Davos live legal updates: Greenland must be part of the United States

In Davos, amid the alpine choreography of the World Economic Forum and against a background of escalating tariff threats against European allies, the United States Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent delivered one of the most legally consequential statements made by a senior American official in decades. He told reporters that the United States is asking its allies to understand that “Greenland needs to be a part of the United States”.

To justify this position, Bessent invoked an early twentieth century transaction, reminding journalists that Washington purchased the present day United States Virgin Islands from Denmark during the First World War. He added that Denmark had remained neutral during that war and then claimed that Denmark “actually sold quite a bit of land to the Germans”, a historical assertion that is, at best, confused and, at worst, inaccurate.

These remarks are not rhetorical colour. They amount to a direct challenge to the modern legal order governing sovereignty, territorial integrity, self determination and the prohibition on acquisition of territory by coercion. When delivered by the official responsible for the financial credibility of the United States, they also carry profound implications for international economic law and alliance stability.

At the heart of the issue is a principle so foundational that it is often taken for granted: territory is not a commodity. Since 1945, the international legal system has treated sovereignty as inalienable except through the freely expressed will of the people concerned.

Article 2 of the United Nations Charter prohibits the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state. That prohibition has evolved, through state practice and jurisprudence, to encompass not only military force but also forms of coercion designed to compel territorial change. The International Court of Justice has repeatedly emphasised that sovereignty cannot be bargained away under pressure, whether military or economic.

Greenland is not an unclaimed possession. It is an autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark, with its own parliament and government and with a population recognised under international law as a people entitled to self determination. That right is codified in the UN Charter and elaborated in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Any lawful change in Greenland’s status would require the free and genuine consent of its inhabitants, expressed without external coercion.

The Treasury Secretary’s declaration that Greenland “needs to be” part of the United States dispenses entirely with this legal framework. It treats sovereignty as an object of strategic necessity rather than a legal condition protected by peremptory norms.

The historical analogy offered to support this claim does not survive legal scrutiny.

In 1917, the United States purchased the Danish West Indies, now the United States Virgin Islands, for twenty five million dollars in gold. That transaction took place in a world fundamentally different from today. The League of Nations had not yet been created. The United Nations did not exist. The legal doctrine of self determination had not yet matured into a binding norm. Colonial territories were routinely transferred between imperial powers without consultation of their populations.

That era ended in 1945.

To cite a colonial era sale as precedent for a twenty first century transfer is to ignore the development of international law over the past hundred years. It is equivalent to invoking nineteenth century gunboat diplomacy as a justification for modern trade policy.

Even the historical account itself is flawed. Denmark did remain neutral during the First World War, a fact widely acknowledged by historians. However, the claim that Denmark sold “quite a bit” of land to Germany during that period is incorrect. Denmark had lost territories to Prussia and Austria in 1864 after the Second Schleswig War, decades before the First World War. After the war, following a plebiscite conducted under the Treaty of Versailles framework, Denmark regained Northern Schleswig in 1920. It did not sell land to Germany during the First World War.

This matters because legal arguments based on historical precedent depend on accuracy. When senior officials distort or misunderstand history to justify present claims, the legitimacy of their legal reasoning collapses.

More troubling still is the context in which Bessent’s statement was made.

The President of the United States has threatened to impose sweeping tariffs on Denmark and several other European states unless a deal is reached for the acquisition of Greenland. These threats are not hypothetical. Specific percentages and dates have been announced publicly.

In international law, this combination of territorial demand and economic pressure is deeply problematic. While the law of coercion traditionally focused on armed force, modern doctrine recognises that severe economic pressure can also violate the principle of non intervention. United Nations General Assembly resolutions and scholarly consensus increasingly view economic measures designed to compel sovereign decisions on territorial matters as unlawful.

In this context, the Treasury Secretary’s claim that Greenland must become part of the United States is not merely aspirational. It is embedded within a strategy of conditional trade access and financial intimidation.

That strategy directly contradicts the United States own treaty obligations.

Under the World Trade Organization agreements, tariffs may not be imposed arbitrarily or as instruments of political coercion unrelated to legitimate trade objectives. Conditioning market access on territorial concessions would violate the principles of most favoured nation treatment and the prohibition of discriminatory trade restrictions.

Under the North Atlantic Treaty, the United States is bound to respect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of its allies, including Denmark. Demanding the transfer of territory under threat of economic harm is incompatible with the obligation of good faith performance enshrined in the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties.

The financial dimension is equally grave.

The Treasury Secretary is not an ordinary diplomat. He is the custodian of the world’s largest sovereign debt market and the official charged by statute with maintaining confidence in United States obligations.

When he declares that Greenland must be American, and dismisses Denmark as irrelevant, he signals that political objectives override legal commitments. For sovereign investors, central banks and pension funds, this raises the spectre that United States financial policy is becoming an extension of geopolitical compulsion.

International finance is built on legal predictability. Sovereign bonds are trusted because the issuing state is assumed to operate within a stable legal order, not because it is powerful. When senior officials treat sovereignty as negotiable and allies as expendable, they erode the juridical foundation on which that trust rests.

The argument that the United States once bought territory from Denmark therefore collapses on three levels.

Legally, because colonial transactions are not precedent for modern self determination.

Historically, because the account of Danish territorial sales is inaccurate.

Normatively, because the entire structure of international law now rejects the commodification of territory.

There is a further irony. Greenland’s strategic importance, which the administration repeatedly cites, is derived precisely from the stability of the rules based order. It hosts military installations because Denmark, as a sovereign ally, consented to them. That consent is legally valid because Denmark’s sovereignty is recognised.

To undermine that sovereignty while demanding strategic cooperation is to saw through the very legal branch on which United States security interests sit.

In Davos, the Treasury Secretary presented territorial acquisition as a matter of necessity, framed by selective history and detached from contemporary law.

In reality, his statement represents something far more serious: an open rejection of the post war consensus that borders are not for sale, that peoples are not property, and that power does not substitute for legality.

If Greenland “needs” to be part of the United States, the law asks a different question.

Who decides.

The answer, in modern international law, is not the Treasury Secretary of a foreign power, not even the President of the United States.

It is the people of Greenland themselves, acting freely, without threats, without tariffs, and without the shadow of economic punishment.

Anything else is not a transaction.

It is coercion.

And coercion, however dressed in the language of history or security, is precisely what the legal order created after two world wars was designed to forbid.