National security experts reject President Donald Trump’s claim that U.S. control of Greenland is critical for the Golden Dome missile defense initiative, and say it ignores longstanding diplomatic agreements that would likely already permit the project’s expansion on the Danish-controlled island.
Trump, in a social media post Wednesday morning, wrote that United States control of Greenland “is vital for the Golden Dome that we are building,” a reference to his administration’s ambition multi-hundred-billion dollar space- and ground-based defense shield initiative. Experts say that Trump’s statement, made ahead of an unproductive diplomatic meeting between the two nations Wednesday in Washington, ignores the U.S. military’s existing, and crucial, presence on the island at Pituffik Space Base.
“What he is saying is detached from reality,” said Todd Harrison, a defense and space policy expert with the American Enterprise Institute. “It’s like he doesn’t realize that for decades we’ve had a major base in Greenland that is critical to homeland missile defense and space surveillance.”
The U.S. military has had a presence in Greenland since 1951, following an agreement between Denmark and the U.S. government that established the Thule Defense Area. The current base, renamed Pituffik Space Base in 2023, is focused on missile warning, space surveillance, and satellite command and control missions.
Under the decades-old agreement, the U.S. government has the right to “to improve and generally to fit the area for military use,” “to construct, install, maintain, and operate facilities and equipment,” and “provide for the protection and internal security of the area.”
The Danish government and U.S. government would have to negotiate such an expansion under the existing agreement, said Mikkel Runge Olesen, a senior researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies in Copenhagen. Historically, the U.S. had no issues securing its national security priorities.
“That means that de facto, it has been a very, very wide agreement in terms of allowing for the U.S. to take care of its security needs,” Olesen told Defense One on Wednesday, adding that any future Greenland-related Golden Dome initiatives would more than likely be accepted.
“A U.S. request concerning a key security issue for them would almost certainly be considered very favorable,” he said.
In 2004, Denmark, Greenland, and the U.S. signed cooperation agreements which allowed for missile defense radar upgrades. Currently, there are no U.S. missile-defense interceptors in Greenland. But the island has long been recognized as a strategic necessity due to its location on the ocean pathway and naval chokepoint known as the Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom Gap, and key arctic proximity for detecting oncoming missiles from Eurasia.
The Trump administration’s ongoing pursuit of Greenland, and criticism of the Danish government, has put the territory’s residents and Pituffik Space Base leaders in the spotlight.
After Vice President JD Vance visited the base in March, the installation commander sent out an email seeking to distance the installation from Vance’s remarks. A day after the Space Force officer’s email was made public, she was fired from her job overseeing Pituffik.
A new Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday showed that 86 percent of respondents oppose a U.S. military takeover of Greenland. And 55 percent of participants oppose the U.S. government purchasing the territory. In a poll conducted last year, 85 percent of Greenlanders surveyed were against the territory becoming part of the U.S.
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