On Friday, the United States, Denmark and Greenland announced a defense agreement that gives American forces permanent basing rights on an island of about 56,000 people, with no expiration date, after more than a year in which the president asked to buy the place and declined to rule out taking it by force. Copenhagen says sovereignty is intact. Washington says it has permanent control. Both can be true on paper. The Church has a settled teaching on what a small nation’s consent has to look like before it counts as consent, and it was written for exactly this kind of week.
The News Story
President Donald Trump announced on Friday, September 18, 2026, that the United States, Denmark and Greenland have reached an agreement giving American forces permanent access, basing and overflight rights on the Arctic island while leaving it under Danish sovereignty. The announcement followed months of quiet negotiations and more than a year of public pressure from Trump, who had asked Denmark to sell Greenland and had declined to rule out taking it by military force.
Writing on Truth Social, Trump said the agreement “gives the United States permanent control over security, and all other needs, in Greenland, completely addressing ALL of our many U.S. concerns.” He called it an “Infinite Life” agreement with no end, and said his administration would “immediately begin the process of developing a large Military presence” on the island, which has roughly 56,000 residents and substantial untapped mineral deposits.
Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen’s office described the terms differently, saying the agreement “recognizes the sovereignty and territorial integrity” of Denmark and Greenland and upholds the right of both peoples “to self-determination.” Greenland Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen said the deal “recognizes Greenland’s interests” and benefits all three governments.
The reported terms bar China, Russia and other non-NATO countries from establishing bases or stationing troops in Greenland, and restrict adversary investment in sensitive sectors. A senior U.S. official told Fox News Digital that the pact has no expiration date, stops short of transferring sovereignty, and is written to survive any future Greenlandic independence. The same official said Denmark and Greenland would not hold approval authority over additional American installations: the United States would consult them but could build when it judged construction necessary. Officials also said the expanded footprint could eventually feed into Trump’s planned Golden Dome missile defense system.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who led the talks with White House adviser Stephen Miller and officials from the State Department and the National Security Council, called it a “historic deal” and a “huge win,” and said it comes “at zero cost to the U.S. taxpayer.” Rubio said Greenland “will forever be part of the strategic defense area of North America.”
Frederiksen’s office said all three governments plan to sign next week during the United Nations General Assembly. Parliaments in Denmark and Greenland must still act before the agreement takes effect.
American forces have operated in Greenland since World War II, when the United States occupied the island to keep it from Germany and to guard North Atlantic shipping lanes. The 1951 Defense of Greenland Treaty produced what is now Pituffik Space Base, which supports missile warning, missile defense and space surveillance for the United States and NATO. More than two-thirds of Greenland lies inside the Arctic Circle.
Denmark and Greenland had said for over a year that the island was not for sale, and both objected to reports of American intelligence gathering there. The Associated Press reported that Trump made false claims about Chinese and Russian forces operating off the island’s coast. Imran Bayoumi of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center told the AP that the episode damaged American standing in Europe. “I think Greenlanders, Danes, Europeans saw this as a real attack on their sovereignty, and it’s going to take a lot of work to repair,” he said. [1]
Catholic Social Teaching Analysis
Start with the word the president chose. Permanent. An “Infinite Life” agreement, he wrote, with no end. Rubio said “forever.” Governments usually avoid that word, because a treaty is a promise, and a promise with no end date is the hardest kind to keep honestly. This one binds a people of about 56,000, which is a parish cluster in a mid-sized American diocese, and it binds them after a year and a half in which the most powerful country on earth said it wanted their island, said it would not rule out force to get it, and, by the AP’s account, made claims about Chinese and Russian forces off their coast that turned out to be false.
So the Catholic question is a narrow one. Rome has no objection to Greenland hosting American radar. Americans have been at Thule, now Pituffik, since 1951, under a treaty Denmark signed without a gun on the table. The question is what a small nation’s yes has to look like before the Church will call it a yes.
