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

The map of the north has been redrawn by a signature, and the men who drew it call it peace.

Greenland is a rock in the cold sea, and for a century its value was measured in weather reports and airfields. Today it guards the shortest road over the pole - the door through which any war in the north must pass. I remember when the Americans asked leave to garrison it. Denmark then lay under the enemy’s boot, and her minister in Washington gave his consent as a free man gives it: because the alternative was the swastika on the ice. Consent freely given is the mortar of alliance. Consent extracted by months of threats from one’s own ally is another material altogether, and I doubt it sets.

“Permanent security control.” The phrase has the smoothness of a lawyer’s drafting. Permanent, in diplomacy, has a way of meaning until someone stronger grows tired; control, of meaning everything but the flag. Denmark keeps the title deeds. The question is who holds the keys.

NATO welcomes the arrangement. Welcome is what one offers a guest; I have not before seen it offered to a creditor who arrives with a bailiff. The real story is not an island. It is that the largest member of the alliance spent a season threatening to dismember a smaller one, and the smaller one bought him off. That is the lesson now taught in the chancelleries of the world: the charter is paper; appetite is currency.

Yet the remedy is not despair but arithmetic. The small nations of Europe together outweigh any one appetite - if they stand as one body, fund their own defence, and refuse to be picked off one headland at a time. The ice binds the north. So must they bind each other.

Bought peace is not peace. It is an invoice.