American interest in Greenland confronts Denmark with a choice it has faced before. With strategic imagination, it could engage the US to forge a mutually beneficial path for the island’s future.
Denmark is well-practised in the relinquishment of its lands. The Danish kingdom was compelled by war to surrender Norway (to Sweden) and Schleswig-Holstein (to Prussia) in the 19th century. In the 20th century, processes that were more voluntary unfolded: the government in Copenhagen sold the erstwhile Danish West Indies to the United States, and conceded independence to Iceland by stages. So what makes the prospect of a severed relationship with Greenland the exception to the Danish record?
Much of the Danish rejection is rooted in the proximate politics of Europe, in which Donald Trump and his America are seen as simply beyond the pale. It’s one thing to sell islands to Woodrow Wilson, but it’s something else entirely to sell the world’s biggest island to the bigly president. This could be interpreted as an aesthetic preference masquerading as principle. At the same time, it is indisputable that much of the American approach has stoked the reaction. The events of this week, with tariff threats and leaked texts, illuminate the phenomenon. Sometimes persuasion yields more than direct appeal. Danish pride and nationalism, alive and well in a Europe with too little of both, proves the point.
Implicit in the refusal to entertain the American aspiration is a strategic choice by Danish statecraft, whether or not Danes or their government fully realise it. That choice is to cast their lot entirely with a Europe that remains, for all the busy pretensions of Brussels, an ephemeral power.
Denmark could take a different course. The kingdom is a longtime ally of the United States and its soldiers fought bravely alongside America’s soldiers in Afghanistan. This spirit could inform the reaction to American needs now: instead of a rejection of the American relationship and a refuge in a Europe that could not guarantee the integrity of Danish territory, it could understand the American demand as the opening of a negotiation, or a frank conversation. That certainly is how the businessman US president understands it. Europeans writ large are fond of reproaching the Americans for insufficient cultural comprehension. That critique runs both ways: Europeans, too, ought to understand the American approach.
Interpreting the American aspiration towards Greenland as the opening of a conversation yields something very different from what we see today. The opportunity for Copenhagen is to think creatively about its own interests and relationships, and engage in the fundamentals of statecraft to generate a mutual win among all parties. This could look like many things: a condominium that shares sovereignty over the island, for example, or American sovereign base areas, both leaving the United States and Denmark alike as sovereigns within the island.
The condominium concept is well known in international law and history, and eminently workable given the longstanding positive tenor of Danish-US relations – to which relations will, even now, eventually return. This simple expedient allows both nations to exercise full and joint sovereignty over Greenland. Though it has fallen into general disuse in the post-Second World War era, the idea of the condominium was once a common feature of post-Westphalian statecraft. Joint sovereignty over territory was exercised throughout Europe: in the patchwork of the German states, including in the region that now constitutes the Danish-German border; in what is now Belgium and the Netherlands; in post-Partition Krakow; in Norway’s own Arctic; and to this very day in a small island between France and Spain that is the acknowledged territory of both powers. There are ample non-European examples as well: Samoa was for some time under the joint sovereignty of Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States. Modern Sudan, too, was a formal condominium of Egypt and the UK until 1956 – and Sudan and South Sudan currently maintain a condominium in Abyei.
The condominium, then, is a time-tested and simple expedient for the resolution of competing claims to sovereignty, well grounded in history and statesmanship — and formulated for the adjudication of scenarios like the Danish-American Greenland standoff.
Another workable concept for generating a win-win for both nations and their aspirations to Greenlandic sovereignty might be the model of the sovereign base area. The archetypes for this are the British cantonments of Akrotiri and Dhekelia, carved out of the Cypriot littoral, within which the United Kingdom exercises full sovereignty while leaving independent Cyprus and its population otherwise undisturbed. This solution recalls the old Panama Canal Zone, an area of American sovereignty within the Panamanian republic, but without the political conflicts generated thereby. American sovereign base areas within Greenland could be simultaneously expansive and also inclusive of effectively no Greenlanders, allowing the United States to attend to its own security needs while allowing the citizens of the Danish kingdom the continuance of their prior allegiance. This, too, is a solution allowing for both nations to meet their sovereignty red lines — if they wish for it.
Danish and European statecraft could be further creative in seeking advantageous trade-offs. If press reports are to be believed, the Americans have already been encouraging this with generous offers of payment for the island. Beyond material compensation, Copenhagen might seek an American commitment to Danish interests elsewhere. Those interests proliferate amid Europe’s metastasising uncertainties. What — the Danish state might ask itself — would benefit from major American commitments in trade, security, research, migration, resource exploitation, and more?
This is exactly the kind of conversation the White House is manifestly willing to have. What remains is for Copenhagen to show the same willingness.
Europeans can announce the deployment of their forces to Greenland, but this small force marks the upper bound of the capabilities of European defence. It is theatrics, not policy.
The window is closing for the Danes to come to the negotiating table. Overlooked in the tumult of the past several days, reports have emerged that indicate the Greenlandic government might be willing to engage in direct discussions with the United States, and that the United States is contemplating direct outreach to Greenlanders. To borrow again from the rhetoric of negotiation and business, once a trilateral conversation becomes bilateral, the excluded third party’s leverage evaporates. The decision before the government in Copenhagen is whether it will allow that to happen — and on what terms. After all, it isn’t just the future of Greenland with which they must concern themselves: it is also the future of Denmark.
