President Donald Trump arrived at Tuesday’s United Nations meeting ready to present his Greenland agreement as another triumph of presidential dealmaking. What he signed with Denmark and Greenland, however, largely preserves arrangements the United States already enjoyed.

Trump has spent months fixated on annexing Greenland, even threatening to seize it by force. He publicly framed that campaign around security, while his rhetoric increasingly resembled a broader ambition to expand the United States.

The obsession also carried an unmistakable air of map based grandiosity. Greenland appears much larger on the Mercator Projection map than it actually is, making it an especially tempting prize for a president captivated by size and spectacle.

Trump made clear in January that ordinary cooperation was not enough to satisfy him. He wanted ownership, treating possession as something psychologically essential to achieving his version of success.

“That’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success,” Trump said in January. “Ownership gives you things and elements that you can’t get from just signing a document, that you can have a base.”

After all that chest pounding about ownership, Trump ultimately got exactly what he dismissed: a signed document. The supposed master negotiator did not secure annexation, possession, or some sweeping new American dominion over Greenland.

Instead, the agreement allows the United States to construct two additional military installations in Greenland. That is an expansion from the single installation operating there today, but it remains far below the American presence that existed during the Cold War.

At the height of the Cold War, the United States maintained 17 military installations in Greenland. Against that history, permission for two more hardly resembles the monumental breakthrough Trump tried to sell from the United Nations stage.

Trump nevertheless bragged during his speech about “building two very major military bases.” The boast delivered the familiar pageantry, even though the agreement provides considerably less than what the United States was once allowed to maintain in Greenland.

The agreement also blocks countries outside NATO from establishing a military presence in Greenland. That provision addresses a situation that is not currently happening, giving Trump another restriction to celebrate without changing an existing foreign military presence.

Another provision requires Greenland to become a NATO member if it eventually gains full independence from Denmark. That condition sounds significant on paper, but Greenland’s membership could not be guaranteed solely through this agreement.

Admission to NATO requires approval from every existing member of the alliance. The Greenland provision therefore cannot bypass the approval process or promise membership regardless of what those countries decide.

For Denmark and Europe, however, the agreement offers one meaningful political benefit. Trump, despite his hostility toward NATO, has now acknowledged the alliance as the central framework for protecting Greenland.

That framework is not a dramatic departure from the previous relationship. It restores the basic security approach that existed before Trump began threatening Denmark and disregarding the wishes of Greenland’s people.

Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire captured the anticlimax directly. “After months of threatening our NATO Ally Denmark and disregarding the will of the Greenlandic people, President Trump has reached a ‘deal’ that essentially returns the U.S.-Greenland defense relationship to where it was before,” she said.

Trump created months of unnecessary anxiety around an ally, demanded ownership, threatened force, and then signed an agreement that mostly returns everyone to familiar ground. His grand Greenland conquest ended not with annexation, but with two additional bases and the NATO framework he has repeatedly treated with hostility.

The deal may at least provide an off ramp from Trump’s fixation, if he chooses to take it. After turning an existing security relationship into a presidential spectacle, he can now declare victory over a problem largely of his own making.