U.S. to Reopen Greenland Bases Under New Deal
The United States plans to reopen a Cold War airfield in southern Greenland and establish a second presence on the east coast under an agreement Denmark and Greenland are expected to sign with Washington at the United Nations on Tuesday, three people familiar with the talks told Reuters.
The sites named by two of those people are Narsarsuaq, a settlement of a few dozen residents on the spot of the old U.S. Bluie West One base, closed in the 1950s, and Mestersvig, an outpost now used by Denmark’s Sirius Dog Sled Patrol. The ceremony is scheduled for 10:30 a.m. in New York, though the text has not been published; the sources said the last details will not be locked until the pens come out. A White House spokesperson would not discuss the fine print and repeated an earlier line that Tuesday’s signing would “secure and defend the security of Greenland and the United States.”
Denmark has described the arrangement as placing Arctic security under NATO rather than leaving it as a bilateral American–Danish file. That framing matters in a year when President Donald Trump has again said the United States should control Greenland and has declined, at times, to rule out military or economic pressure to obtain the semi-autonomous territory. Polling has shown an overwhelming majority of Greenlanders reject the idea. The threats, sharpest in January, opened a crisis inside the alliance and pushed Denmark and Greenland into talks meant to lower the temperature without handing over sovereignty.
The map of American power on the island has already shrunk to a shadow of its Cold War size. Then the United States kept 17 installations and more than 10,000 personnel in Greenland. Now Pituffik Space Base holds about 150 American service members. A return to Narsarsuaq would put U.S. forces back on a southern airfield that once linked North America to Europe across the ice cap. Mestersvig would put them on the sparsely watched east coast, beside a Danish unit that still patrols by dog sled. How large the garrisons would be, what they would fly or radar, and who would command day-to-day operations are among the questions the unpublished text is supposed to answer.
For Nuuk the bargain is access and presence without annexation. For Copenhagen it is a way to keep Greenland Danish while satisfying an ally that has treated the island as unfinished business. For Washington it is infrastructure in a warming ocean that Russia and China also study. Tuesday’s signatures, if they come, will not settle whether Trump’s larger claim recedes. Rather, they will show whether two runways and a NATO label are enough to stand in for it.
