There is a narrative streaming out across legacy media and among other members of the “smart set” in the aftermath of the arrangement struck between the Trump administration and NATO over an impending deal with respect to Greenland.
First, the deal, or at least the chief highlight of it, is for some fraction of Greenland to be effectively ceded to the United States as sovereign territory in order that military bases and other activity might be undertaken unimpeded…
The United States will be able to buy sovereign base areas in Greenland that will become legal U.S. territory “forever” under the terms of a NATO-brokered deal at Davos, reports claim.
A “framework” for a future deal negotiated in meetings at the Davos summit in Switzerland this week will see the United States get a sovereign base area modelled on Britain’s military bases on the Island of Cyprus, it is stated. While those bases are not on the British mainland, the UK owns approximately three per cent of the island in two exclaves, which are legally and internationally recognised as an overseas British territory.
The New York Times claims several “officials” who it says were present in the Trump-NATO meetings talking about America’s need to enhance its Arctic security and position on Greenland, who say the “deal” unveiled by President Trump yesterday is Cyprus-style. One is said to have called it a Cyprus base “concept” and the other is reported to have called the framework “modelled” on Britain’s bases in Cyprus.
British conservative broadsheet The Daily Telegraph cites its own [s]ource in the meetings who told the paper the deal would stop short of a complete sale of the entire Greenland island to the United States, but would instead involve those sovereign base areas based on the British Cyprus model. If the American exclave in Greenland were large and well sited enough, the report states, the sovereign nature would mean there could be nothing stopping the U.S. from using the land to also prospect for mineral wealth as well as using it to secure America’s national security.
Indeed, if the United States managed to buy just one per cent of Greenland — a country that is statistically speaking essentially uninhabited beyond a dozen towns — it would give America a Sovereign base area nearly the size of the entire state of Maryland.
As reported, President Trump hailed the mooted deal on Wednesday. Although he didn’t give away much about what it would involve, he did say the terms would be “forever” — so not a lease — and that the other parties to it would be “involved in Golden Dome, and they’re going to be involved in mineral rights.”
If this is the result, then the Greenlandic diplomatic adventure of the past year is not only a major victory for Trump’s foreign policy but it’s a classic example of the president’s dealmaking modus operandi at work: he asks for the moon when his aims are for far less, he rattles sabers and cages in order to get attention, he creates a crisis in order to force his counterparty to engage with him, when his secret terms are met he agrees to them, and then he proceeds to shower his counterparties with praise. (RELATED: Trump Sends a Cajun to Press the Message to Greenland)
But the narrative is the opposite. It’s that because Trump fell short of full ownership of Greenland, which it’s clear he was not attempting — if he really wanted to annex Greenland he could do it with a battalion of soldiers from one of the Airborne divisions of the U.S. Army in a matter of hours, and there would be almost no geostrategically significant negative reaction to his doing so… he lost. (RELATED: The Smart Way to Get Greenland)
And because he lost, all of his bluster was wasted.
You can declare that Trump’s style is not your cup of tea, and you can decry the lack of diplomatic nicety in his bull-in-a-china-shop routine. For example, outgoing Nebraska congressman Don Bacon, who calls himself a Reagan conservative but is instead a Bush Republican, one of the sad-sack moderates who squandered Reagan’s legacy before Trump came along, threw a very furious fit over Trump’s Greenland antics…
Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE) told reporters on Wednesday that “there’s been grave damage done with our European allies” and “it’s going to take probably the next president to spend a lot of his time trying to fix” the relationship between the United States and Europe.
“Right now, our… pic.twitter.com/yh2E60ToNd
— CBS News (@CBSNews) January 22, 2026
But if you want to be Don Bacon, you have some questions to answer.
And the first one is, if you agree that Greenland is crucial to American national security and that our having unfettered military rights there is a valid diplomatic aim, then why weren’t those rights secured before Trump came along?
Clearly, designating significant morsels of Greenlandic territory as Cyprus-style sovereign military reservations had not been done. We’ve had military bases in Greenland before, and we maintain the Space Force base at Pituffik (it’s a shame we don’t still call the place Thule; that was so much easier on the autocorrect), but this is obviously an advance for American national interest. (RELATED: Trump and Greenland: A NATO Test)
Why didn’t we already have it? We’re not facing some new threat that we didn’t face a decade or two ago. The Arctic is a region that is more in play now than it was before with the advent of nuclear-powered icebreakers, which can open up shipping lanes, and Greenland is suddenly a way station and sentinel along those routes, yes. But these things were foreseeable long before now.
So, Congressman Bacon, why weren’t they secured before the obnoxious ruffian from Queens, who has so disturbed your European friends with his bluster and antagonism, came back onto the scene?