The Rights Of Nations Are Human Rights At Scale
The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church puts the rights of nations inside the rights of the human person, and it does it on purpose. “The field of human rights has expanded to include the rights of peoples and nations,” it says; “what is true for the individual is also true for peoples.” International law “rests upon the principle of equal respect for States, for each people’s right to self-determination and for their free cooperation in view of the higher common good of humanity.” Then it names what a nation is owed: a “fundamental right to existence,” the right to “shape its life according to its own traditions,” and the right to “build its future by providing an appropriate education for the younger generation.” [2]
Notice that last one. A right to build the future for the young. A clause with no expiration date reaches the young by definition. Every Greenlander born after next week’s signing at the UN inherits an arrangement he was never asked about and that the text says will outlive even independence. The Church does not call that automatically unjust; nations bind their children all the time, and that’s what a constitution is. But she does say a people’s future belongs to that people, and a document that spends it should be judged by how freely the people spent it.
The Compendium is careful here, and I want to be careful with it. “National sovereignty is not, however, absolute. Nations can freely renounce the exercise of some of their rights in view of a common goal, in the awareness that they form a ‘family of nations’ where mutual trust, support and respect must prevail.” [3] That sentence is the whole case for NATO, for the 1951 treaty, and in principle for this one. The load-bearing word is freely. A renunciation is a gift a nation makes, and a gift extracted is a different thing with the same signature at the bottom.
What The Threat Does To The Signature
Here the Church has a specific position, and it is older than this presidency. The Compendium reminds us that the United Nations Charter “not only” bans “recourse to force, but it rejects even the threat to use force,” and that this rule “arose from the tragic experience of the Second World War.” Among the things the popes of that war named as indispensable to any decent international order was “the freedom and territorial integrity of each nation.” [4] The reason is practical. A threat that succeeds never has to be carried out, so a world that polices only the act will get a great many threats.
Pope John XXIII, writing in 1963 with the Cuban missile crisis six months behind him, gave the rule its full shape. He wrote that “all States are by nature equal in dignity,” and that some nations have “attained to a superior degree of scientific, cultural and economic development. But that does not entitle them to exert unjust political domination over other nations.” [5] When interests clash, the differences “must be settled in a truly human way, not by armed force nor by deceit or trickery.” And he pulled in St. Augustine: “Take away justice, and what are kingdoms but mighty bands of robbers.” [6] Under the heading of freedom, he added that “no country has the right to take any action that would constitute an unjust oppression of other countries, or an unwarranted interference in their affairs.” [7]
Read those against the record. Denmark and Greenland said for over a year that the island was not for sale. The reply was a refusal to rule out force and, per the AP, false claims about foreign troops. A Greenlander who signed after those events has still signed. However, St. Thomas Aquinas has a category for what that signature truly is.
Aquinas On The Cargo And The Storm
In the Summa, Aquinas asks whether fear makes an act involuntary, and his answer fits a treaty better than any op-ed I read this week. Things done through fear, he says, “are of a mixed character,” partly voluntary and partly involuntary. His example is a merchant in a storm who throws his cargo into the sea. No merchant wants to lose his cargo. But here and now, with the ship going down, he chooses to. So the act is “voluntary simply, but involuntary in a certain respect.” [8] The will does move; it moves toward the lesser evil.
That is the honest description of a small nation’s consent under a year of pressure from a large one. The agreement is real. The signatures will be real. Frederiksen’s office is right that the text names sovereignty and self-determination, and I take her at her word that she fought for those sentences. Nielsen is right that the deal “recognizes Greenland’s interests.” A merchant who jettisons cargo also acts in his own interest. Aquinas lets us ask what kind: the interest in avoiding a worse thing that the other party put on the table.
Which is why Rubio’s “zero cost to the U.S. taxpayer” is true and beside the point. The cost was paid in Copenhagen and Nuuk, in the currency the Compendium says international order actually runs on: “the principle of mutual confidence is of the utmost importance.” [9] Bayoumi at the Atlantic Council said the same thing in plainer words. Europeans saw an attack on their sovereignty, and repair will take a lot of work. That is the bill, and it doesn’t show up in an appropriations request.
