In the long contest between great powers over the world's last strategic frontiers, the Arctic has emerged as the newest theater of quiet ambition. The United States has reached a defense agreement with Denmark and Greenland — to be signed at the United Nations General Assembly — granting Washington permanent authority over Greenland's security and the power to bar rival nations from establishing any military presence there. The pact stops short of annexation, yet achieves something functionally similar: the subordination of a small, self-determining people's strategic fate to the calculations