The United States is unique in getting so much of its territory through peaceful purchases. Among other acquisitions, it bought Louisiana from France in 1803, Florida from Spain in 1845, and Alaska from Russia in 1867.
Even when the expansion was not peaceful, money was often involved. Mexico received dollops of cash for the formal cession of its various conquered territories after 1845: $7.5 million in debt relief for Texas; $15 million for California, New Mexico, and Utah; and, later, $10 million for Arizona. Spain was paid $20 million for the Philippines in 1898.
The U.S. is not the only country to have engaged in checkbook expansion. Pakistan, for example, bought some coastal land from Oman in 1958. However, the acquisition of often lightly settled lands through amicable agreements has been an American specialty. The business of America, after all, is business.
There is nothing intrinsically wrong with offering to buy Greenland, which is even more sparsely populated today than much of the Louisiana Purchase was in 1803. There might be advantages both to the U.S. and, if there is meaningful investment in mineral extraction and defense, to local people.
Then again, contracts must be willing or they are not properly contracts. If President Donald Trump is serious about buying Greenland, he should put something on the table that would make people both there and in Denmark, the sovereign power, better off. Instead, by all accounts, he is threatening economic sanctions against Denmark, a country that has been a loyal American ally since 1941, going so far as to send troops to Afghanistan after 9/11.
Loyalty, for Trump, does not imply reciprocity. He reportedly stormed and raged at the Danish prime minister in a phone call, and his officials have briefed that economic sanctions are being drawn up against the little kingdom, including the possible banning of the Danish weight-loss drug Ozempic from the world’s, in every sense, largest market.
This, rather than the idea of a purchase in itself, is where the problem arises. The U.S. has acquired Danish territory before. In 1917, it bought what are now the U.S. Virgin Islands for $25 million — around $700 million at today’s prices. The Danes had no great attachment to the islands, which had few ethnically Danish settlers and had always been viewed more as an investment than a colony. Yet, even so, the sale happened only after half a century of sporadic negotiations, with one side or the other often backing out at the last minute. Only the threat of German U-boats using the Caribbean archipelago as a base forced President Woodrow Wilson’s hand. The islands have been a drain on the U.S. Treasury ever since.
According to Danish historian Tom Høyem, who used to serve as Denmark’s high representative in Greenland, Wilson originally bid for Greenland, too, but the Danes were not interested. The U.S. eventually agreed that, in exchange for the Virgin Islands, they would not only acknowledge Danish sovereignty over Greenland but, according to Høyem, also give Britain a right of first refusal if Denmark ever decided to sell.
The last thing Britain’s woke, indebted, and anticolonialist Labour Party government wants is to acquire territory. Never mind that Greenland costs the Danish taxpayer a pretty penny. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer is so keen to give the Chagos Islands to Mauritius that, far from demanding payment, he is offering the Mauritians $11 billion to take the islands, home to the British-American base at Diego Garcia.
Since 1945, Britain and America have been the primary defenders of a rules-based international order. That order rests on the sanctity of international treaties, the recognition of territorial jurisdiction, and the unacceptability of altering boundaries by force.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Russia used gas diplomacy as a prelude to its invasion of Ukraine. China periodically surrounds Taiwan in advance of a possible assault there. We have always deplored such maneuvers as threats to the peace and stability of the world. On what grounds can we criticize them once the U.S. begins to throw its weight around in pursuit of territories which it has never owned, and to which it has no legal or historical claim?
Britain may not be able to afford Greenland. But its right of first refusal was based on the fact that, in 1917, Canada was still British territory. What if Canada, as the inheritor of that claim, chose to exercise it? Not because it especially wants Greenland but because it has been spooked by all the 51st-state rhetoric into wanting to avoid encirclement. You see how quickly these things escalate?
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
