Mark Twain’s famous advice to ‘buy land, they aren’t making it anymore’ couldn’t have found a more receptive audience than President Donald Trump, a real estate man at heart who covets a certain piece of property to our north.
Vice President JD Vance and Second Lady Usha traveled to the Island nation this week, visiting a U.S. Space Force base, in the firmest message yet that Trump means business when he says he wants to make Greenland part of America.
Notice that when Trump talks about foreign countries he almost always references the properties he owns there, a golf course in Scotland or a hotel in Dubai. He’s not merely boasting. He’s saying that he has skin in the game and therefore understands the country.
This is not a president who puts much store in intangible multilateral defense agreements that allow the United States to pay for the protection of Danish Greenland. No, he wants the land, not some complicated leasing agreement.
And is it such a crazy notion? We are the nation that pushed Lewis and Clark across the Rockies. We have acquired Alaska and Hawaii, Guam and all the little micro-islands nobody has been to.
The last time the United States grew in territory was in 1947 with the addition of the Marshall Islands and some others, but these last 78 years have been an outlier. Prior to that, America’s appetite for land was almost insatiable.
So why not Greenland?
The only reason that Greenland is Danish to begin with is that 1,000 years ago some Vikings bumped into it. Since then it’s been too cold for anyone else to bother with it.
And while it ultimately should be up to the Greenlandic people to decide their sovereignty, that is not the only consideration in a world where control of the Arctic could mean control of the globe.
Trump’s interests, which is to say America’s interests, may well be best served by possessing the strategic nation.
More than anything else, what is standing in the way of a big beautiful deal to buy Greenland, something the United States tried to do after occupying and protecting the large island in World War II while Denmark was under German rule, is the post-Cold-War order of the past 40 years.
Under the neo-liberal bromides of leaders with good hair, the West, led by the U.S., came to view newly-minted borders in Europe and elsewhere as sacrosanct, fixed as the firmament, immovable, which runs counter to all of human history, including America’s.
It kind of worked for a while. There has been no third world war, but even by the mid-1990s, the former Yugoslavia was descending into violent chaos, there is no peace in the Middle East, and Russia has spent decades redrawing its border with Ukraine in blood.
To Trump, and to many Americans who think like him, if countries like Russia are expanding, if China has an eye towards doing so, then we cannot sit on the sidelines, especially if the defense of the free world is conducted on our dime.
In chess, the early 20th century saw the emergence of the hyper-modern style in which the conventional wisdom that pawns must physically occupy the all-important center of the board was tossed aside in favor of powerful pieces controlling the center from a distance.
But unlike chess, geopolitics does not have a firm and discrete set of rules. So one can see why Trump prefers the idea of physically holding space, rather than allowing it to be protected by a vague collection of Western interests.
Because we have been conditioned by the post-Cold War order, it sounds strange when Trump refers to borders as ‘artificial lines.’ But it’s absolutely true: Borders are negotiated, and you might even think of them as a kind of real estate deal.
Nobody wants to go to war over Greenland, but that is no reason not to pitch this deal to the 57,000 people who live there. America has a lot to offer, and maybe Trump can make them an offer too good to refuse.
In any event, as Americans we should not be shocked by or shy about the idea of expanding our territory. It’s not just what Trump has always done, it’s in America’s DNA.