Trump Isn’t the First American President to Covet Greenland
75 years ago, the U.S. and Denmark inked a joint defense agreement for Greenland
By Frederic J. Frommer
President Donald Trump has obsessed about taking over Greenland for months, including in his Truth Social post this month when he complained that NATO wasn’t there when the United States needed it, adding, “Remember Greenland, that big, poorly run, piece of ice!!!”
But for three-quarters of a century, the United States and Denmark have operated under an agreement for the joint defense of Greenland. That deal was signed on April 27, 1951 — 75 years ago this Monday.
And it was a NATO request that defense installations in Greenland be made available to NATO members — “in the common defense of Greenland and the rest of the North Atlantic area,” as the State Department noted at the time — that resulted in the joint defense agreement.
This was in the early, fraught days of the Cold War, just a year after the start of the Korean War.
“Danish sovereignty is fully and explicitly realized in the agreement, and in recognition of that fact, the North Atlantic pact nations recommended that a Danish officer be given supreme command of the local defenses of the island,” the New York Times reported.
But it also gave the United States the right to establish as many bases as it wanted. The same year it was signed, President Harry Truman gave the go-ahead to build Thule Air Base. Now known as Pituffik, it is America’s northernmost military base – just 750 miles from the North Pole. The base once housed 10,000 soldiers.
“The Government of the United States of America may enjoy, for its public vessels and aircraft and its armed forces and vehicles, the right of free access to and movement between the defense areas through Greenland, including territorial waters, by land, air and sea,” the agreement reads.
The ’51 pact called for it to remain in force as long as NATO was in existence — something Trump has tried to make an open question in recent weeks. It replaced a 1941 agreement aimed at defending Greenland from the Nazis, which was signed by Denmark’s ambassador to the United States without the knowledge of his government. That deal effectively turned “the island into an American protectorate,” according to the Wall Street Journal.
The Trump administration isn’t the first American government to covet Greenland. In 1946, the United States made an offer to purchase Greenland from Denmark for $100 million — about $1.6 billion in today’s dollars — the Associated Press reported in 1991, citing National Archives documents first reported by the Copenhagen newspaper Jyllands-Posten.
That bid was initiated the previous year by Sen. Owen Brewster (R-ME), who, presaging Trump, said that he considered American ownership of the island “a military necessity.”
In the leadup to the offer, an April ’46 State Department memo said that a planning and strategy committee of the Joint Chiefs of Staff reported that ‘’practically every member ... said that our real objective as regards to Greenland should be to acquire it by purchase from Denmark.’’
With money “plentiful,” the memo added, the committee found that “Greenland is completely worthless to Denmark (and) that the control of Greenland is indispensable to the safety of the United States.”
In December 1946, Secretary of State James Byrnes made the offer in New York to Danish Foreign Minister Gustav Rasmussen during his visit to America.
‘’Our needs ... seemed to come as a shock to Rasmussen, but he did not reject my suggestions flatly and said that he would study a memorandum which I gave him,’’ Byrnes wrote In a telegram to the U.S. Legation in Copenhagen.
In contrast to Trump, once that offer went nowhere, the United States did not engage in saber rattling to try to get its way.
Before that, during Andrew Johnson’s presidency, Robert J. Walker, a former treasury secretary who had helped make the 1867 deal to purchase Alaska from Russia, argued in 1868 that America “should purchase Iceland and Greenland, but especially the latter.” And in 1910, an ambassador serving in the William Howard Taft administration proposed a three-way deal in which the United States would get Greenland, Germany would receive a cluster of the Philippine islands and Denmark would reacquire the Schleswig-Holstein territory.
And you thought NBA trades were complicated.
Frederic J. Frommer, a sports and politics historian who has written for the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Atlantic and other national publications, is working on a book on ‘70s baseball.