Four months of non-public negotiations between the United States, Denmark, and Greenland — and no signed documents. What the NYT and BBC describe as "negotiations over bases" is actually a dispute over sovereignty in miniature: Washington wants to obtain three new facilities in Greenland that would formally be considered American territory.
What exactly is Washington proposing
According to the BBC, which confirms anonymous sources familiar with the negotiations, the United States is seeking to deploy three bases in the southern part of the island — primarily to monitor the activity of Russian and Chinese submarines and ships in the so-called GIUK gap (between Greenland, Iceland, and Great Britain). One of the bases is planned to be deployed in Narssarsuaq — where American military infrastructure already existed until 1958.
The key point around which tensions have arisen: the American side proposed that these three facilities legally receive the status of sovereign U.S. territory — modeled after British sovereign bases in Cyprus. This is not a lease and not a basing agreement like NATO agreements. This is an enclave with American jurisdiction within an island that is itself an autonomous territory of Denmark.
"We are not for sale. And that will be the leitmotif of the meeting."
Prime Minister of Greenland Jens-Frederik Nielsen
Mechanism: there is a 1951 framework, but no new agreement
Negotiations are being conducted within the framework of the American-Danish pact of 1951, which gives the United States the right to expand its military presence on the island. Denmark has never formally rejected American requests of this kind. But the sovereign status of the bases goes beyond any previous precedent — both legally and politically.
The U.S. side in the negotiations is led by a senior State Department official Michael Needham. Denmark is represented by the Permanent State Secretary of the Foreign Ministry Jeppe Tranholm and ambassador in Washington Jesper Møller Sørensen. The White House confirmed the fact of the negotiations but refused to comment on their content, stating only "great optimism."
The legal knot that is being kept silent
International law experts point to a problem that diplomats are currently circumventing. Greenland is constitutionally recognized as the homeland of the Inuit people, who have the right to self-determination under international law. The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) requires their free, prior, and informed consent for any large-scale projects affecting their lands. A sovereign enclave corresponds to such a condition first and foremost — and no public consultation mechanisms currently exist.
In parallel, White House press secretary Karolina Levettt confirmed that "the use of armed forces is always an option" regarding the Greenland issue — a formulation that NATO and Copenhagen have publicly rejected.
What this means in practice
- The U.S. currently has one base on the island — Pituffik — compared to 17 at the height of the Cold War.
- The new bases are oriented not toward occupation but toward radar and maritime monitoring — but the formula of sovereignty turns them into a precedent.
- The Greenlandic prime minister says the negotiations "made certain steps in the right direction" — but without details and without dates.
If Denmark does sign an agreement on sovereign enclaves without separate, documented consent from Greenlandic institutions — the legal contestability of such an agreement will become not theoretical but practical: the precedent of Chagos in the UN ICJ ruling has already been established. The question is not whether Washington will get the bases — but whether any agreement will withstand the first serious legal attack from Nuuk.
