opinions
From Akrotiri to Pituffik: Why Europe Must Control the Bases That Shape Its Security
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This is an op-ed written by an external contributor. All views expressed are the writer's own.
In January, as pressure on Greenland intensified, one proposal emerged: a “Cyprus style deal”, sovereign or near sovereign U.S. military ground in Greenland presented as compromise. The premise misstates the problem. Cyprus is not a model for Greenland. It is a warning.
The real lesson of Cyprus is not that Europe needs an elegant formula for accommodating external powers on European territory. It is that Europe waited too long to recover political control over ground decisive to its own security.
The next phase runs in the opposite direction: not new enclaves for allies, but European control over the bases that shape Europe’s security.
Akrotiri and Dhekelia are not remnants. They are the residue of Cyprus’s 1960 independence settlement. In 1960, sovereignty and guarantee formed a single structure. Britain retained the bases. It undertook to safeguard the Republic.
In 1974, when Turkey invaded Cyprus, that structure failed at the only moment it was meant to operate. The guarantee collapsed. The bases remained.
An active demonstration of how exceptional arrangements survive after the settlement that justified them ceased.
What failed was not utility. It was the political bargain that conferred legitimacy. London continues to treat the Sovereign Base Areas as sovereign British ground within a global defence network, administered under a dual military civil command. The arrangement persists. Its foundation does not. Cyprus is not a relic of decolonisation.
It is an active demonstration of how exceptional arrangements survive after the settlement that justified them ceased to command belief.
The bases do not function as instruments of Cypriot or European defence. Since Brexit, the Republic of Cyprus implements and enforces Union law within the base areas across customs, taxation, agriculture and regulatory domains, while Britain retains sovereign primacy and military use.
Europe underwrites the operating environment. Britain retains the decisive logic.
March 2026 rendered the contradiction explicit. A strike on Royal Air Force Akrotiri placed Cyprus within a conflict it did not shape. The Republic drew a line. European forces deployed. Article 42(7), the EU’s mutual assistance clause, was tested in practice. The European Council placed the bases on the Union’s agenda.
A structure that can draw risk onto Union territory while remaining outside the host’s defence logic is not a settlement. It is an open strategic file.
The distortion deepens beyond the island. In 2025 London elevated defence alignment with Turkey to a declared priority, advanced the Typhoon process, and concluded a major agreement with Ankara.
The Union maintains restrictive measures in response to Türkiye’s actions against Cyprus and frames the island as a matter of European solidarity. The British enclave thus straddles two strategic orders: bilateral and European. This is structurally unsustainable for territory embedded within the Union’s security perimeter.
Europe has articulated the governing principle in the north with greater clarity than it applies in the south. In January, European leaders affirmed that Arctic security is collective and that Greenland belongs to its people. Pituffik is not a sovereign American enclave.
It is a U.S. installation under Danish sovereignty, performing indispensable functions in missile warning, defence, space surveillance and Arctic access. Its importance is not in question. Its political anchoring is.
The issue is not whether Pituffik matters. It is whether a site of this magnitude can remain politically subordinate to Washington rather than anchored first in Copenhagen, Nuuk and Europe.
The American case is weaker than it appears. The 1951 agreement provides for U.S. operation where Denmark lacks capacity, allows reassignment of operational responsibility by agreement, and preserves Danish usage rights. It includes precedent for transfer.
The 2023 defence cooperation framework affirms Danish sovereignty and treats U.S. presence as temporary. Greenland’s constitutional framework establishes equal partnership and self determination. Political demands for greater control and value extraction are explicit. Nothing in this framework precludes European primacy.
It enables it.
Function does not require external ownership.
For that reason, the “Cyprus style deal” misstates the problem. Europe does not require additional externally controlled territory. It requires less of it. The asset at Akrotiri lies in runway, access and location, not in a 1960 title. The asset at Pituffik lies in radar, latitude, port and airfield, not in American primacy.
Function does not require external ownership.
Europe already operates alternative models. The U.S. withdrew its permanent presence from Iceland. NATO missions continued through rotational deployments. Strategic air policing, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance and missile defence are conducted across European territory within allied command structures.
Strategic assets can be hosted without sovereign enclaves.
The answer is not expulsion. It is reversal of primacy. In Cyprus, the operative options are integration of the base areas into a framework of Cypriot and Union control, consent and interoperability, or recognition that their current sovereign form has exhausted its function.
In Greenland, it means Europeanisation: Danish and Greenlandic political primacy, European financing, and integrated NATO command structures in which the United States remains an essential ally but no longer defines the site’s governing logic. The old formula was host, tolerate and depend. The new one is own, integrate and invite.
Europe is in a position to execute this shift now. The instruments exist. The funding exists. Defence spending constraints have been eased. Arctic operations have intensified. Cyprus has tested collective defence in practice. The bases are now a declared Union issue.
What has been absent is not capacity, but political permission, above all the reflex to defer to London and Washington on European ground. That reflex must end.
Cyprus is not a template for Greenland. It is a record of what follows when enclaves outlast their legitimacy. Pituffik cannot become the next Akrotiri. Akrotiri cannot remain a permanent exception. Europe need not rupture alliances to correct this. It must cease conflating access with entitlement.
The bases that shape Europe’s security must operate under European authority. In Cyprus, that means transfer or termination. In Greenland, transfer is the next step. Either way, the era of the untouchable enclave is over.
Shay Gal works on security coherence, engaging senior government and defence officials worldwide on sovereign risk, alliance leverage and cross-theatre alignment.
