Uummannaq, Greenland (Photo by: Arterra/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
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It is probably safe to say that the US will not be buying Greenland. Despite Donald Trump’s surprise confirmation on Sunday that he is indeed interested in such a proposition – though not as his “number one” priority – Denmark, Greenland’s longstanding owner, has said categorically that the island is not up for sale.
At worst, the revelation will reinforce views of the US President as a compulsive property developer for whom everything – even parts of other people’s countries – has a price. At best, it might cast Trump as a President from an earlier age, when the United States was expanding in part by buying its rivals and enemies out.
The practice might seem archaic, but is it worth taking another look at the potential for states to buy land from other states? After all, the US did pretty well out of it. About one-third of the territory that comprises the US today came in exchange for money. Louisiana was bought from Napoleon in 1803; Alaska from Russia in 1867, and money changed hands as part of the treaty under which the US gained the northern half of Mexico in 1848.
As recently as 1917, Woodrow Wilson bought the Danish West Indies and renamed them the US Virgin Islands. If you go right back to beginnings, Dutch colonists bought the island of Manhattan for a pittance from native American tribesmen in 1626.
Nor, in perhaps seeking to add Greenland to the list, is Trump quite so out of order as it might seem. The US had a plan to buy Greenland at the same time as Alaska in 1867, and the possibility was raised again by President Harry Truman in 1946, when he offered Denmark $100m. And just look at a map, or preferably spin a globe. Would it not make a lot more sense, in sheer practical, geographical, terms, for the place to be run by the United States – or Canada? The US already has a major air base at Thule in the north of the country, with missile early-warning and space surveillance systems, and the changing climate is opening up new shipping routes. In many ways a sale would make eminent sense.
Except that Greenland and Denmark don’t want to give it up – for many of the same reasons, no doubt, that the US President has expressed an interest. With Russia and China eyeing opportunities in the Arctic, Greenland’s strategic significance is obvious. It is rich not just in fish, but in all manner of natural resources, most of which have barely been tapped, but could become more accessible as the ice melts.
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