Military experts reject Trump's logic regarding owning Greenland
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Jan. 12, 2026 11:00 pm ET
President Trump’s assertion that the U.S. must own Greenland to expand its defenses there runs counter to decades of policy and undermines the deterrence of its global network of bases and alliances, say former American military and diplomatic officials.
Trump has said the U.S. should have full control of the island, a semiautonomous Danish territory that is larger than Alaska. In recent days, he has said the U.S. needs to own it to assure Arctic and U.S. security.
“When we own it, we defend it. You don’t defend leases the same way. You have to own it,” Trump said Friday. “And we’ll have to defend Greenland. If we don’t do it, China or Russia will.”
But military officials and diplomats say the U.S. has built the world’s most formidable assembly of overseas military bases without owning foreign soil.
The Defense Department manages or uses more than 128 foreign bases in at least 51 countries, according to a Congressional Research Service report from 2024. Independent analyses have said the total number, including smaller facilities, could top 750 installations in 80 countries and territories. Many date to World War II and the Cold War.
In almost all cases, land is provided by host countries under bilateral agreements, without a change of ownership. Host countries generally permit the U.S. to build and operate facilities, as spelled out in detailed diplomatic documents.
“We don’t need ‘ownership’ in order to conduct all the operations we would like to do,” said retired Navy Adm. James Stavridis, a former supreme allied commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
Overseas bases are the backbone of America’s global defense posture, which a Defense Department document describes as “the fundamental enabler of U.S. defense activities and military operations,” which also advances U.S. strategic interests, according to the Congressional report. Of 1.3 million active-duty U.S. military personnel, almost 13% are based overseas, according to the Defense Department.
The biggest U.S. overseas military installations are in Japan, Germany and South Korea. Those countries and other allies not only provide land but also contribute to U.S. operating costs.
According to the Pentagon, more than 53,000 active-duty troops are stationed in bases across Japan and more than 36,000 are in Germany. Landstuhl Regional Medical Center there is the Pentagon’s largest overseas medical facility, treating servicemembers from across the hemisphere. The adjacent Ramstein Air Base employs more than 12,000 service members and civilians on approximately 4,000 acres.
Over the past 15 or so years the Pentagon has shifted away from running its own large overseas installations to using sites belonging to allies and partners, an approach dubbed “places, not bases,” according to the Congressional report.
The Guantánamo Naval Station in Cuba is an exception where the host country deems U.S. presence illegitimate. The facility was established under open-ended diplomatic agreements struck decades before the 1958 communist revolution. But even there, the U.S. doesn’t own the land.
The motorcade of Vice President JD Vance traveled through Pituffik Space Base in Greenland last year. Jim Watson/Pool photo/Associated PressGreenland, located just north of eastern Canada, is a crucial gateway to the Arctic Ocean. It also sits beneath the flight paths of potential intercontinental ballistic missiles fired from parts of Russia or China.
Danish leaders have said Greenland isn’t up for grabs and any decisions about the island’s future lies primarily with its 57,000 residents.
The U.S. since the 1940s has considered Greenland crucial to national security and during the Cold War had 17 bases on the territory. The U.S. now operates just one base there, a Space Force facility focused on tracking potential missile attacks.
Denmark, a founding member of NATO, has said it is open to discussing an expanded U.S. footprint on Greenland. Copenhagen last year also bowed to pressure from Trump and pledged to significantly boost its own Arctic military presence.
A Danish navy ship patrolling the waters off Greenland in March. Odd Andersen/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images“Greenland, and the sovereign state Denmark, have always been courteous and responsive hosts going back many decades,” said Stavridis.
Richard Fontaine, who served as a foreign-policy adviser to former Republican Sen. John McCain, among other diplomacy-related positions, said Trump’s argument that “you don’t defend leases” amounts to a “No One Washes a Rental Car theory of international relations.” In other words, a country only defends or cares about its own territory, but not that of other countries.
“That makes sense for private property but not for nations,” said Fontaine, who now runs the Center for a New American Security, a think tank in Washington. He said that the U.S. is committed to defending many allies without owning their territory.
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Trump defended Israel last year, Fontaine noted as an example, and many allies have fulfilled pledges to defend the U.S. “The whole point of alliances is mutual defense of one another’s territory,” he said.
U.S. Air Force Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, NATO’s supreme commander, said on Sunday in Sweden that allies are expanding joint Arctic activities and “military cooperation in this region has never been stronger.” He declined to “comment on the political dimensions of recent rhetoric.”
Former U.S. Ambassador to NATO Ivo Daalder said Trump’s stated desire to take Greenland “poses a grave threat” to the 32-country alliance.
“Merely suggesting that the U.S. can only be secure if it owns Greenland raises fundamental questions about its willingness to defend countries that it doesn’t own,” said Daalder.
Daalder was one of 14 former diplomats and national-security officials from both parties who on Friday published a letter praising Denmark as a staunch ally and criticizing Trump’s posture on Greenland.
“Far from strengthening U.S. security, musing about taking Greenland only weakens Alliance solidarity, undermines American credibility as a trusted ally, and diminishes deterrence,” the letter says.
Greenland is home to 57,000 people. Oscar Scott Carl for WSJAdministration officials have been scornful of such thinking, reflecting a fundamental shift in American foreign policy that was set out most starkly last month in a new national-security strategy. Its fifth paragraph says that after the Cold War, “American foreign policy elites convinced themselves that permanent American domination of the entire world was in the best interests of our country. Yet the affairs of other countries are our concern only if their activities directly threaten our interests.”
The document is being seen as a playbook for U.S. action. White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller said on CNN last week that the U.S. “is the power of NATO” and that for the U.S. to secure the Arctic region and defend NATO interests, “obviously Greenland should be part of the United States.”
Even serving politicians from Trump’s own party have denounced that position.
Sen. Thom Tillis (R., N.C.) said on Wednesday in the Senate that Miller’s assertion of a need to own Greenland “is absurd.” Tillis, the Republican leader of the bipartisan Senate NATO Observer Group and a Trump supporter, lauded Denmark’s contribution to the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan as exemplary.
“This nonsense on what’s going on with Greenland is a distraction” for Trump, Tillis said, praising the president. “And the amateurs who said it was a good idea should lose their jobs.”
Write to Daniel Michaels at Dan.Mi...@wsj.com
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Appeared in the January 13, 2026, print edition as 'Experts Reject U.S. Logic on Greenland'.
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