Nuuk, Greenland

Source: Bigstock

One of the more curious aspects of the second Trump administration is how, without warning to voters, the White House has suddenly become more pugnacious than James K. Polk at threatening wars of conquest in the frozen north. As Donald Trump recently ominously observed:

We need Greenland for national security and even international security. And I think we’re going to get it one way or the other.

For example, with Second Lady Usha Vance soon to visit Greenland due to her newly discovered fascination with dogsled racing, JD Vance told Fox News:

Denmark, which controls Greenland, it’s not doing its job and it’s not being a good ally. So you have to ask yourself: “How are we going to solve that problem, solve our national security?” If that means that we need to take more territorial interest in Greenland, that is what President Trump is going to do, because he doesn’t care about what the Europeans scream at us. He cares about putting the interest of America’s citizens first.

Of course, objectively, Denmark is a pretty good ally. It has let America build up our Thule Air Base (now renamed Pituffik Space Base), where my brother-in-law served in the 1980s, for free since 1951. During WWII the Danish government-in-exile endorsed the U.S.’s occupation of Greenland, and likely would in the case of WWIII unless America made itself too obnoxious.

Denmark has also fought alongside the U.S. in our post-9/11 wars. On a per capita basis, little Denmark lost three-fourths as many men in combat in Afghanistan as the U.S. did.

Denmark currently devotes 2.4 percent of its GDP to defense, less than America’s 3.4 percent, but above average for NATO and more than Britain, France, or Germany spends. It has committed to boosting military spending to at least 3 percent of GDP next year.

It’s been the world’s second most generous relative contributor of aid to Ukraine, following only Estonia, giving four times as much proportionally as the U.S.

And Denmark’s immigration restriction policies ought to have served as a role model for America over the past two dozen years.

In other words, Denmark is close to America’s ideal ally.

These are all reasons why nobody in America was sore at Denmark until Trump decided he was. Now, though, many are scrambling to come up with rationalizations for why Denmark deserves to have Greenland stolen from it.

Presumably, Trump doesn’t really want to go to war with Denmark, he just wants to extort a lower price.

But vindicating wars of conquest is one of the worst ideas imaginable in 2025. After all, Washington wants a Taipei that remains independent from Beijing. But America doesn’t have much of a legal argument for that, having recognized China’s legal claim to Taiwan since the 1970s…other than that aggressive wars are bad.

Which they are.

I realize that a bunch of kids on Twitter think that Nietzsche made modern war sound like great fun. But that turned out not to be true in World War I, due to the artillery and machine guns. And combat sure isn’t in Ukraine, what with all the flying death robots.

In contrast, proposing to buy Greenland from Denmark at a fair price was one of the more interesting initiatives of the first Trump administration’s fairly amiable foreign policy, which saw some unexpected successes, such as Trump charming Mexico’s leftist president Andrés Manuel López Obrador into cooperating with his effective Remain in Mexico plan for slowing the influx of Central Americans through the southern border.

Granted, the U.S. purchasing Greenland for a mutually agreeable price would have violated the unwritten rule of thumb since about 1960 that countries shouldn’t get bigger. (The main internationally recognized exception was India adding some territories, such as the Portuguese colony of Goa in 1962 and formerly independent Sikkim in 1975.)

I realize that paying attention to international recognition sounds wussy, but please notice that Vlad Putin is obsessed with getting recognition of his annexation of four Ukrainian provinces (three of which he hasn’t fully gone through the formality of conquering yet) recognized.

In contrast, Israel’s conquests in 1967, Indonesia’s occupation of East Timor, and Morocco’s of Western Sahara (both in the tumultuous year of 1975) were not widely recognized abroad (which cost Indonesia dearly in 1998).

But then the Trump-Kushner administration recognized Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights. One could argue that Israel is special, but then, Trump-Kushner recognized mediocre Morocco’s invasion of Spain’s former colony of Western Sahara in order to secure Morocco’s recognition of Israel.

Did this encourage Putin to think his invasion of Ukraine might likewise be recognized?

On the other hand, it’s not clear if there really is a norm against territorial expansion by purchase. There clearly has been one against expansion by conquest since shortly after World War II, when the Soviet Union expanded a couple of hundred miles westward and the U.S. acquired a few Pacific islands (rather small acquisitions considering the colossal scale of the conflict).

