Breitbart Business Digest: Let’s Lease Greenland for 100 Years

We Don’t Need to Annex Greenland, We Can Lease It

Yesterday, we explained why annexing or buying Greenland outright creates unnecessary complications. Sovereignty transfers trigger nationalist backlash, a purchase would invite pressure for statehood, and outright ownership isn’t necessary to achieve America’s strategic objectives.

So, if purchase doesn’t work, what does?

A 100-year lease.

A century-long lease offers the simplest way to secure enduring Arctic access without the political liabilities of ownership. A lease keeps sovereignty where it is while transferring defined rights for a defined term. Denmark keeps the flag, Greenland keeps internal self-government, and the United States secures the access and capabilities that matter in the Arctic theater.

What the United States Would Secure

The primary objective is military and strategic access: expanded basing rights beyond the current Pituffik Space Base installation, the ability to build out air and naval facilities, surveillance infrastructure, and search-and-rescue capabilities that turn Arctic operations from aspirational to operational. The United States needs ports, logistics hubs, and forward operating locations that provide dependable access across Greenland’s territory and waters.

Secondary but valuable: exclusive mineral development rights in defined zones. Rare earth elements, critical minerals, and other resources would be extracted under terms that are explicit, durable, and insulated from political volatility in Nuuk or Copenhagen or Brussels. This allows the U.S. to establish supply chain security for defense-critical materials.

The 100-year term provides planning certainty. It’s long enough to design, fund, build, and operate infrastructure with confidence that the arrangement will endure.

What Denmark Would Receive

For Denmark, the lease is a way to harvest Greenland’s strategic value without absorbing the domestic backlash that comes with “selling” territory. The key is political cover: Denmark retains formal sovereignty, while the agreement is technically finite.

At the same time, the lease would deliver two tangible benefits that Copenhagen can sell at home. First is a substantial upfront payment, big enough to be real, not symbolic. Second is fiscal relief. Denmark would no longer carry the roughly $600 million annual cost of supporting Greenland’s current arrangement.

Denmark gets cash, fiscal relief, and political cover without giving up sovereignty.

What Greenland Would Gain

A Greenland lease cannot be a Denmark-only negotiation. If it looks like Denmark is “renting out” Greenland, it will fail politically. Greenland has to be at the table as a party to the agreement, with explicit rights, protections, and benefits written into the deal.

The core offer is straightforward: Greenland would receive annual payments that are dramatically larger than what it gets today, enough to transform public finances and expand real autonomy rather than just symbolic autonomy. In addition, Greenland would receive a structured share of mineral-development revenues, making Greenland a direct stakeholder in development. It could include environmental protections important to Greenland’s population.

Finally, the lease must come with a serious investment package that will create jobs and improve the quality of life of the people of Greenland while also supporting American logistics and security objectives. We’ll be building ports, infrastructure, and hiring locals.

Pricing the Lease

To price the lease, use Denmark’s own cost of capital as the benchmark. Denmark’s 10-year government bond yield is roughly 2.77 percent, which is essentially Denmark’s price for long-term money. If the lease is supposed to be mutually beneficial, that’s the discount rate that matters.

Start with the fiscal baseline. Denmark’s roughly $600 million annual support, discounted over 100 years at 2.77 percent, has a present value of about $20.3 billion. That’s the value of the fiscal burden Denmark sheds.

But Greenland isn’t only a subsidy line. It is strategic positioning, Arctic operating depth, and resource potential. If you put the strategic asset and mineral upside at $100 billion in present-value terms, then compensating that value purely through an annual flow would imply payments on the order of $3 billion a year.

The smarter move is to combine an upfront payment with a manageable annual payment and revenue sharing. That produces something each party can point to immediately, while still aligning incentives over decades.

How Much Would It Cost?

Here is a plausible structure: $50 billion upfront to secure political buy-in and make the agreement tangible; $2.5 billion annually for 100 years to make the benefits permanent in practice; and mineral revenue sharing at 25 percent to tie Greenland’s prosperity directly to development.

The total nominal cost is $300 billion over a century. Discounted at 2.77 percent, the present value of the $2.5 billion annual stream is about $84.4 billion. Add the $50 billion upfront and the present value is about $134.4 billion, before accounting for mineral revenue sharing.

Compared with the price tag of an outright purchase, the lease delivers the same strategic ends at far lower present-value cost—and without the sovereignty complications that make purchase politically toxic.

The Art of the Greenland Deal

Will this happen exactly like this? Diplomacy is rarely that clean. Domestic politics in Washington, Copenhagen, and Nuuk all impose constraints.

But the strategic and economic logic remains. The United States needs deeper access to Greenland. Annexation would break the NATO alliance and alienate allies. Outright purchase is politically fraught and operationally unnecessary. A long-term lease—tripartite, rights-based, and properly priced—gets America what it needs without forcing any party to lose face.

That’s the art of the deal.