On: Nato welcomes Greenland deal as Trump says it will give US 'permanent security...

I read that the matter of Greenland is settled - two capitals have shaken hands, and the alliance applauds. The word used is control. Permanent security control. I have copied the phrase twice now, and it does not improve with copying.

I have lived long enough to watch a territory change hands by purchase, the people upon it inventoried with the soil. We called that a bargain then; we call it a deal now. The vocabulary is refreshed. The arithmetic is not.

Here is what I notice, and I notice it because I have spent a life keeping accounts while men kept treaties: no one at that table was from Greenland. The Danes negotiated for them, the Americans negotiated about them, and the Greenlanders - the ones who haul the boats, salt the fish, teach the children their letters in two languages - were the subject of the sentence, never the speaker of it. Security is a fine word. But security for whom, and whose bread is counted at whose table?

A household understands this at once. Sell the roof over my head to a stranger, call it protection, and I will still be the one deciding where the firewood goes and what the children eat. A home is not an abstraction to the person doing the work inside it.

If this continues - great powers dividing the map between them, the people on the map consulted last or never - mark me: the discontent will be audible in the kitchens of Nuuk long before it reaches any communiqué. It always is. The fisherman reads the ice before the ministry does.

They call it settled. I call it a deed signed by all parties but the family who lives inside it.