In the end, it was all kisses and laughter as U.S. President Donald Trump hailed his “fantastic” relationship with Denmark and Greenland after signing a new security deal that America’s European allies hope will close one of the most dangerous chapters in transatlantic relations.
Trump’s territorial ambitions over Greenland almost broke the NATO military alliance and shattered trust with one of America’s oldest and closest partners. The new defense agreement puts an end to the standoff. But was it worth the cost?
While the new defense agreement is a bit broader, the United States already had extensive military access under an existing 1951 deal and all the gains laid out in the agreement signed on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday could, ostensibly, have been achieved by asking nicely a year ago. The trans-Atlantic distrust created since the end of 2024 seems a very high price to pay for what may ultimately be a fairly incremental gain.
Interestingly, one place may emerge from this standoff as the real winner: Greenland itself.
The promised investments and contracts may never fully materialize, but the episode marks a major step forward in its push for greater autonomy and a more influential seat at the table. Greenland is no longer merely the subject of foreign policy decided by its former colonial rulers. Increasingly, it is helping to shape it.
There’s been progress toward self-determination
“A notable change is Greenland itself at the table today, signing this agreement,” said Greenlandic Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen speaking to a room cram packed with journalists and officials at the UN to witness the signing of the deal.
That’s an understatement. The world’s largest island, home to about 56,000 mostly Inuit people, was still considered a colony until the early 1950s. Progress towards greater self-determination has been slow and it wasn’t until 2009 that Greenland became a self-governing country within the Kingdom of Denmark.
Even then, while the Self-Government Act recognized Greenland’s right to independence when requested by local voters in the future, Denmark retained control of defense and foreign affairs.
“I cannot stress it enough: This is the first time that we are venturing into a binding agreement as a country,” Naaja Nathanielsen, one of Greenland’s two lawmakers in the Danish parliament and a former government minister in Nuuk, told The Associated Press. “That is a huge step forward in our quest for more self-autonomy.”
Denmark and Greenland confront their own troubled past
Like most former colonial powers that discover history keeps receipts, Denmark’s ties with Greenland are complicated. Greenland’s economy is heavily dependent on Denmark, families and students often live between the two territories and the cultural linguistic ties are strong. Yet underwriting modern relations are centuries of Danish policies that dehumanized Greenlanders and their families.
They included forced contraception, the removal of Inuit children for reeducation by Danish foster families, and controversial parental-competency tests that led to children being separated from their parents.
“For many, many years you believed that you were a good colonizer,” Múte Bourup Egede, then Greenland’s prime minister and now its foreign minister, reminded Danish journalists early last year, shortly after a newly elected Trump made his first military threat against the island. “But time has also caught up with us, and … cruel things have come to light.”
The abuses are not distant history; many victims remain alive. Hundreds of Inuit women have claimed compensation from Denmark, alleging that health authorities violated their rights by fitting them with intrauterine devices — often when they were teenagers and without their informed consent. Danish authorities estimate that as many as 4,500 women and girls received IUDs between the 1960s and mid-1970s.
While the first official apology for the historic mistreatment had long been coming it was finally delivered in the summer of 2025.
The standoff with the United States “has been applying pressure and focused some of the Danish attention” on reconciliation with Greenland said Ulrik Pram Gad, a senior researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies, but “perhaps, some Greenlanders feel that it’s not as credible as it could have been without Trump.”
Trump’s involvement changed the equation
While Denmark moved to address past grievances, anger with Trump’s tactics also helped shore up support for its sovereignty and take the edge off calls by some in Greenland for quick moves to independence.
At the height of the crisis over Trump’s ambitions in January, Nielsen said that “if we have to choose between the United States and Denmark here and now, we choose Denmark. We choose NATO.”
For Denmark, the main victory is no doubt getting the US president off its back and succeeding in framing the crisis as a European security problem.
Danish and Greenlandic diplomats “have been working very hard to have European allies be part of this,” Pram Gad said. “The result is an attempt to patch together the NATO alliance.”
And while Denmark has accepted some limitations to its sovereignty, investments by adversary countries such as Russia had long been off the table.
“The benefit of keeping the transatlantic alliance, or patching it together, or at least not allowing Greenland to be the occasion for Trump to blow it up, I think that counts heavily on both the Danish and the Greenlandic cost-benefit analysis here,” he said.
After Tuesday’s signing ceremony, relief was palpable. But while the Danish and Greenland delegations celebrated with a cold beer on a rooftop bar in Manhattan, the Greenland crisis has scarred a once-undefiable bond. It leaves leaders in Copenhagen, Nuuk and other European capitals now assessing the reliability of the United States — and whether a signed agreement can repair trust once it has been broken.
