US and Denmark agree military presence in Greenland

The institution designed to prevent a foreign garrison from hardening into a foreign sovereignty was the defence agreement between Washington and Copenhagen, which has long treated Denmark as the sole landlord of Greenland and the American presence as a tenancy. It has not so much failed as been made redundant by what the two governments signed on Friday: an arrangement between Mette Frederiksen and Donald Trump for a significant American military presence on the island. Its restraint was always the restraint of two parties who might quarrel with each other. The question is not whether the action was right, but whether any institution exists that could have stopped it if it was wrong, and I have looked for one in vain.

Consider how power is distributed. Under the self-government settlement, as I understand it, defence and foreign affairs remain with Copenhagen. Greenland governs its own fisheries, its schools, its health, and holds a route to independence by its own vote, but on the question of who may station soldiers upon its rock, it is heard rather than obeyed. The Folketing may scrutinise, and the American Senate may or may not be asked; an executive agreement need not pass through it. So the party with the most at stake in the land is the party with the least standing at the table. The named principals are a Danish prime minister and an American president. The people who live there are not among them.

The strongest defence of the arrangement deserves its full weight. Russia and China have interests in the Arctic, and a Denmark of modest means cannot police that ocean alone. A great ally supplying radar, aircraft and men is a genuine security good, and Copenhagen, by negotiating rather than being bullied, has kept a hand on the pen. I grant all of it. A garrison is not an annexation, and to call it one would be to mistake the soldier for the flag.

But observe what is contested in this very event: whether the United States has obtained “permanent control.” That the dispute exists at all is the diagnosis. A lease names its term and its landlord; sovereignty names neither. When honest observers cannot say which one has been signed, the instrument has been drafted so that its meaning will be settled later by whoever holds the ground. Possession is the most patient of lawyers.

The comparison is instructive, and I offer two. In 1903 the United States obtained from Cuba a lease of the bay at Guantanamo, at a rent, in perpetuity, terminable only by mutual consent. Cuba has spent the better part of a century as a landlord whose tenant will not leave and whose rent cheques go uncashed. The lease was consensual on paper and permanent in fact, because the clause that would have restored the land required the agreement of the very party benefiting from its absence. Britain, for its part, detached the Chagos islands from Mauritius before independence to make room for a base at Diego Garcia, and the islanders who lived there were removed; the legal wrangling over that decision has lasted decades, long after the strategic value was banked. In both cases the arrangement was defended at signing as modest and temporary, and in both the withdrawal clause proved to be the only clause that mattered.

Greenland has its own precedent, and it is the most telling. In the early 1950s, when the Thule base was built, the Inughuit families living near it were moved north to make room, by authorities in Copenhagen who had negotiated with Washington and not with the hunters. One imagines a family loading a sledge, told that the arrangement was temporary and the reasons were strategic. The reasons were sound, I dare say. The families did not go home.

Here, then, is the check under pressure: the consent of the inhabitants, which in this structure exists only as a political courtesy and not as a legal veto over defence. A courtesy is functional exactly as long as the powerful find it convenient. Denmark will presumably consult Nuuk out of decency and prudence, and I would not bet against its doing so. But a balance that rests on the decency of the balanced is no balance. The next Danish government, or the next American one, is the successor one would not choose.

The structure, then, is unsound in one place only, but it is the place where soundness matters. What should be written into the instrument is not a promise but a mechanism: a fixed term, a named authority for renewal, and a Greenlandic signature required for any extension, so that the word “permanent” cannot arrive by drift. Absent that, the matter will be settled in some office in Nuuk, years hence, by a clerk handed a document and asked whether the word appears in it.