Bangladesh, Sept. 22 -- The Greenland controversy has produced an unusual outcome: months of increasingly dramatic rhetoric have ultimately given way to a negotiated security arrangement between the United States, Denmark and Greenland.

When Donald Trump began pressing publicly for greater US control over Greenland earlier this year, the reaction across much of the Western foreign-policy establishment was immediate and severe. Commentators warned about the implications for NATO, Denmark's sovereignty and the stability of the transatlantic alliance. Some coverage portrayed the dispute as potentially leading to an unprecedented confrontation between the United States and its European allies.

Those fears were not entirely without foundati...