The negotiations over Greenland’s future center around building up a larger NATO presence, thwarting adversaries and giving the United States sovereign claim to bits of the island —- a deal remarkably similar to an agreement that already exists.

The hurried, initial plan — discussed this week between President Donald Trump and NATO officials at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland — has helped pull Trump back from his threat to either buy the Danish territory or take it by force. While neither Denmark nor Greenland has signed off on any proposal, it could represent the early contours of a deal, according to two European officials who were granted anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

But officials and allies question what has changed. The U.S. and Denmark already have a framework for Greenland: a 1951 treaty that permits some of what the new deal would likely include. That defense agreement allows the Pentagon to establish bases and send as many troops as it needs to the island after Copenhagen approves — which it has almost always done.

“The treaty gives an enormous amount of flexibility to the United States to identify the security interests it thinks are necessary and to have a green light to go execute upon them,” said Iris Ferguson, who served as the Pentagon’s deputy assistant secretary for Arctic and global resilience under the Biden administration. “So on paper, the authorities are there.”

The U.S. military based more than 10,000 troops in Greenland at the height of the Cold War. The world’s largest island served as a critical radar hub at the time, tracking Soviet missiles coming via the Atlantic. It also functioned as a site to test military outposts that could survive a nuclear strike.

While the U.S. maintains a Space Force installation and powerful radar systems in Greenland, any expanded troop presence would require expensive upgrades to old facilities, as well as new housing and logistics facilities that would have to be built during a few brief months of warmer weather.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers this month announced it was undertaking a modernization of the runway at Pituffik Space Base that could cost as much as $25 million, an indication of the expense of building out new facilities in the harsh Arctic climate.

And it’s not clear how NATO’s role would really shift. The alliance’s military chief said he only found out about the talks from news reports.

Trump’s ambitions still seemed to stretch further. He called for the U.S. to have “total access” to the world’s largest island on Thursday at Davos — with no end date.

Yet the legal standing of U.S. troops at Pittufik Space Base on the island’s northwest coast is already well-established under another treaty, NATO’s 1955 status of forces agreement. That pact allows American forces to pass in and out of Greenland freely, even if it doesn’t legally make the land U.S. soil.

Since the late 1980s, the American presence at the base has been miniscule. Around 100 troops are there to focus on early warning and missile defense.

“A lot of it is old wine in a new bottle,” said Jim Townsend, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for NATO and Europe. “At all of our bases around the world, we negotiate sovereignty. It’s not something that we’re getting uniquely free from Greenland.”

Denmark’s prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, is expected to meet with Rutte on Friday to discuss his meetings with Trump. But, as always, the wild card in the process remains the American president. Just as he quickly climbed down from threats to invade Greenland this week, he could just as easily turn back to those threats, allies conceded. They are bracing for more surprises.

But allies are also past the point of playing down their frustration.

Bjorn Soder, a Swedish parliamentarian who serves on the Swedish Defence Committee, said that while NATO has legitimate security concerns in the Arctic, the aggressive U.S. opening gambit is damaging relations within the alliance.

“The United States is making a huge mistake by raising this Greenland topic,” he said. “We are very pro-America in our region, and what’s happening now is that voices that usually speak very [highly] of America are now changing position.”

Danish political leaders have also pushed back on the early talks between NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte and Trump, particularly since they left the Danes and Greenlanders out.

“Only Denmark and Greenland themselves can make decisions on issues concerning Denmark and Greenland,” Denmark’s Frederiksen said Thursday in a statement. “We can negotiate on everything political; security, investments, economy. But we cannot negotiate on our sovereignty,” about Greenland.

But some heads of state, including French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, expressed relief on Thursday at Davos that the temperature had cooled down.

Frederiksen said that Copenhagen remained open to building on the 1951 agreement, although it wasn’t immediately clear what the next steps would be.