“It’s the United States alone that can protect this giant mass of land, this giant piece of ice, develop it and improve it,” President Trump declared of Greenland to a crowd of globalist weaklings Wednesday at the World Economic Forum.

By nightfall, it was clear America would take up exactly those missions, under what Trump called “the framework of a future deal” worked out through back-channel diplomacy with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, who referred to Trump in June as “Daddy,” and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, whose own speech in Davos excoriated his European colleagues for their inefficiency and weakness.

Trump haters at home and abroad insist he backed down out of indecision amid resistance to his expansionist plan. They are wrong.

Throughout his second term, the president has identified Greenland as vital to US national security interests because of its geographic position and abundant mineral wealth.

He’d refused to rule out the use of force to acquire it. He suggested no European country — including Denmark, which rules the world’s largest island as a colony — could stop him.

And he maintains nobody but America can adequately defend Greenland against Russia, which seeks a stronger role in the Arctic, or its ally China, which has absurdly declared itself a “near-Arctic state” and seeks to protect its global near-monopoly on rare earths.

Trump declared last Saturday he’d hike tariffs on eight European countries standing in the way of an American purchase.

He floated that transaction’s value at $700 billion, sweetening the deal with prospective additional payments of $100,000 to every Greenlander.

This upset resentful Eurolosers, who mustered the fortitude to “monitor the situation closely” and contemplate establishing “working groups” to consider providing for their own defense for the first time in 80 years.

But then, just like that, Trump told the assembled mandarins he would not take Greenland by force.

After reaching the “future deal,” which a high-level team including Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff will hammer out in detail, he added tariffs are off the table, too.

For anyone who has read Trump’s still-popular “The Art of the Deal” — and much of our befuddled former foreign policy elite has not — the president neither backed down nor lost.

He merely engaged in the negotiating tactics that made him famous in 1980s New York City real estate.

Although he started from a much bolder and seemingly inflexible position, the terms of the “future deal” appear to give him virtually everything he wanted out of Greenland — without war, without rupturing NATO and possibly even without payment, though Trump’s been careful to say no agreement under discussion rules out a future purchase.

“If this deal goes through,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said, “the United States will be achieving all of its strategic goals with respect to Greenland, at very little cost, forever.”

The emerging pact vastly expands the already-generous terms of America’s stake in Greenland.

That presence goes back to a military occupation Denmark invited during World War II, when the hapless metropole fell to Nazi invaders in just 12 hours, and was codified in 1951, during the Cold War.

America will not merely enjoy the ability to station troops across Greenland but hold base rights in perpetuity as a territorially sovereign authority.

Britain has long had such an arrangement with its bases on Cyprus, which analysts say was a direct inspiration here.

Reports suggest NATO’s European members will send troops and technology to augment a revamped American-led military effort in the Arctic based at a new NATO command center in Greenland.

Better still, on Friday the nervous Europeans, after a Brussels meeting, announced they’d work out an economic investment plan for Greenland that will help the people more than the Danes can and support the enhanced military effort.

Trump’s deal also bolsters American economic dominance, a goal far beyond simple free trade or Obama-Biden-era feelgoodism.

Trump’s private talks with Rutte, per a NATO spokesman, will ensure “Russia and China never gain a foothold — economically or militarily — in Greenland.”

If either US adversary did, it’d be disastrous for Trump’s vision of a “Golden Dome” anti-missile network to defend North America.

It would also jeopardize Atlantic shipping routes.

And of course it would challenge US access to Greenland’s minerals, which include the world’s eighth-largest supply of rare earths.

Reports on the deal suggest America will enjoy right of first refusal — over its adversaries and anyone else — on mineral-development projects.

“You need the ownership to defend it,” Trump said of Greenland. “Who the hell wants to defend a license agreement or a lease?”

Understanding the laws of power, as he certainly does, and with a deal nobody can stop him from getting, the marrow of what Trump wants puts America first while leaving only partial sovereignty to the Danes and Greenland’s ice sheets to the polar bears.

Paul du Quenoy is Palm Beach Freedom Institute president.