The United States will be able to buy sovereign base areas in Greenland that will become legal U.S. territory “forever” under the terms of a NATO-brokered deal at Davos, reports claim.
A “framework” for a future deal negotiated in meetings at the Davos summit in Switzerland this week will see the United States get a sovereign base area modelled on Britain’s military bases on the Island of Cyprus, it is stated. While those bases are not on the British mainland, the UK owns approximately three per cent of the island in two exclaves, which are legally and internationally recognised as an overseas British territory.
The New York Times claims several “officials” who it says were present in the Trump-NATO meetings talking about America’s need to enhance its Arctic security and position on Greenland, who say the “deal” unveiled by President Trump yesterday is Cyprus-style. One is said to have called it a Cyprus base “concept” and the other is reported to have called the framework “modelled” on Britain’s bases in Cyprus.
British conservative broadsheet The Daily Telegraph cites its own cource in the meetings who told the paper the deal would stop short of a complete sale of the entire Greenland island to the United States, but would instead involve those sovereign base areas based on the British Cyprus model. If the American exclave in Greenland were large and well sited enough, the report states, the sovereign nature would mean there could be nothing stopping the U.S. from using the land to also prospect for mineral wealth as well as using it to secure America’s national security.
Indeed, if the United States managed to buy just one per cent of Greenland — a country that is statistically speaking essentially uninhabited beyond a dozen towns — it would give America a Sovereign base area nearly the size of the entire state of Maryland.
As reported, President Trump hailed the mooted deal on Wednesday. Although he didn’t give away much about what it would involve, he did say the terms would be “forever” — so not a lease — and that the other parties to it would be “involved in Golden Dome, and they’re going to be involved in mineral rights”.
President Trump said the deal “gets us everything we needed to get… it’s a deal that everybody is very happy with” and that:
I think it’s going to be a very good deal for the United States, and also for them, and we’re going to work together on something having to do with the Arctic as a whole and also Greenland, it has to do with security, great security… it’s a little bit complex but we’ll explain it down the line. The Secretary General of NATO and I and some other people were talking and it’s a kind of a deal that I wanted to be able to make.
The United Kingdom operates two military bases on the Island of Cyprus; Akrotiri in the South and Dhekelia in the East. Cyprus was once part of the British Empire and gained its independence from London in 1960, but the highly strategic bases were considered too important to lose and the British government handed over all of the island to the Cypriots except for the military areas.
RAF Akrotiri on Cyprus remains an essential British outpost to this day and is frequently used for reconnaissance and military strikes, such as on recent operations against the Islamic State and against the Houthis in the Red Sea, the island acting as an unsinkable permanent aircraft carrier in the eastern Mediterranean.