We don’t have to wait for Bacon’s surely dishonest answer. The truth is staring us in the face, and Trump — as per his greatest talent — has illuminated it for us.
There are two problems that Trump has clarified, if not solved, with the Greenland adventure. One is specific, the other more general.
The specific problem is that if you engage in traditional diplomacy in an effort to secure the necessary rights in Greenland, your objective will likely be obsolete — and not in a good way, it’s more likely than not — by the time you have them. Europe is so bureaucratic, so sclerotic in the decision-making of its elites, and so horrifically torpid, languid, and flaccid in the face of obvious threats that items of importance to be negotiated with the European elites cannot be negotiated on either European terms or European timelines.
The rare earth minerals Trump is trying to access in Greenland almost certainly require mining techniques that European net-zero and other standards based on climate-change mythology would grind them to a halt. The reason China has cornered the market on so many rare earths is that the Chinese give not a fig about environmental standards of any kind, and so their mining and steel refinery processes yield rare earths in quantities no one else dares bother to rival.
Those same stupid reels of regulatory red tape would surely govern base construction, the fabrication of artificial harbors for ships, laying of railroad, and other activities we will need in order to turn Greenland into a true strategic asset.
The niceties and hand-stroking Bacon thinks are so crucial to maintaining our relationship with Europe do not work to satisfy American aims. Period. Trump is now in his sixth year as president, and he has been engaging in a fight to get the Euros to move bare inches off their status quo the entire time. Look how difficult it was to make the NATO “allies” satisfy their commitment to a mere two percent of GDP for defense. Now they’re pledging five percent; nobody really believes that will happen, but Trump can at least credibly argue that without threatening to pull out of NATO, he’d never have gotten to where we are.
It requires rattling cages to get anything done. That is the lesson Trump applied with the Greenland initiative.
Which brings us to a larger point, one that Drew Allen made an excellent observation of in a column here at The American Spectator yesterday. Namely, that the sclerosis the Europeans offer with respect to diplomacy is but a symptom of a far worse disease. Europe is dying, culturally, politically, and economically, and it is a mercy for someone to apply shocks to its system in hopes of rejuvenating the patient. (RELATED: An Open Letter to Europe)
As word of Trump’s Greenland deal began wafting through the salons of Davos, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy addressed the crowd in the main hall, and here was a quote of his…
“Just last year, here in Davos, I ended my speech with the words that Europe needs to know how to defend itself. A year has passed, and nothing has changed.”
Our regular readers know that I’m no fan of Zelenskyy’s, but he couldn’t be more correct in this.
Europe doesn’t know how to defend itself. Or more to the point, Europe doesn’t know how to — doesn’t want to, actually — defend its people.
That isn’t just true with respect to Russia, but it’s certainly true with respect to what Zelenskyy is lamenting. We’re coming up on four years since the Ukraine war started, and the Europeans have been blathering about sending troops to help the Ukrainians for practically all of that time. Have they done it? No. When America wouldn’t send troops and when Trump started trying to negotiate a settlement of the war, they opposed the U.S. administration on both counts and then began talking about raising armies for continental defense.
How did that attempt at militarization go? Well, in Germany and the U.K., a staggering number of young men of native extraction made it very clear they would not fight for their governments, seeing as though those governments were actively suppressing them in favor of the Muslim migrants who are taking over their countries. In the U.K., this has brought a harvest of Muslim rape gangs having a go at the native working-class females, and average citizens are punished with imprisonment if they so much as grouse about it on Facebook.
It might not have helped that the Euros never stopped buying Russia’s oil and gas while they were claiming their belligerence would soon become kinetic.
As Allen noted, the entire European continent is busily selling itself off to China, while Europe’s close cousins, the Syrupeans to our north, have largely completed the project, their new-ish pseudo-dictator Mark Carney openly bragging about the sale. (RELATED: Carney Cozies Up to China)
We face the strong possibility that at some point soon we will need to intervene militarily in Great Britain and France to secure their nuclear arsenals lest they fall under the control of a jihadist-dominated government. Not 100 years from now, not 50 years from now, in our lifetimes. Already, British lunacy is putting our access to the hyper-strategic airhead at Diego Garcia at risk of loss to China. (RELATED: With Diego Garcia Military Base in the Balance, ‘The Chagos Farce’ Is No Laughing Matter)
And these are the allies we’re sworn to protect, at $50 billion per year across 38 military bases.
Trump might have advertised bigger than he bought in Greenland. That’s a small piece of the issue here. What actually matters isn’t that he was rude to the Euros, but that he had to be. And that he’ll have to keep doing it, perhaps, to save them from themselves.
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