsuaq’s operating period by a year: “Initially, it is a one-year extension. That gives us the opportunity to extend the playing board” (The Copenhagen Post). While negotiating over who would use these airfields, Denmark was filling them with allied troops and keeping them open on its own authority. It arrived at the table already in possession of the assets under discussion.
Discipline held to the end. Bruus refused to characterize the talks at all: “I cannot comment on that. What goes on in that working group, goes on in that working group.” Frederiksen said only that she was “quite optimistic,” and Rasmussen, a week later, was “cautiously optimistic” (The Copenhagen Post). Andersen, asked in June whether Greenland needed American bases to be defensible, answered that Greenland already has enough bases to defend itself (The Straits Times). Silence in the negotiating room and confidence in public sent the same message: Denmark was not in a hurry.
Continuity of personnel mattered as much as continuity of message. When a new Danish government was formed in June, Rasmussen was retained at the Foreign Ministry specifically as a key architect of Copenhagen’s response to American pressure, to steer the next phase of the talks (Bloomberg). Consider the contrast.
The administration across the table changed its public position on Greenland repeatedly, including Trump’s reiteration at the July NATO summit in Ankara that Greenland “should be controlled by the United States, not by Denmark,” which drew Frederiksen’s response that allies should “respect the sovereignty of the Danish kingdom” (Reuters). Against that, Copenhagen offered eight months, one negotiator, and one line. Consistency was itself a weapon.
Ed Timperlake chose to clarify in February, writing about the underlying strategic reality while the news cycle ran on tariffs and threats. Copenhagen and Nuuk made the same choice in a different arena. Every escalation drew a response, but the line itself never moved: title stays with the Kingdom, self-determination is written into the text, and the alliance’s northern flank can be strengthened on that basis.
The facts underneath did not change when the rhetoric did, which is why a settlement was always likelier than a rupture.
What remains open
The signed text is not public, and the Guardian noted on Friday that the full scope of the agreement was not immediately clear. Four questions will determine whether this holds.
Does it supersede or amend the 1951 treaty’s consultation obligations? That treaty, as amended in 2004, requires the United States to consult with and inform Denmark and Greenland before making significant changes to its military operations or facilities in Greenland. Bloomberg reported in January that Washington was seeking effectively unlimited presence, unencumbered by that requirement (Bloomberg).
Whether consultation, joint oversight, review points, and termination options survive in the new text is the single most consequential detail still unknown. Nissen identified exactly those instruments as the tools available to Copenhagen and Nuuk to shape what American ambitions become on the ground (Al Jazeera). They are also the mechanisms that keep a host a partner rather than a subject.
Will the parliaments ratify? Signature is expected next week at the UN General Assembly, but the agreement must clear Danish and Greenlandic parliamentary procedures before it can be enforced (AP, via the Twin Cities Pioneer Press). That is not a formality.
The 2023 U.S.–Danish defense cooperation agreement, approved by the Folketing in 2025, has already drawn claims that it is unconstitutional (The Guardian). Danish MP Sascha Faxe’s January formulation, “there can’t be a deal without having Greenland as part of the negotiations,” reflects a parliamentary mood that will scrutinize the text closely (Al Jazeera).
How will 57,000 Greenlanders read it? Nielsen’s careful line that the agreement “recognizes Greenland’s interests and our place in the international cooperation” is the language of a leader who intends to defend this at home. The independence-survival clause will be the flashpoint, and the trust Copenhagen spent the summer rebuilding will be tested as much by how the text is explained as by what it says. This is Ed Timperlake’s question about hosts, asked in a political register.
And what does the outcome tell the rest of the alliance? That is the part worth sitting with. A state of six million people, facing annexation pressure from its own principal ally, refused to choose between capitulation and rupture. It invested in real Arctic capability. It built a legal and diplomatic coalition. It reframed the dispute as common defense of the northern flank. It kept its territorial partner inside the tent and paid to keep it there, put allied boots on the specific airfields under negotiation, and let a single negotiator hold a single line for eight months. The result is an agreement that expands American access, which Denmark wanted anyway and has been funding since 2025, while leaving sovereignty, self-determination, and parliamentary control formally intact.
Beyond those four questions, the agreement will eventually be judged by tests that have little to do with rhetoric, and Ed Timperlake’s framework supplies them.
- Is the alliance detecting and comprehending threats sooner?
- Are its decisions faster and better informed? Is the network more resilient, with more nodes, more redundancy, and fewer single points of failure?
- Are the people who host these capabilities better off for hosting them?
A triumph, on those terms, is something that can be verified in the field a year or two from now, not something announced on a Friday.
The President will call it a triumph, and in his own terms it is one. So, quietly, will Copenhagen. The interesting question for the alliance is not who won. It is that the smaller party discovered it had more leverage than anyone, including many in Washington, had assumed, and knew exactly how to spend it. That leverage rested on a fact Ed Timperlake set down in February: the network needs Greenland, and it works best when Greenland is a willing partner.
In 2014 I concluded that how Greenland’s defense was worked out with Denmark, the Nordics, the United States, and other Europeans would be integral to the evolution of Europe and NATO as wealth and influence shifted north (Second Line of Defense). That judgment has held up. What has changed is that the question is now being answered at the highest level of alliance politics rather than in seminar rooms in Copenhagen.
None of this settles anything yet.
The text remains unpublished, the ratification fights lie ahead, and Greenland’s own politics will have a great deal to say about what was agreed in its name.
But if the pattern I have watched in Denmark for two decades holds, Copenhagen will keep doing what it has always done: read the balance of power soberly and defend what matters most, patiently, one negotiating round at a time.
Seeing Through the Storm: How Ed Timperlake’s Greenland Argument Anticipated the New Agreement