Buy Greenland? Why not?

Besides acquiring Louisiana from France, Florida from Spain, Alaska from Russia and much of its southwest from Mexico, the U.S. nearly bought Greenland and Iceland in the 1860s. The idea was to surround Canada with U.S. territory and thus persuade it to join the United States.

The time for wooing Canada passed quickly, though, and the U.S. recognized Denmark’s sovereignty over Greenland in 1917 after it bought the Virgin Islands, then a Danish colony. But soon enough, the world’s biggest island acquired strategic importance for the U.S. again, this time as a base for warplanes during World War II. The atomic bomb made Greenland even more strategic. In the pre-missile years, it was especially important to have a base for bombers near an adversary’s borders, and Greenland was close enough to the Soviet Union that the U.S. could threaten all of European Russia from it. It was also an ideal base for reconnaissance flights.

If the idea of the U.S. buying Greenland still seems outlandish, it’s just because land deals between states have become rare. The most recent examples are obscure.

But one could easily imagine other situations in which an institutionalized market in sovereign territories could be beneficial. In a 2017 paper, two Duke University law professors, Joseph Blocher and Mitu Gulati discussed what it would take to create such a market and what problems it would solve. They argued that nothing in today’s international law prevents nations from ceding and acquiring territory as they see fit as long as the transfer isn’t forced.

The reason such deals no longer take place is that in the modern world, sovereignty ultimately resides with the people. Buying and selling people with the territories they inhabit is an obsolete notion. But, Blocher and Gulati argued, taking the population’s desires into consideration could

change things.

Their proposal is to change international law so that “parent nations” can’t forbid a region to secede, but they’re entitled to compensation for lost territory. Of course, there would be lots of sensible objections to such a plan. The supply of territories for sale is limited, the will of the people isn’t always easy to determine with certainty, and there’s a question of how you put a price on a place.

Also, it may not be a great idea to let rich nations buy up territories from poor ones (they have the technology to persuade residents to vote for it, too) and turn them into colonies. The solution Blocher and Gulati suggested, giving the purchased territories’ residents the purchasing nations’ citizenship, wouldn’t change much: Puerto Ricans, for example, are U.S. citizens but they don’t really enjoy U.S. living standards.

Greenland, of course, won’t be sold. On the one hand, Denmark has no reason to sell it. It’s a wealthy country that runs a budget surplus. It can easily afford the annual subsidy of about $500 million that it pays to Greenland, and it sees itself as the island’s sensible steward rather than the unwilling owner of a vast, largely uninhabited territory.

Besides, the 56,000 Greenlanders likely wouldn’t want to switch their allegiance. Alaska, with its recent crippling budget cuts, can hardly serve as an attractive example to another sparsely populated northern territory cut off from the continental U.S.

To protect U.S. interests in the Arctic, Trump would be better off working closely and constructively with European allies, including Denmark and Norway. Such cooperation can make more economic sense than territorial expansion. Trump may be wrong on Greenland but he unwittingly raised the question of sovereign territory transactions. If they can be used to avoid violence and unnecessary tension and benefit denizens of the territory for sale, why not?