On March 31, 1917, a Danish government representative in Washington accepted a treasury warrant for $25 million in gold coin and handed over three Caribbean islands the Danish crown had held since the 17th century. Copenhagen framed the sale as tidying up a colonial holding nobody at home wanted anymore. The United States called it a purchase.
It was a strategy: German submarines operated in the Atlantic, and Washington decided a Danish colony near American shipping lanes could not be left to chance. Denmark agreed.
Here is the ironic kicker. The sale came with a side letter. In 1916 Secretary of State Robert Lansing wrote that Washington would not object if Denmark extended its political and economic claims over the whole of Greenland, the same island the U.S. now wants locked down.
On September 18, 2026, President Donald Trump said that an agreement had been reached with Denmark regarding Greenland. Trump announced a deal giving the US what he called permanent control over security and all other needs in Greenland, without annexation this time and no money changing hands. Copenhagen keeps the flag while Washington keeps the military access, and a de facto say over who gets close to Greenland’s strategic minerals. China and Russia are the powers explicitly targeted for exclusion. The framework agreement, which now goes to the legislatures of Denmark and Greenland, was signed during the United Nations General Assembly on September 22.
The logic behind the transaction looks familiar even if the paperwork has changed. A larger power identifies a smaller ally sitting on ground it now needs, names a rival circling the same ground, lets the pressure build until refusal seems reckless rather than sovereign, and signs a document both governments can call a partnership. Denmark called 1917 a negotiation as it calls 2026 a negotiation. The word lets both governments file the transfer as consent instead of pressure.
The Philippines has already lived a version of this. In 1898, Spain transferred sovereignty over the Philippines to the US for $20 million without Filipino participation in the treaty. There was not a Filipino protest that changed anything, just a signature in Paris by men who had never lived in the islands. Manila was a line item in a war settlement over Cuba. Greenland, by comparison, was negotiated.
Greenland is inventory before it is a country. That is the analogy that does the work. It sits on the GIUK (Greenland, Iceland, and the United Kingdom) gap, on missile-warning geography, and on rare earths that China wants to control. The Philippines sits on Asia’s first island chain, on sea lanes that carry other people’s oil and chips, and on nickel that Washington put in a February memorandum after the Arctic option looked messy.
The modern Philippine equivalent has a name and a decade of history behind it. The Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) was signed in 2014, stalled through the Duterte government’s flirtation with Beijing, and reached the scale that matters, forces, equipment, and rotational access, after 2022. It now covers nine sites, including Basa Air Base and Fort Magsaysay. Washington’s line was that no other nation in the region should read a signal from the EDCA. Beijing read one anyway, the same way Moscow will read one from Greenland.
Manila chose this position. No warship came up the Pasig to extract it. The 2016 arbitral ruling, the 2023 base expansion, the repeated preference for American security guarantees over more generous-looking Chinese financing, were decisions made by Philippine governments that judged one dependency safer than the other. That judgment may hold up. It has not yet been tested the way Denmark’s was in 1917, or Greenland’s is now.
The US-Philippines minerals memorandum, a non-binding framework signed last February to diversify critical-mineral supply chains and push domestic processing instead of shipping raw ore, is Plan B dressed as industrial policy. Nickel is the Philippine card even as Washington looks to Greenland for another source of critical minerals, provided they can keep Chinese companies out of the supply chain.
Inventory gets appraised, not consulted, and the appraisal changes when a rival evaluator shows up. Denmark’s islands were useful against Germany in 1917 and useful again in 2026, different acreage, same idea. The Philippines has spent a century being useful first against Spain, then Japan and now China. The greatest benefit has always gone to the United States.
Usefulness renews on its own schedule. The language changes, the agreements get rewritten, and the same strategic ground gets a new label: negotiation, partnership, cooperation. The inventory remains. Only the price and the label change.