Experts see three key changes in Trump’s Greenland deal

Experts say a new agreement between Greenland, Denmark and the United States appears favourable to Denmark and Greenland, but its details remain largely unknown, DR reports. The agreement is expected to be signed next week.

US President Donald Trump has offered his own account of the deal on Truth Social, while the Greenlandic and Danish governments have issued brief statements. Mette Frederiksen and Jens Frederik Nielsen are travelling to New York, but Frederiksen has declined to disclose the agreement’s contents until everything is finalised.

Marc Jacobsen, a lecturer at the Royal Danish Defence College who researches Arctic security policy, and Rasmus Bruun Pedersen, a lecturer in international politics at Aarhus University, have highlighted three points in Trump’s statement.

The US will increase its military presence

Trump writes that the United States will have “permanent control over security” in Greenland.

Nielsen, the chairman of Naalakkersuisut, says the agreement “ensures and strengthens security for Greenland, the Kingdom of Denmark, the United States and the Western alliance”. Frederiksen says it “strengthens our shared security in the Arctic and the North Atlantic region”.

It was expected that the US would increase its military presence in Greenland. However, Jacobsen says this would also have been possible under the previous agreement between the Kingdom of Denmark and the United States, which dates from 1951 and was updated in 2004.

The agreement has no end date

Trump says the new agreement has no end. The 1951 agreement states that it will “remain in force for the same period as the North Atlantic Treaty”.

“In other words, it was tied to NATO’s existence,” Jacobsen told Danish public broadcaster P1 Morgen.

If Trump’s description is accurate, the change could reflect his limited support for NATO, Jacobsen says. The new agreement is not tied to NATO, he argues, but more closely to the United States and “America First”.

The US appears to gain a veto

Trump also says other countries will not be allowed to maintain a military presence or invest in Greenland unless the United States approves.

Jacobsen says the US already had de facto military control over Greenland, often with Denmark acting as an intermediary. Under the new agreement, however, Denmark may no longer need to serve that role.

“With this document in hand, the United States can veto something and say, ‘We want to oppose that’,” he said.

According to Bruun Pedersen, the wording shows that Greenland has been firmly drawn into the US sphere of interest. He says the US considers itself to have both the right and the duty to intervene if something threatens American interests.

The long-term consequences remain unclear, he says. The United States usually considers China and Russia to be its adversaries, but there have also been conflicts with Europe and the European Union. It is therefore uncertain whether larger European investments in Greenland could eventually face US opposition.