When Nazi Germany occupied Denmark in April 1940, Greenland was cut off from its colonial power and became strategically important in the North Atlantic. The United States stepped in, establishing bases and defensive measures on the island to prevent German use.
More than eighty years later, Donald Trump invoked that wartime episode at the World Economic Forum in Davos, claiming the US “gave Greenland back” to Denmark after World War II and implying the US therefore retains a claim to the island today. That assertion rests on a selective reading of history and reflects a colonial view of territory and sovereignty. The sequence of agreements before, during and after the war clarifies why the claim is misleading.
In 1916 Denmark sold the Danish West Indies to the US (now the US Virgin Islands). That transfer included an explicit American declaration that the US would not object to 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 wartime necessity. The 1941 Greenland Defense Agreement, drafted by the US State Department and signed by Henrik Kauffmann, Denmark’s envoy in Washington, explicitly stated that the US “fully recognizes the sovereignty” of Denmark over Greenland and framed American action as safeguarding the eventual re-establishment of normal relations between Greenland and Denmark. The US built airstrips, military installations and patrols, integrating Greenland into allied logistics.
After the war, Kauffmann wrote that Denmark was pleased to contribute Danish territory to the common war effort and declared Denmark did not wish to receive payment for US military use of Greenland—again affirming Danish sovereignty. In 1951, within the postwar NATO-era framework, Denmark and the US concluded a new defense agreement granting the US extensive and lasting military rights in Greenland. This formalized a peacetime American presence that had begun under wartime exception, including construction of installations such as Thule Air Base (now Pituffik Space Base), a key component of US Arctic strategy and the only active American base in Greenland today.
The expansion of Thule involved the forced relocation of local Inuit in 1953, a move later acknowledged as unjust by Danish courts and addressed with compensation awarded by the Danish state in 1999.
These security arrangements stabilized Danish sovereignty and Greenland’s defense but left colonial relations largely unexamined. In 1953 Greenland’s colonial status was formally lifted and the territory integrated into the Danish state. Subsequent reforms—home rule in 1979 and self-government in 2009—transferred most domestic responsibilities to a Greenlandic parliament and recognized Greenlanders as a people under international law, marking only gradual and recent expansion of Greenlandic participation in decisions about their future.
Recent diplomacy underscores that shift: the inclusion of Greenland’s foreign minister, Vivian Motzfeldt, in high-level January talks in Washington breaks with earlier practice when Greenland’s strategic future was negotiated without Greenlandic representatives. Trump’s revival of imperial language about ownership highlights the contrast between older colonial assumptions and emerging efforts to include Greenlandic voices. The contest is now as much about who sits at the table for discussions of Greenland’s future as it is about historical claims.
Rikke Lie Halberg is a PhD Candidate in history, Lund University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.