What Leo XIV Adds
Pope Leo XIV, in Magnifica Humanitas this spring, described the moment exactly: “escalating tensions and reciprocal threats are becoming almost commonplace, and forms of conflict driven by the desire for territorial expansion that were thought to be overcome are re-emerging.” [10] Two paragraphs later he declared the “just war” theory “now outdated,” while keeping “the right to self-defense in the strictest sense,” and named the tools that replace it: “dialogue, diplomacy and forgiveness.” [11]
Here is the development. Under the older framework, a Catholic might have said: no war was fought, so no just war test is even triggered, and a treaty is a treaty. Leo has moved the line back. The moral question now attaches to the threat, the posture, the willingness to let a neighbor believe force is on the table. A deal reached by diplomacy after a year of that is still diplomacy, and I’m glad it ended at a signing table. But the Pope’s point is that the threat was already the wrong instrument, and a good outcome doesn’t launder it.
Where To Look Next
I’d give the deal a fair reading on two terms and a hard one on two others. The fair reading: it keeps NATO adversaries out of the Arctic, and it is written to survive independence, which means someone in the room was thinking of Greenlanders as a future nation. Those are goods, and Catholic teaching counts them.
The hard reading falls on two terms. First, Denmark and Greenland would hold no approval authority over new American installations. A people that cannot say no to a base on its own rock has lost the ordinary content of self-determination on the one subject the treaty is about. Second, no expiration date. The Church allows nations to renounce rights freely; she has never said a people may be asked to renounce them forever, for everyone who comes after, in exchange for a large neighbor standing down.
The place to watch is the two parliaments. The Compendium’s word was “freely”, and a ratification vote in Copenhagen and Nuuk is where “freely” gets tested in public, by the people the Church says the treaty belongs to. Fifty-six thousand is a small number. The Church has never measured nations that way.
This story turns on the rights of nations: a small people’s consent has to be free before the Church will call it consent.
One principle from the Church’s social teaching, applied to the week’s news, in your inbox each Saturday.
Footnotes
- “US and Denmark reach deal to build US military presence in Greenland,” Associated Press, September 18, 2026, kpbs.org; “US, Denmark close Greenland deal, sources say,” Reuters, September 18, 2026, reuters.com; “US and Denmark reach deal over Greenland after Trump annexation threats,” BBC News, September 18, 2026, bbc.com; “Trump declares victory in historic deal with Greenland as he secures ‘permanent’ US military rights,” Fox News, September 18, 2026, foxnews.com; “Trump announces agreement with Denmark to secure ‘permanent’ control over Greenland’s security,” NBC News, September 18, 2026, nbcnews.com; “Trump: US strikes security deal with Greenland, Denmark,” The Hill, September 18, 2026, thehill.com; “Trump says U.S. has reached security deal with Denmark over Greenland,” The Washington Times, September 18, 2026, washingtontimes.com; “Trump claims security, military deal with Denmark over Greenland,” Axios, September 18, 2026, axios.com; “Trump says deal with Denmark gives US ‘permanent control’ over Greenland,” Al Jazeera, September 18, 2026, aljazeera.com. ↩
- Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2004), no. 157, vatican.va. ↩
- Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium, no. 435. ↩
- Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium, no. 438. ↩
- Pope John XXIII, Encyclical Letter Pacem in Terris: On Establishing Universal Peace in Truth, Justice, Charity and Liberty (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, April 11, 1963), nos. 86–88, vatican.va. ↩
- Pope John XXIII, Pacem in Terris, nos. 92–93. ↩
- Pope John XXIII, Pacem in Terris, no. 120. ↩
- Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 6, a. 6, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, in New Advent, newadvent.org. ↩
- Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium, no. 439. ↩
- Pope Leo XIV, Encyclical Letter Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, May 15, 2026), no. 190, vatican.va. ↩
- Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, no. 192. ↩
Leave a Reply