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Notes -
So something actually happened regarding Greenland.
Details are fuzzy, but Trump just posted that the US made an agreement with Denmark and Greenland gives the US permanent military control over Greenland, the right to expand its military presence there and, most importantly, to veto any foreign intervention on the island.
This will not make Greenland a part of the United States, which means Mercator Projection dominance lies beyond our grasp for now.
Critics will point out that this doesn't really change anything since the U.S. already had de-facto military control over Greenland. I think in these case the critics would be wrong. If Trump's post is accurate, this does seem substantially different from the previous agreement. It's permanent, the US can expand with Denmark's permission, and they can deny foreign expansion without Denmark's say so.
It's unclear exactly what the US gave up in order to get these concessions, but Trump says it will cost the US taxpayer nothing. Perhaps there are trade concessions?
What's somewhat interesting is that the US barely has a presence on Greenland at all anymore. At one point, in the Cold War, it stationed 10,000 troops there consisting of a quarter of Greenland's population. Today, just 150-200 unlucky souls man the Pituffik Space Base in northern Greenland. Perhaps that's what makes this agreement valuable. The U.S. can now deny adversaries such as China a perch in Greenland without having to actually send in troops.
Which of these are actually new things that the US was not allowed to do before? Expanding their military presence is something the US could already do. And the presence they had was already permanent. So that is two out of three of your claimed "substantial differences" that seem not so different after all. As for the third, I am not sure that really matters. Unless it allows the US to veto foreign companies, it doesn't prevent the Danes from doing anything they would have actually done in the first place. We would need the explicit details of the deal in order to determine if there is actually anything new here.
Were all of these in writing as the official agreement? Or just de-facto true? It could be that this is Greenland giving us permission to do what we already intended to do in a way that staves off international complaints and lets them save face.
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/den001.asp#art2para3M
This is the 1951 agreement. As far as I can tell, it gives America the ability to build bases on Greenland and treat them as under American jurisdiction. There seems to be no upper bound on bases or personnel, as long as the areas in question are used for military purposes only and don't interfere with the civilians.
This is why Trump's demands last year seemed so strange. There was no need for a takeover if the goal was to simply defend the place from foreign powers. He could have just sent troops there and rebuild the existing bases from the cold war, or build new bases as needed.
I'd... caution that agreement was more theoretical than practical. Look at the aftermath of the 1968 Thule crash for an example of the asterisks on it.
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