When Nazi Germany occupied Denmark in April 1940, Greenland was effectively cut off from Copenhagen and gained strategic importance across the North Atlantic. The United States moved in during the war, building bases and taking on Greenland’s defense to keep the island out of German hands.
Decades later, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Donald Trump described that wartime episode as if the US had “given Greenland back” to Denmark after World War II, implying the United States still retains a claim. That framing relies on a selective reading of history and reflects an older colonial mindset about sovereignty. The archival record of agreements before, during and after the war shows why that claim is misleading.
A useful prelude is a 1916 transfer: Denmark sold the Danish West Indies to the United States (now the US Virgin Islands). As part of that transaction the US explicitly stated it would not oppose Denmark extending its political and economic interests over all of Greenland, reaffirming Danish sovereignty even as one colony changed hands.
During World War II the US assumed responsibility for Greenland’s defense under the logic of wartime necessity. The 1941 Greenland Defense Agreement—drafted by the US State Department and signed in Washington by Denmark’s envoy Henrik Kauffmann—stated plainly that the United States “fully recognizes the sovereignty” of Denmark over Greenland. American military activity was presented as a temporary measure to protect Greenland until normal relations with Denmark could be restored. The US built airstrips, radar installations and patrols and integrated Greenland into Allied logistics.
After the war Kauffmann wrote that Denmark was willing to contribute Danish territory to the common war effort and did not wish to be paid for American military use of Greenland—another affirmation of Danish sovereignty. In 1951, in the early NATO era, Denmark and the United States concluded a new defense agreement that granted the US broad and long-term military rights in Greenland, formalizing a peacetime American presence that had begun as a wartime exception. This agreement paved the way for installations like Thule Air Base (today Pituffik Space Base), which remains the only active US base in Greenland and a key node in American Arctic strategy.
The Thule expansion had a painful human cost: the forced relocation of local Inuit in 1953. Danish courts later acknowledged that relocation as unjust, and the Danish state provided compensation in 1999.
While the security arrangements reinforced Denmark’s sovereignty and Greenland’s defense, they left colonial relationships largely unexamined. In 1953 Greenland’s formal colonial status was ended and the territory was incorporated into the Danish realm. Subsequent constitutional and political reforms gradually transferred authority to Greenlanders: home rule in 1979 and expanded self-government in 2009, which recognized Greenlanders as a people under international law and devolved most domestic responsibilities to the Greenlandic parliament.
Recent diplomacy has reflected that evolving balance. For the first time Greenland’s foreign minister, Vivian Motzfeldt, was included in high-level January talks in Washington—a break from earlier practice when Greenland’s strategic future was decided without Greenlandic representation. Trump’s revival of imperial language about “owning” Greenland highlights the contrast between older assumptions and the ongoing effort to include Greenlandic voices.
Today the debate is less about an American legal claim rooted in wartime arrangements and more about who gets to sit at the table when Greenland’s future and security are discussed. That shift—from decisions made by external powers to decisions that include Greenland’s own representatives—marks the most significant change in the island’s modern political story.
By Rikke Lie Halberg, PhD Candidate in History, Lund University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.
