The Trump administration has finally secured a deal on Greenland. But it was reached despite President Donald Trump’s self-defeating tactics and rhetoric, not because of them.

On Sept. 18, the president announced that the United States had entered into an agreement with Denmark and Greenland that gives America “permanent control” over the world’s largest island. The autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark became an early foreign policy fixation for the second Trump administration because of its vital strategic position along America’s eastern Arctic approaches.