But, in contrast, there hasn’t been much interest in peacefully buying territory since, say, the U.S. bought Denmark’s Virgin Islands in 1917. Nor have there been payments to the losers in wars of conquest, the way the U.S. paid Spain for the Philippines in 1898 and Mexico for California in 1848. (After 2014, I’d idly pondered Russia trying to mollify Ukraine for its land grabs by offering, say, $100 billion for Crimea, but that idea didn’t seem to appeal to anybody else. On the other hand, how has not settling their dispute for cash worked out for all concerned? Modern war is expensive.)

One reason that payment for territory is out of fashion are ideologies associated with nationalism and decolonization. For example, when Imperial Germany bullied the Bolsheviks into relinquishing Ukraine at Brest-Litovsk in January 1918, Germany didn’t formally acquire Ukraine the way it had annexed Alsace and Lorraine after the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. Instead, Berlin sponsored an independent Ukrainian state (which, presumably, would have been an economic underling of Germany).

Hence, it’s likely that the U.S. would end up paying twice for Greenland, once to Denmark and then again to the indigenous Inuit population. To me, it sounds like a tedious imbroglio to take on responsibility for a bunch of drunken Eskimos who owe zero loyalty to America. But you can just do things, so what do I know relative to teenage Trump enthusiasts on X?

Yet another reason that you never hear anymore about payment for territory is because land, unless it has cheaply accessible oil and gas, isn’t all that valuable anymore, relatively speaking. For instance, you hear lots of chatter about Greenland’s purported vast wealth of rare earth elements, but the total revenue from all the rare earth elements mined in 2024 was a measly $4 billion.

Nations used to worry about their population expanding more than could be fed by their farmland, but since the development of the Haber-Bosch process for generating nitrogen fertilizer from the air in 1913, the supply side of the problem has dwindled. And lately the demand side of the problem is disappearing outside of Africa.

Another reason countries don’t bother expanding by purchase anymore is that, as Norman Angell pointed out in The Great Illusion just before the Great War, piracy and property rights don’t mix well:

If credit and commercial contract are tampered with in an attempt at confiscation, the credit-dependent wealth is undermined, and its collapse involves that of the conqueror; so that if conquest is not to be self-injurious it must respect the enemy’s property, in which case it becomes economically futile. Thus the wealth of conquered territory remains in the hands of the population of such territory. When Germany annexed Alsace, no individual German secured a single mark’s worth of Alsatian property as the spoils of war. Conquest in the modern world is a process of multiplying by x, and then obtaining the original figure by dividing by x. For a modern nation to add to its territory no more adds to the wealth of the people of such nation than it would add to the wealth of Londoners if the City of London were to annex the county of Hertford.

Angell is often laughed at as a poor prophet, but how well did the Great War pay off for his skeptics?

Similarly, what’s the benefit of Trump’s plan of making Canada the 51st state when it would get 55 electoral votes and give the Democrats one-party rule?

The main reason for territorial expansion is to increase the size of your population and thus your army so that you can expand some more.

But what’s the point for citizens, per capita?

The U.S. already owns the best parts of North America. That was President Polk’s insight: There were five great natural harbors on the west coast: Acapulco, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, and Vancouver. Let the Mexicans keep the southernmost and the British empire the northernmost and America will get the rest.

How did that work out for the United States?

Pretty great, in fact.

As Abraham Lincoln asked:

Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the ocean and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest, with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years.

Since then, the fact that the United States could conquer Canada and Mexico but hasn’t, has contributed to the rest of the world more or less acceding to American world leadership. That America has such a fine piece of real estate that it doesn’t bother to bully its immediate neighbors suggests that it won’t attempt to pilfer the rest of the world.

Yet, Trump’s elderly thought pattern seems to be to pull America back from commitments overseas in order to tyrannize the inferior regions of North America. Hence, his bizarre insistence on renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America after 475 years.

Of course, being the global alpha male is moderately expensive—the U.S. ranks 25th out of 166 countries on military spending—but it’s a lot cheaper than being the world’s bitch.