Buying Greenland Isn’t a New Idea

Denmark wanted to sell it a century ago. The U.S. didn’t bite but did acquire the Virgin Islands.

Critics are sharpening their pens to excoriate President Trump for again proposing to purchase Greenland. The real-estate baron wants to buy not only the land but also Greenland’s political sovereignty. Many commentators derided the idea when Mr. Trump raised it during his first term. Then and now, the discussion could use a healthy dose of historical perspective.

In 2019, Denmark, which holds sovereignty over Greenland, deemed the president’s idea ridiculous. In the U.S., critics lambasted his project as megalomaniacal or un-American.

But the idea isn’t outlandish or unique to Mr. Trump. Politicians from all parties have negotiated such deals throughout U.S. history. Thomas Jefferson made the Louisiana Purchase and then flirted with buying Cuba. As secretary of state, John Quincy Adams arranged debt relief for Spain in exchange for Florida. Secretary of State William Seward acquired Alaska. What Mr. Trump proposes is consistent with this American tradition—and with our current borders. Sovereignty purchases are responsible for more than 40% of U.S. land.

Further, this practice has had international approval. When Spain, France, Mexico and Russia sold to America the lands that now make up a large portion of our country, they recognized the legitimacy of such transactions.

Purchasing sovereignty has been an accepted custom of international law for centuries. The unification of Germany in the 19th century involved real-estate transactions in which states mixed sovereignty, property and money. In 1898, Imperial Germany leased sovereignty over Qingdao, a settlement on China’s Shandong Peninsula. Later that year, the U.K. leased from China sovereignty over a piece of land further south, in Kowloon. That land became a crucial part of a now-familiar trade hub: Hong Kong.

Though Danish leaders today imply that the idea of selling sovereignty is out of touch with their national values, the country has a long history of doing just that. In 1845, the king of Denmark accepted millions of rupees from the East India Co. to transfer control over multiple Danish hubs in India. In the early 1900s, Denmark’s leadership, despairing over the loss of Schleswig-Holstein to Bismarck’s Prussia, floated a possible sale of Greenland to the U.S. The U.S. didn’t agree but in January 1917 paid $25 million to Denmark for another remote Danish possession of strategic importance—now the U.S. Virgin Islands.

The world of 1917 isn’t the world of 2024, but it’s ahistoric to dismiss purchasing Greenland as a ludicrous idea. It’s better to scrutinize the terms of a potential agreement—particularly how it might affect Greenlanders themselves.

Many of the precedents that legitimate Mr. Trump’s proposal for Greenland are tainted by terms that treated the people of the purchased lands as pawns. These arrangements were made without popular consent and sometimes involved coercion. Mr. Trump would need to improve upon his predecessors’ work in this respect, and it’d be a tough sell to the Greenlanders, whose prime minister has declared the island “not for sale.”

Still, the people of Greenland could gain from a deal with Mr. Trump. History suggests the benefits of being open-minded about this. Inhabitants of Alaska wouldn’t be better off under Russian sovereignty. Bringing Greenlanders into closer affiliation with the U.S., and sweetening the deal with economic subsidies, could conceivably prove beneficial to all parties. It’ll be a complicated decision for Greenland, which will have to weigh the material and defense benefits against other considerations, not least the principle of national self-determination.

In 1946, long before any Dane had heard of Mr. Trump, America made a formal offer of $100 million to buy Greenland, recognizing the strategic importance of the land to U.S. interests. Though the Danes didn’t say yes at the time, it’d be good for political commentators to keep in mind that this idea is neither new nor radical. At least so we might be spared spurious indignation.