Washington, Nuuk and Copenhagen signed an Arctic pact that none of the Nato allies managed to read.
The US, Greenland and Denmark signed an Arctic security deal at the UN that melted before anyone read it. Washington now plans new military bases on the puddle and on six sister sites that must not be mapped. Nato allies say the row is over. The water has not been told.
The water in the UN carafes had already gone warm by the time the photographers were waved back. A pen borrowed from the Danish desk leaked through the blotter and did not stop.
The United States, Greenland and Denmark have signed an Arctic security deal that melted before any of them read it. Washington will build its new military bases on whatever is left. The ceremony, staged at the UN general assembly in New York, was billed as the end of a quarrel among Nato allies over who may keep forces on the ice.
Officials now treat the puddle as the text. The bases will follow the puddle.
A pen with a thaw in it
The ink, a spokesman said afterwards, had been mixed from glacier melt so the clauses would stay solid only in the cold. New York in late September is not the cold. The pages went soft during the applause, slid off a windowsill, and gathered under a radiator.
Colonel Ames Whitlow, of the Pentagon's Arctic desk, called this a feature rather than a loss. "A base is a place we have agreed not to argue about," he said. "The puddle meets that test. It does not redeploy unless somebody opens a window, and we have issued window guidance."
Anyone who sat through the 1951 defence agreement will know the furniture. Then, as now, the ice was asked to behave like a hallway between larger capitals. The hallway has opinions. They were not on the blotter.
Whitlow added that engineers prefer a text with no footnotes, no maps and no readers. "Readers move things," he said. "We are trying to keep the north still."
The briefing that was mostly weather
Kaia Broberg, liaison for unread documents in Nuuk, said ministers had been shown a room and told the deal was in it. "The room was damp," she said. "That is the fullest account I have had."
She went on without raising her voice, which made it worse. People on the island, she said, have spent a year and a half being told their country was a missing piece in someone else's set. A puddle is not a reassurance. It is a smaller version of the same missing piece.
We were promised a text. We have been handed a climate.
Peder Quist, at the Danish foreign ministry, asked reporters not to call it a spill. "Copenhagen regards the melt as a technical annex," he said. "We have cabled New York to stop mopping. Mopping would be a unilateral amendment."
In 1940 the argument was also about who held the keys while the owner was busy surviving. The keys, this time, have been declared a liquid. Quist said Denmark would defend that liquid with the full vigour available to a government that has not seen the clauses.
A junior legal adviser in Copenhagen, speaking as the ministry's residue unit, said the annex could be frozen again if a hotel minibar could be requisitioned. The UN, she added, has minbars. It also has rules about requisitioning them, which is why the puddle remains a puddle.
Six sites, none of them on a map
The construction note, circulated on a single sheet that also wilted, names six sites. Each is the place where a sister puddle will be frozen and then forgotten on purpose. Labelling them on a chart would count as publication. Publication, Whitlow said, would demobilise the walls.
Work is to be described to local councils on Wednesday, for six hours, after which the sites revert to weather and the briefing is withdrawn. A Nato official, who asked to be called only the alliance's dampness desk, said allies were "broadly content, in the sense that nobody can quote a clause against them."
This is not the version in which the fortress went up and the neighbours were invited to admire the gate. Naming that earlier disappointment would only give it top billing again. The new one has the same third act and cheaper sets.
Municipal leaders in western Greenland, speaking through Broberg, split along lines anyone could have predicted from the last round. Some hope a base, even a wet one, means contracts for six seasons of honest work. Some fear a runway that arrives before a vote. Most noted that hope and fear are doing the job a published treaty was meant to do.
Live reporting had already caught that mix, and the plain complaint that a deal was being praised while remaining unseen. The Guardian's account from the assembly floor recorded hope, scepticism and fear in the same breath. The BBC and Al Jazeera carried the signing as a tremendous calming of allies.
Tremendous is a room temperature. It does not survive contact with a radiator.
A rope around the weather
On the windowsill, a velvet rope has gone up. A small card, blank on both sides, marks the spot as a facility. Ushers have been told not to discuss the depth.
Whitlow said it was six centimetres at the deepest point. "Enough sovereignty for the week," he said, "and more than some parliaments get in a year." He declined to say which parliaments. The decline was logged as a classified annex to the puddle.
Broberg asked, not unreasonably, who pays if the facility evaporates before Wednesday. Whitlow said evaporation would be treated as a scheduled redeployment, not a retreat. Quist said Denmark would not accept a redeployment it had not been shown. The dampness desk said Nato would monitor the situation, which in practice means a thermometer and a polite email.
Greenlandic contractors who turned up looking for tender documents were handed paper towels and a timetable. The towels are not a contract, Broberg said, though they are the only paperwork anyone has been willing to touch. One harbour master, reached through her office, said his cranes could lift containers, not weather. He has put the cranes on standby anyway, because standby is what you do when capitals get lyrical about ice.
The quarrel among the allies has been declared over. The water has not been informed. It will be briefed on Wednesday, if it is still there, and if anyone is allowed to look.
