US and Denmark agree military presence in Greenland

There are some fifty-six thousand people in Greenland, most of them Inuit, who learned on Friday that the military future of their island had been settled between Mette Frederiksen’s government and Donald Trump’s administration. No one is bleeding, and no rule of war has been broken, because there is no war. That is exactly why the case needs an inspector’s eye. The rules that protect these people are peacetime rules, and peacetime rules are the ones nobody counts.

The first is Article 30 of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. It says military activities shall not take place on indigenous lands unless justified by a relevant public interest or freely agreed with the peoples concerned. Denmark voted for that text. The difficulty lies in the seam between Greenland’s 2009 Self-Government Act and the agreement now announced. Greenland governs most of its internal affairs, but defence and foreign policy stayed in Copenhagen. Denmark can therefore sign lawfully, and whether Greenlanders consented becomes a political courtesy rather than a legal requirement. It is a treaty with two signature lines and the actual tenant living in the margin.

The public quarrel is over whether the United States has obtained “permanent control.” I think this looks at the wrong ledger. Sovereignty presumably remains Danish, and a presence agreement is not a title. But a presence that cannot be terminated, inspected, or contested by the people beside it behaves like title without ever using the word. The useful question is who holds the power to end it.

The strongest case for the agreement deserves a full hearing. Denmark cannot defend the largest island on earth with the forces it has. Russian and Chinese interest in the Arctic is real, and a serious American garrison may protect Greenlanders as well as Americans. A base already stands at Pituffik, and it has stood there for decades. I grant all of it, and then I read the record of that base. In 1953 the Inughuit of Uummannaq were moved to Qaanaaq to make room for the airfield at Thule, with little notice. In 1968 a bomber carrying nuclear weapons crashed nearby, and the Danish workers who cleaned up afterward spent years fighting for recognition of their illnesses. Both costs were imposed by agreements between capitals, and Denmark’s own later apologies to Greenlanders for other policies show how such decisions look in retrospect. The precedent is the best argument for building safeguards into this agreement now.

The stated purpose is deterrence of Russia and China, and deterrence sometimes fails. If it does, every installation becomes a military objective. Article 58 of Additional Protocol I obliges parties to avoid placing such objectives within or near densely populated areas, and to remove civilians from the vicinity of them. Greenland’s settlements are small and scattered, and no road connects the towns. The island has one main hospital, in Nuuk, and a patient in a distant settlement is reached by aircraft or ship, if the weather permits. A buildup that brings targets without adding civilian medical capacity moves the risk onto those least able to leave. The first document I would ask to see is the evacuation plan. I have not seen one, and I have not seen the text of the agreement either. The absence of both is already a finding.

Pity is not a programme, so here is what a programme would contain. There should be a standing monitoring body seated in Nuuk with Greenlandic appointees, and with access to the sites and the authority to publish what it finds. Jurisdiction over incidents involving foreign personnel must be written down before the first incident. Contamination baselines should be surveyed at the start, so that liability cannot later be argued away. Civilian hospital and airlift capacity should be paid for as part of the basing cost, and a termination clause should exist that Greenland’s own government can invoke. None of this is hostile to the alliance. Each item makes the arrangement more durable, because an arrangement the population can inspect is one they have less reason to resent.

Denmark and the United States have the right to make a defence bargain. What they cannot do lawfully or wisely is make it about fifty-six thousand people while leaving them as spectators. In Qaanaaq, the families moved from Uummannaq in 1953 will read this agreement when they are allowed to, looking for one sentence only, the one that names who may say no.