Trump Wishes to Buy Greenland

Even after three years in office, President Trump still manages to surprise everyone. In his latest debacle, he is involved in attempting to buy Greenland from Denmark but when he was rejected. In response, Trump cancelled his planned trip to Denmark.

In the past, the United States did buy land including Louisiana from the French in 1804 for 15 million dollars which double the size of the United States under Thomas Jefferson and bought Alaska from the Russians in 1867 for 7.2 million dollars.

Both the French and Russian government needed the money and at the time the United States was neutral and avoided intervening in European affairs therefore, offsetting large swathes of lands seemed reasonable at the time. However, the practice of selling and buying land in foreign territories is an archaic practice.

Yet, in 2019 President Trump’s intentions to buy Greenland from Denmark was dismissed by all factions in Denmark. Even though Greenland has a large number of natural resources and with global warming opening up new routes and trapped resources, they rely on ⅔ of their budget from Denmark and alcoholism, unemployment and suicide rates are high.

President Trump justified his intentions by pointing out the former President, Harry Truman’s, intentions of buying Greenland in 1946 with 100 million dollars worth in gold. At the time, Truman wanted to use the territory as a military base to counter the Soviet Union.

However, the deal was not met and instead, Denmark alongside the United States were founding members of NATO. The deal was kept under wraps, not only for security measures but the idea was and is still unpopular amongst the public.

President Trump called the Danish Prime Minister dismissing his idea as “absurd” as “nasty”. As a result, a planned trip to Denmark was cancelled because the agenda of buying Greenland was not on the table which made many in Denmark frustrated at the wasted expenses on planning and security for the visit.

Photo by Filip Gielda on Unsplash