Who Owns Greenland?

‘O, from this time forth, My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!’* * *We fetched that quote from Hamlet after reading President Trump’s “Dear Jonas” cable to Prime Minister Støre of Norway. “Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS,” Mr. Trump thumbed to his pen pal, “I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America.”Denmark, Mr. Trump suggests, “cannot protect that land” — meaning Greenland — “from Russia or China.” He goes on to ask, in an apparent reference to the Danes, “why do they have a ‘right of ownership’ anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also.” Spoken like a true real estate tycoon from New York, we say. The president here is echoing a point made by his adviser Stephen Miller, who has mooted doubts over Denmark’s claims to Greenland. Mr. Miller is a critic of what he describes as “international niceties,” as he put it to CNN’s Jake Tapper. On that head, Mr. Miller appears to view Denmark’s documented claims to sovereignty of Greenland, conceded by America by treaty and agreements, as subject to revision by the president.A professor of international law at Cambridge, Marc Weller, calls Denmark’s stake in Greenland “unimpeachable.” It can be dated to 1721 when a missionary, Hans Egede, arrived on the island and Denmark’s administration of the territory commenced. This reflected the legal doctrine of the era when unoccupied lands, like Greenland, which had “not yet been colonially occupied,” were deemed “terra nullius,” or belonging to nobody, Mr. Weller says.The post-Napoleonic Treaty of Kiel, signed in 1814 by Britain, Sweden, and Denmark, affirmed Copenhagen’s possession of Greenland. Yet Norway, which had been under Danish rule, took an interest, too. Norway’s claims to Greenland would be barred in 1933 by an international tribunal at the Hague. In 1916 America confirmed Denmark’s control of Greenland in a treaty that ceded the islands known as the United States Virgin Islands to America.The language — treaties are part of the “supreme Law of the Land,” per the Constitution — states that Uncle Sam “will not object to the Danish Government extending their political and economic interests to the whole of Greenland.” In 1941, after Denmark was overrun by the Nazis, America inked a deal with the Danish envoy at Washington, agreeing to defend Greenland and noting “the sovereignty of Denmark over that island.”In 1951, America noted Denmark’s ownership of Greenland in a defense pact between the two countries. In 1953, Greenland’s colonial status was dropped and the island became a self-governing part of Denmark. The liberal press suggests that the defense deal makes American control unnecessary. “The U.S. has such a free hand in Greenland that it can pretty much do what it wants,” the Times quotes a Danish researcher, Mikkel Runge Olesen, saying. Yet NATO allies have not always accommodated America. Feature, say, Denmark’s ban on nuclear weapons, which has kept American warships from docking at an ally’s port. Would that policy apply to Greenland? These are not small matters. Which brings us back to Hamlet, whose turn to “bloody” thoughts ended in tragedy. Even if “something is rotten in the state of Denmark,” better results await Mr. Trump when he aspires to, as he puts it, “peace through strength.”

Who Owns Greenland?

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