Is the Greenland Deal a Win?

Foreign Affairs Not for the reasons the White House is saying. Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images The Great Greenland Crisis has ended, and Donald Trump has declared victory. Last Friday, the president announced that he had reached a deal with the Danes that would give “the United States permanent control over security, and all other needs, in Greenland, completely addressing ALL of our many U.S. concerns.” The barren, icy prize is finally ours. Or is it? Despite the usual bluster, bravado, and social media posts showing Greenland colored in with the Stars and Stripes, Trump’s avowed aim of annexation was not accomplished. The Dannebrog will still flutter in the Arctic breeze. According to a statement put out by Denmark’sPrime Minister Mette Frederiksen Friday, the deal “recognizes the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Kingdom [of Denmark] and the Greenlandic people’s right to self-determination.” Nor does the new agreement appear to give American firms new economic privileges, another reason Trump has cited for taking the island (although, interestingly, it does come two weeks after a U.S.-based company closed a deal for a big Greenlandic mining concern). Rather, so far as can be determined without seeing the actual text—which is due out this week, to be signed on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly—the deal amounts to a kind of tinkering with the status quo. Since 1951, the U.S. military presence in Greenland has been governed by the Greenland Defense Agreement, a short but sweeping pact that grants the U.S. military basing and access rights across the territory for an indefinite period of time. It was under this agreement that we constructed a network of about a dozen installations during the Cold War, all but one of which we closed down after the Soviet Union fell. (The surviving base was Thule, now renamed Pittufik in a nod to Inuit sensibilities.) And most of the benefits the White House has highlighted since Friday—the access to all of Greenland, the lack of U.S. payments, even what the president arrestingly called the pact’s “Infinite Life”—were in fact already provided for by the 1951 agreement. Though there are a few new additions. U.S. officials say that the deal will explicitly block non-NATO nations from basing forces in Greenland, for example. (Even if it seems doubtful in the extreme Copenhagen would ever have allowed this.) The new agreement is also supposed to give the U.S. government some degree of control over adversaries’ ability to invest in Greenland, although the specifics are unclear (and Denmark, for what it’s worth, has historically blocked Chinese deals when we’ve pushed). And it’s been reported that this deal will provide the U.S. military with more latitude to construct military facilities. But the most salutary thing for U.S. interests is not the grab bag of minor concessions noted above, most of which any president could have had for the asking. It is, rather, the way in which the deal was brought off. For a year and a half, the Trump administration has employed cajolery, bluster, and bullying to obtain an outcome Europe has always held to be flatly unacceptable. Trump has sought to buy Greenland; he has tried to use tariffs to dislodge it from Denmark; he has suggested the United States may take the island by force. And behind the half-baked security rationales, the true motive has always been clear: to close America’s biggest real estate deal since the Mexican cession, at Europe’s expense. The effect has been to unnerve Europe, and to force its leaders to question their most deeply held assumptions about American policy and power. More than anything else in the last few years, it has persuaded the Europeans that the United States has changed. That the old guarantor of security, which could be depended upon to commit its blood and treasure to defending the other side of the Atlantic—and even defer to its wards on the planning and conduct of that defense—was no more. As one European diplomat told the Financial Times at the height of tensions in January, “We know who our allies no longer are. It’s just we are still hoping we are wrong and the problem will go away. We know what needs to be done, we just need to bloody do it.” Subscribe Today Get daily emails in your inbox If one thinks that the world’s wealthiest continent must provide for its own defense, this is immensely positive. The U.S. can and should leave Europe on its own terms, as I have previously argued in these pages. But in view of the pervasiveness of Atlanticism in American foreign policy circles, the task will be made considerably easier if the ostensible beneficiaries—that is, the Europeans themselves—cease to see American security commitments as dependable or even desirable. We are a way off from that yet. And of course, one could argue that by abandoning the demand for annexation and resolving the crisis, Trump has also ended these dissensions. (Not to mention the deal’s other downsides, like the fact that Greenland—and therefore Europe—is now likely to play a central role in building out the wasteful, unnecessary, and probably unworkable Golden Dome system.) But some of the damage will endure. The fractures created by an American president threatening economic and even military devastation in order to seize European territory cannot be entirely papered over. Even if the push was initially attributable to Trump’s personal proclivities, the fact that the entire U.S. policy apparatus (including the Pentagon) was willing to sustain such an adversarial campaign against a treaty ally will resonate in Old World capitals for years to come. So viewed in its wider aspect, as the dénouement of a drama that has made a bad status quo less tenable, the Greenland deal is indeed a win for America First.