Much ado about Narsarsuaq

Denmark, Greenland and the United States amend their 1951 Defence Agreement

Sometimes all it takes to end a crisis is one man’s change of heart, especially if that man caused that crisis the first place.

Today, on September 22, U.S. President Donald Trump, Greenlandic Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen and Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen appeared jovial at U.N. headquarters in New York City, where they put signatures of camera-friendly proportions to a new Defence Agreement. The ceremony drew a line under nearly two years of transatlantic tension over the future of the self-governing Arctic island.

In a nutshell, the 2026 U.S.-Danish-Greenlandic Defence Agreement does not supersede the original security treaty concluded between Copenhagen and Washington in 1951, but supplements it. The text also builds on the 2004 Igaliku amendments and reaffirms many of the rights Washington already held under both texts. It also spells out a number of additional privileges that were long assumed to be available to the U.S. on request but were never formally guaranteed in writing.

Perhaps most importantly, the 2026 Agreement reaffirms the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Kingdom of Denmark, and the Greenlandic people’s right to self-determination. Greenland will not become part of the United States, but remain either within the Kingdom of Denmark, or become an independent state within NATO.

Speaking of the alliance, the 2026 Agreement is also notable for loosening its 1951 predecessor’s ties to NATO’s founding document. The 1951 Agreement was to remain in force only for the duration of the North Atlantic Treaty. The 2026 Agreement, by contrast, has no end date and can be amended only by mutual consent. Tellingly, it could therefore outlive the alliance itself, turning a security arrangement once anchored in NATO into a more straightforwardly trilateral one.

Yet the same text goes on to endorse “stronger NATO engagement in the Arctic”, and binds Denmark and Greenland to ensure that an independent Greenland would remain in NATO, applying for membership if necessary, and assume all of Denmark’s obligations under the agreement. In practice, full Greenlandic statehood would thus come conditional on NATO membership and on continued U.S. basing and overflight rights, both of which Nuuk has already

Much of the remaining substance of the new text lies in its provisions for additional U.S. defence areas in Greenland. As a reminder, these are designated territorial pockets in which Washington enjoys extensive military rights while formal sovereignty remains with Nuuk and Copenhagen.

The legal mechanics underpinning defence areas will essentially be preserved, a significant win for Copenhagen and Nuuk given earlier speculation that the U.S. had requested full sovereignty over them. Whereas the 2004 Igaliku amendment still designated the U.S. space base at Pituffik as “the only defence area” on the island, the 2026 Agreement authorises the U.S. military both to expand its existing installations there and to open two new defence areas, at Narsarsuaq and Mestersvig.

Surprisingly, perhaps, while Narsarsuaq has a berth deep enough for substantial ocean going vessels, neither of the two confirmed new defence areas possess a functional deep sea port, which some U.S. officials had floated as a necessary asset to be targeted on the island in any future agreement.

Narsarsuaq is a recently abandoned airport near Greenland’s southern tip. Built by the U.S. military during the Second World War, it served transatlantic military aviation until American operations ended in 1958. It then became southern Greenland’s principal civilian airport until commercial operations ceased earlier this year.

Narsarsuaq has a paved runway capable of handling heavy aircraft, terminal buildings and harbour infrastructure, and it borders a small settlement. Mestersvig, by contrast, is a Danish-built airstrip on Northeast Greenland’s coast. It was originally developed to serve nearby lead-zinc mining and was later maintained as a Danish military and logistics outpost, and also disposes of a 1.8 km landing strip.

The likely attraction of both sites is this existing infrastructure, combined with their strategic geography. Narsarsuaq offers a southern logistics and aviation hub for North Atlantic operations, including “undersea” operations now now formally authorised and encouraged the 2026 Agreement. Mestersvig will give the U.S. Navy and Air Force access to the eastern Arctic, particularly as a vantage point over the GIUK gap and Atlantic approaches to the Northern Sea Route.

Beyond these sites, Greenland as a whole will host installations for the U.S.’s planned “Golden Dome” missile defence system. What these would look like remains unclear, given the doubts and delays that officials and experts alike have raised about the system.

