This article was written by Judge (Ret.) John Wilson
Recently, President Donald Trump floated the idea of purchasing Greenland from Denmark. In response, the Danish Prime Minister, Mette Frederiksen, called the idea “absurd,” which in turn, prompted the President to cancel a planned visit to Denmark.
Immediately, the question arose – Does Denmark even own Greenland? According to a BBC profile, Greenland “is the world’s largest island and an autonomous Danish dependent territory with limited self-government and its own parliament.” With a population of approximately 57,000 spread across 840,000 square miles, two thirds of Greenland’s revenue comes from Denmark. The other one third derives from fishing.”
While many have made fun of the President’s ambitions, including the former Prime Minister of Denmark, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, who pointedly asked if this was a joke in a recent tweet, even the New York Times had to admit that purchasing Greenland was not such a bad idea. “The island sits atop a trove of rare-earth metals, a category whose mining and export is increasingly dominated by China. It also has national security importance to the United States, which maintains its northernmost missile-warning, space surveillance and deepwater seaport at the Thule Air Base on Greenland’s northwestern coast.”
In fact, Thule Air Base is situated in Greenland as a result of the last attempt by an American President to buy the island from Denmark.
In 1946, President Harry Truman offered Denmark $100 million in gold for Greenland. As reported by the Washington Post, the proposal was also rejected out of hand by the Danes. “After floating the proposal at (a) December 1946 meeting in New York, Secretary of State James Byrnes wrote in a telegram that his overture ‘seemed to come as a shock’ to Danish Foreign Minister Gustav Rasmussen…(u)ltimately, Denmark’s refusal to sell Greenland to the United States wasn’t a major obstacle. In 1951, the two countries entered into a defense treaty that allowed the Pentagon to build Thule Air Base, its northernmost military installation.”
Though the Cold War has been over for years, making the Truman Administration’s rationale for seeking the purchase of Greenland no longer of primary importance, Greenland is still possessed of a wealth of mineral resources. In fact, besides gold, iron-ore, and rubies, Greenland is also a potential source of uranium, oil, natural gas, fluoride and thorium. Since most of the country sits under ice for most of the year, however, mining those precious elements has been one issue. Another has been the concerns of environmentalists who do not wish to have Greenland’s pristine environment disturbed by mining.
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The populaton of Greenland, is mostly Inuit, an indigenous group spread across the arctic regions, including Alaska and Canada. But rather than engage in mining their own resources and enriching themselves, the Inuit live in poverty. The reason? The aforementioned concerns of environmentalists. According to James Pinkerton, “the Danes have chosen to treat the territory…like a giant nature preserve,” leaving the Intuit with nothing but fishing to support themselves and their families.
Clearly, if the Trump Administration were to purchase Greenland, and open the territory up for mining, the Inuit would find themselves employed, and enjoying a higher standard of living then they do under their Danish rulers.
This is not the first time the opposition has made light of a President’s aspirations. In the early 1800’s, the Federalist Party opposed Jefferson’s purchase of the Louisiana Territory. The 1867 purchase of Alaska from Czarist Russia was ratified by only one vote, and was largely derided as “Seward’s Folly,” in honor of then-Secretary of State William Seward. However, all laughter ceased with the discovery of large deposits of gold in the Alaska territory in 1898.
If nothing else, the mere idea that the United States could purchase Greenland, and keep that territory’s valuable resources out of the hands of the Chinese shows that President Trump is thinking on a grand scale. Perhaps Make America Great Again is more than just a slogan to this President.
Picture: Pixabay