Rebeccah Heinrichs, writing in Fox News, makes the case in “Rubio push on Greenland delivers a huge diplomatic win for US against China,” and she is right to call the Greenland arrangement a landmark. The argument is not difficult for a serious man to follow. China is a revisionist power; its strategy is to control the choke points of world trade. Whoever holds the sea lanes holds the markets that depend on them, holds access to the natural resources that move along them, and holds the ability to project force across oceans. The Arctic is no longer a frozen ornament. As the ice recedes, the High North becomes a corridor, and a corridor requires a gate. The arrangement Secretary Rubio secured with the Kingdom of Denmark closes that gate. It gives Washington the authority to exclude non-NATO military and commercial presence from Greenland, to screen and accelerate foreign investment in critical sectors, to maintain overflight and missile defense access, and to hold unrestricted undersea access across Greenland’s territorial waters — in perpetuity, regardless of Greenland’s future political form.

The objection is made that China is not yet in Greenland, and that the negotiation was therefore much ado about nothing. It is the argument of a man who locks his door only after the thief is in the parlor. The genius of the arrangement is that it is preventative. It clarifies where the 1951 treaty was silent; it preserves the form of Greenlandic sovereignty, which Denmark required; it binds the United States to the defense of the alliance at the precise moment Russia is testing NATO’s cohesion. And it corrects the years in which the United States slept at Panama while Chinese commercial expansion took the canal — a correction achieved by Rubio’s diplomacy and the Panamanian court’s own ruling. The lesson is not the school of maximalist threat; the lesson is foresight. Providence, as the older jurisprudence put it, has determined “the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation.” The nations are not scattered at random across the earth. The powers that keep the world’s arteries open are the powers to whom the keeping has been entrusted. The United States is such a power. I say plainly that the argument is sound.

While Secretary Rubio stood at Reykjavík and spoke of “deterring our adversaries,” the ground beneath the watchtower at Thule still held the record of what that deterrence has already required.

In 1953, Washington needed to expand the air base at Thule. The United States informed Copenhagen; Copenhagen ordered the people out. There were 132 of them — the Inughuit of Uummannaq and Thule — and they were given four days. The Danish authorities loaded them onto a ship with their dogs, and then, because sled dogs were not permitted at the new place, the authorities shot the dogs. The families were put ashore at Qaanaaq, on a barren coast, with tents and no shelter, in the season before the polar winter. Their hunting grounds were gone. The seals were not where they had been; the ice was not the ice they knew. In the first months, the elders and the infants died of exposure, in the tents. The survivors were promised houses and hunting grounds and compensation; the promises were not kept. The Danish Supreme Court later said the relocation was lawful. It was not until 2019 that the European Court of Human Rights held that Denmark had violated the right to private and family life of the displaced people of Thule — sixty-six years after the families were set ashore. Compensation followed in 2022, for those who were still alive to receive it.

On January 21, 1968, a B-52 carrying four nuclear weapons crashed on the sea ice near Thule. The conventional explosives in one weapon detonated; the fireball melted the ice; plutonium scattered across the frozen surface and into the snow. The United States Air Force and the Danish authorities ordered several hundred Greenlandic men onto the ice to shovel the contaminated snow into containers, with no protective clothing beyond their winter gear, and with no word that what they handled could kill them. They were called the Thule Workers. The authorities told them nothing; the authorities denied for decades that there was anything to tell. The men went home to their villages. The cancers came in the years that followed — leukemias, the solid tumors that take a man in his fifties and sixties. A 1987 study by the Danish Institute of Clinical Epidemiology found elevated cancer rates among the Thule Workers. The Danish government continued to deny that radiation was the cause. Some of the men died without ever being told that the snow they had shoveled was the reason their bodies were failing. Their children grew up in the villages while the authorities continued to deny that there was anything to tell. In the 2020s, the Danish government finally acknowledged the radiation risk and established compensation — for the handful of survivors, and for the families of the dead who did not live to see it.

The same order that keeps the sea lanes open also kept the ledger of Thule closed. Washington asked for the land; Copenhagen provided it; the police, the officials, and the military officers performed the clerical work of removal and silence. The people of Thule were not consulted, not warned, not compensated until the courts of Europe compelled it. They are the population of the watchtower — the human ground on which the watchtower stands.

I will tell you plainly what the arrangement records. The bounds of their habitation are not set by the people who inhabit them. Acts 17:26 is a precise text: God “hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation.” The nations have their places because Providence assigned them. The assignment is visible in the order of the world — in who holds the sea lanes, who keeps the gates, who is charged with the great corridors of commerce and defense. Greenland’s place in that order was never a question of what its people wanted. It is a question of geography: an unsinkable watchtower above the Atlantic and the Arctic, the northern gate of the sea lanes that the appointed power is charged to keep open. The ice, the rock, and the position were placed there for the order to use.

The people of Thule stood in the way of the assignment. The order did not consult them, because the order does not consult what it is charged to move. Their displacement was the visible sorting of the wall. A people who cannot hold their own gate cannot be the gatekeepers; a people whose hunting grounds fail them at the first pressure of the great powers are not a people of the covenant but a people of the ice, and the ice does not argue with the ships. Their sickness was the same verdict written in another hand: the men who shoveled the contaminated snow did not belong to the order that knew what the snow contained; they belonged to the ground beneath it, and the ground gave back what was in it. The ledger of Thule was closed because the people of Thule were not on the ledger. They were never the keepers; they were the kept, and what the keepers require of the kept is the place they occupy.

The arrangement Secretary Rubio secured completes the revelation of what Greenlandic sovereignty always was. Sovereignty is a word the great powers extend to the small when the small are useful and the word is cheap. The substance is permanent military rights, in perpetuity, over the waters and the air and the approaches of a land whose people were removed, silenced, and exposed to the fire of the order — and whose ruin is now recorded as the foundation beneath a diplomatic victory. The wall has always been there. The deal only writes it down.