Finally, the 2026 Agreement meets expert expectations by targeting Russia and China from both a military-strategic and a geo-economic angle. Before 2021, Chinese companies made significant inroads into several Greenlandic investment projects. In 2018, Chinese state companies bid for commercial airport construction projects in Greenland, prompting a counter-reaction from Washington. That reaction eventually produced a new U.S. Arctic policy, best epitomised by Mike Pompeo’s 2019 Arctic Council diatribe in Rovaniemi. Chinese companies were thereafter de facto excluded from Greenland’s critical sectors, and after 2021 Chinese involvement on the island slowed to a trickle.

In another formalising stroke of the pen, the 2026 Agreement bars non-NATO countries such as China from setting up “manned or unmanned” military installations in Greenland, or from maintaining a “persistent” military presence there, unless all three signatories agree otherwise. Article X also announces formal screening requirements for investment from outside NATO.

The specifics have yet to be outlined, but their eventual introduction will be subject to “close consultation with relevant [U.S.] authorities and other partners”. The EU received a carve-out and will therefore be free to build on its recent spending spree in Greenland as it sees fit.

How, then, to sum up the Greenland saga that sent much of the Western world into a hallucinatory spin for nearly two years? The 2026 U.S.-Danish-Greenlandic Defence Agreement gives the U.S. written assurances on a few points. Washington can establish new defence areas, bars Russia and China from investing or setting up camp in neighbouring Greenland, and commits Nuuk to NATO membership upon independence.

None of these gains required the new agreement. Each was attainable without it, though the U.S. President will want to present their appearance in writing as a major foreign policy win.

In essence, the Greenland crisis ends in a win for Denmark and Greenland, whose patient diplomacy deserves much credit. It is also a win for nearly every establishment figure in the U.S. government and security apparatus, who spent years trying to convince Trump that owning Greenland was not necessary to achieve American security goals in the wider Arctic, and that threats of seizing the island by force were doing irreparable damage to America’s standing among allies.

The new defence areas, however, are set to reshape the region’s wider security landscape. A U.S. military presence at three strategic vantage points on the island will weigh on Russian and, to a lesser degree, Chinese security and commercial planning for the Arctic and North Atlantic, and is likely to draw responses from both Moscow and Beijing.

While Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov called the agreement “a matter for the parties involved to decide“ at a briefing in Moscow this afternoon, Russian media struck a somewhat more combative tone.

In an explainer published by RT, Evgeny Semibratov and Konstantin Blokhin portrayed the expanding U.S. presence in Greenland as an acute threat to Russian security. Blokhin pointed to the Northern Sea Route and the Arctic as offering an optimal flight path for ICBMs. Semibratov echoed earlier official rhetoric from Moscow by linking “Golden Dome” to the lapse of New START and the unravelling of Cold War-era arms control.

For its part, Pravda described the agreement as tightening a “noose“ around Russia’s neck in the Arctic. Kommersant’ correctly noted that the U.S. already held extensive rights in Greenland, while Gazeta.ru amplified the Danish perspective on the negotiations, suggesting Copenhagen might see the agreement as a defeat for Trump.

Chinese officials, by contrast, had not yet reacted to the news as of 18.00 EST, and China’s state media carried only limited commentary. Speaking to the Global Times, Zhang Yao argued that the agreement updates and expands existing U.S. defence privileges on the island while adding exclusionary clauses, laying bare Washington’s “ambition to monopolise” Greenland as a military forward position.

Renmin University’s Wang Yiwei read the timing as tactical. In his view, the deal was meant to strengthen Washington’s hand ahead of Trump’s summit with Xi, with an eye to controlling Arctic chokepoints and weaning the U.S. off Chinese rare-earth supply chains.

Several analysts quoted by the South China Morning Post likewise focused on leverage, cautioning that the agreement risked “eroding major-power trust and peaceful development in the Arctic.”

This is a reproduction of an article that first appeared on 66° North. Any opinions expressed in it are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Arctic Today. If you would like to read more posts by Lukas Wahden, you can sign up for his blog on Substack here.

Lukas Wahden is a PhD candidate in International Relations at SciencesPo Paris and Associate Fellow with the Russia Program at George Washington University. He mostly writes about Russia, the poles, oceans and space.