This is the script for my video posted on June 24, 2026. Watch it on TikTok.
The US has been openly campaigning to acquire Greenland since 2025, even refusing to rule out the use of force against one of its own NATO allies to obtain it. But what many people don’t know is that the US military has had a substantial presence in Greenland already for decades, including its northernmost permanent military installation. So how is the US allowed to operate in Greenland, what impact has the current administration had on this dynamic, and what role does Pituffik Space Base have on all of this?
The US has operated in Greenland since WWII, when the Danish ambassador signed an agreement in the name of king authorizing the US to defend Greenland after Germany occupied Denmark. After the war, the two countries signed the 1951 Defense of Greenland Agreement, which granted the US broad rights to build bases and conduct military operations with substantial latitude. For the following two years, a massive and secret construction effort began, with roughly 120 ships, 12000 men, and 300k tons of cargo transported to Greenland to build a new base during the compressed season where construction is possible in the Arctic. This base, called Thule Air Base, allowed US strategic bombers to reach targets like Moscow and Leningrad in a matter of hours.
In 1953, the US wanted to expand the base and build an anti-aircraft site, and at their request the Danish government forcibly relocated the natives on extremely short notice. This remains a point of contention with locals today, even after Danish courts ruled the relocation unlawful and the government settled with those affected.
The following decades saw a handful of fascinating events, like in 1968 when a US B-52 bomber caught fire and crashed onto the sea ice just 7 miles west of the base. The aircraft was carrying four live thermonuclear bombs, and the conventional explosives inside detonated, rupturing the weapons and scattering plutonium, uranium, americium, and tritium around the area. The cleanup effort saw about 550k gallons of contaminated liquid, ice, and other debris shipped to the US, and the secondary stage of one weapon was never recovered. In 1995, prompted in part by declassified US records, a Danish government review confirmed that the Prime Minister had given the US tacit approval back in 1957 to store and overfly nuclear weapons in Greenland, violating the country's nuclear-free policy and contradicting decades of public denials.
In 2020, the base was formally transferred from Air Force Space Command’s authority to the US Space Force, and in 2023 it was renamed Pituffik Space Base to recognize Greenland’s cultural heritage. But fundamentally, nothing has changed. Pituffik remains the US’s northernmost military installation, less than a thousand miles from the North Pole. It sits on the shortest great-circle route for a Russian or Chinese ballistic missile launched toward North America, and this is the primary reason for the base’s continued existence.
Pituffik’s geographical location allows its radar to peer into Russia at potential flight paths, and it allows polar-orbiting satellites to make more frequent contact with their ground stations. The base hosts a two-sided solid-state phased array radar system with a detection range of more than 3000 miles. This system, among others located on orbit and across the US and its allies, feeds data into NORAD that allows for the rapid characterization of missile launches. Notably, there are no interceptors based at Pituffik, and the base is only used for monitoring and detection.
Even with this important role, the actual US presence in Greenland is limited, which is exactly what Greenland, and Denmark at this point, prefer. Greenland has governed its own domestic affairs since 1979, and a 2009 Self-Government Act expanded that authority, giving it control over most domestic matters and its natural resources while Denmark retains control of foreign affairs, defense and security, monetary policy, and other areas. Beyond the 1951 agreement governing the US presence, there were additional agreements made in the early 2000s that modernized the old deal, built formal infrastructure for cooperation, and created a requirement for the US to consult Greenland on matters affecting it. The US does not pay rent on the land it uses, but it does pay billions of dollars to Danish and Greenlandic contractors for their support.
The natural question here is why would the US would want Greenland at all if it already has so much latitude there. The short answer is that the Arctic region is warming roughly four times faster than the global average, and it holds large quantities of oil, gas, critical minerals, and rare earth metals, and though extraction of these would be extremely difficult and expensive, a large enough investment could still pay off. Greenland also anchors the western edge of the Greenland-Iceland-UK gap, a maritime chokepoint that NATO uses to monitor and contain Russian submarines and surface ships transiting the North Atlantic.
Russia controls roughly half of the Arctic coastline and two-thirds of the region’s GDP, and it has been rebuilding dozens of Soviet-era bases as well as modernizing its Northern Fleet with the aim to exert control. China has also increasingly pushed for access and influence in the Arctic. The terrain is rapidly changing, and the world’s powerful authoritarians, including the current US administration, Russia, and China, are all looking for a way to capitalize on it for their own benefit.
But Denmark has staunchly backed Greenland and has refused to be mistreated or pushed around by the US. Since the US’s threats began, it has begun to actively invest into Greenland’s defense to a far greater degree than it has historically needed to. And in March 2025, Greenland's general election produced a governing coalition around the center-right Demokraatit party, which favors a gradual path to independence and pointedly excluded Naleraq, the party pushing for the fastest break from Denmark, while the Qulleq party that’s friendly to the current US administration won zero seats. Fortunately, in January 2026, the US administration finally took the use of force off the table, but the potential for conflict remains. The fact of the matter is, Greenland is not for sale, and pending an unprecedented US attack on one of its closest allies, it will remain a part of Denmark.
Keep reading
- Why is Denmark so powerful when it’s so small?
- Why is Iceland a NATO member if it lacks a military?
- Why is Guam critical to the US?
I’m writing a book called Groundwork about the buried history beneath geopolitics. Join the waitlist to hear when it has a publisher, a cover, and a release date.