Ex-US Army Europe chief baffled by Greenland ‘sovereignty’ demand

The man who once commanded every U.S. Army base in Europe has a simple question about the Trump administration’s push for sovereign territory in Greenland: what would it actually achieve?

Retired Lieutenant General Ben Hodges, who led U.S. Army Europe from 2014 to 2017, says the demand makes little sense on its own terms. The 1951 Defense of Greenland Agreement with Denmark already lets Washington build effectively unlimited installations on the island, and the Danes have never refused a request. In Hodges’s view, sovereign status would change none of the things that actually let a base operate.

“I never ever thought, you know, it sure would be good if these bases here in Wiesbaden, or Clay Kaserne, were sovereign territory of the U.S.,” Hodges told Arctic Today, naming the installations around his own former headquarters. “What would that do for us that we don’t already have?”

At issue is a set of talks between Washington, Copenhagen and Nuuk over expanding the U.S. military footprint on the island. The U.S. currently operates a single base in Greenland, the Pituffik Space Base in the northwest, and is negotiating to add three more, focused largely on surveillance of Russian submarines and Chinese shipping across the gap between Greenland, Iceland and the UK. The sticking point is not the bases themselves but a U.S. proposal to have them formally designated as sovereign American territory rather than installations on Danish soil. Both Greenland and Denmark have called sovereignty a “red line,” insisting the island’s future is theirs to decide.

He was skeptical of the president’s choice of envoy, too. The administration named Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry to the Greenland file, though he has reportedly has not been involved in the negotiations. Hodges called the appointment “a very strange choice,” and warned that Greenland and Denmark would face heavy pressure “to deliver something.”

Whatever emerges, he said, should not come in a way that wrecks those relationships.

No base is self-contained, Hodges noted. American installations depend on host-nation water and power, on the local communities where troops and their families live, and on Status of Forces Agreements that govern legal and tax matters. Even the airspace is shared.

“Even big, gigantic Ramstein doesn’t control all the airspace,” he said. “It’s part of the air traffic control system of Germany and of Europe.”

That, he suggested, is the point others may have missed. The same rules apply across the alliance: U.S. aircraft at a Spanish or British base cannot simply come and go without the host nation’s say-so. Hodges suspected the realization came as a surprise inside the administration, which he said had been “reminded what they should have known” once it confronted how host-nation control actually works.

It’s about legacy

If the demand does not solve a military problem, why make it? Hodges’s answer points less at strategy than at the president himself.

“Part of this, frankly, is legacy. The president really wants to see that big, huge territory added as American territory,” Hodges said. “And he wants to be able to say, ‘I expanded the size of America and I kept the Chinese and Russians from being able to do it’.”

That reading, Hodges suggested, is consistent with the administration’s National Security Strategy and its emphasis on dominance in the Western Hemisphere. He allowed for a second, narrower motive as well: that the demand is precautionary, locking in a “forever clause” against the risk that an eventually independent Greenland could one day revisit a deal struck with Denmark.

There may be a commercial logic, too. Hodges acknowledged that the real prize might be economic rather than military, as sovereign territory would let the U.S. exploit Greenland’s resources under American law, without paying taxes to Nuuk.

“That’s what sovereignty implies,” he said.

Hodges was careful to separate the goal from the method. The U.S. has real interests in the Arctic, he said: competition with China and Russia as the ice cap melts and shipping increases across the top of the globe, plus critical minerals and energy.

“Those are legitimate interests,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean that therefore the United States is entitled to take it because we want it.”

That logic, he argued, was exactly the thinking and the language of Vladimir Putin with regards to Crimea, where “one side said, we really need this and so we’re going to take it.”

‘Now we look like Russia’

The cost of the approach, in Hodges’s telling, has fallen on America’s alliances. The friction over Greenland, he said, has harmed how allies see the United States more than almost any other move of the Trump era.

“It’s one thing to not consult with allies, to just make decisions or to bark at them and all that,” he said. “But to threaten the territory of one, that’s different. Now we look like Russia.”

The deeper damage, he argued, is the ammunition it hands to America’s critics. Neither Moscow nor Beijing needs an American precedent to act.

“Putin doesn’t need justification to do what he does,” Hodges said. “But it lets those who argue the U.S. is no better than its rivals say ‘you guys are just as bad,’ which is a favorite sport among many people.”

The result, he argued, is an erosion of American moral authority “not only in our own eyes, but in the eyes of the international community.”

The nuclear option

Pressed on whether sovereign status might serve narrower aims, such as circumventing Denmark’s longstanding ban on nuclear weapons on its territory, Hodges declined to speculate beyond what he had seen. He said he had never heard nuclear basing offered as a rationale and doubted Greenland adds much, given that intercontinental missiles “would go over the top anyway.”

The genuinely useful military function, he said, is monitoring: anti-submarine capabilities tracking Russian submarines out of the Kola Peninsula and Chinese merchant traffic through the Northern Passage, much as the U.S. did from Iceland during the Cold War.

What Europe should do

Hodges had advice for the Europeans, too: stop being on the back foot. Too often, he said, allies have complained from the sidelines rather than confronting the consequences of Washington’s moves. The more effective response, in his telling, was the one several European capitals gave to Trump’s early designs on Greenland last year, when they simply refused to go along.

“The President was surprised that several European countries actually said no,” Hodges said.

Rather than letting it become a bilateral test of strength, the Europeans kept the matter inside NATO, where Denmark’s prime minister insisted it belonged. That, Hodges suspects, is precisely what the administration dislikes: it prefers bilateral dealings, where it can bring its full weight to bear.

He argued that Europe, together with the UK, Norway and Canada, already amounts to a latent superpower in economy, population and technology, and gets “trampled” only as long as its members act alone. His sense was that more and more European leaders are understanding this.

No point of no return

Despite his unease, Hodges rejected the idea that transatlantic relations had passed the point of repair. Democracies have election cycles, he noted, and a different Congress and president could change course.

His prescription was for the U.S. to build whatever bases and naval facilities its strategy requires, but within existing law and the treaties that already bind Washington, Copenhagen and Nuuk. Heavy investment in Greenland’s minerals, he added, would likely be welcomed by both Greenland and Denmark.

As for the prospect of American troops in the Arctic, Hodges was under no illusions.

“I don’t imagine there are a lot of soldiers anxious to get stationed in Greenland now,” he said. “Maybe they will in a few years.”