Who Owns Greenland Anyway?

Having run promising to bring world peace in the first 24 hours, Trump has, weeks before taking office, threatened invasion of Mexico, Annexing Canada, and the Panama Canal.

Deranged Christmas post by the incoming President again asserts the “need” for the United States to control Greenland, which is territory of NATO ally Denmark.
I have no special expertise, but IMHO is this fixation was seeded, or at least encouraged, in conversation with Vladimir Putin.

Washington Post:

Since his first term, President-elect Donald Trump has insisted that the United States should purchase Greenland — to the bewilderment of aides asked to investigate such a possibility, and despite repeated denials by top officials in Greenland and Denmark, of which the island is an autonomous territory, that it would ever be for sale at any price.

As he prepares to assume office, Trump has returned to the idea. “For purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World, the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity,” the president-elect wrote on Truth Social, his social media platform, over the weekend, in a statement announcing his choice for ambassador to Denmark. Kenneth Howery, the newly announced pick, is a co-founder of PayPal.

The Arctic island, which is roughly three times the size of Texas, has a population of about 57,000 people. It is on the North American continent, to Canada’s northeast, but is in practice part of Europe and is an autonomous territory of Denmark, which ruled over the island for more than 200 years and still maintains some control over its foreign policy.

Greenland’s prime minister, Múte Egede, echoed previous statements from Greenland’s leaders on the occasion of similar overtures from Trump during his first term. “We are not for sale and will never be for sale,” Egede said.

Trump says owning the island is a national security objective for the United States. The U.S. military has a base on the island, Pituffik Space Base, a strategic location for missile defense and space surveillance missions, according to the U.S. Space Force. The base was erected in the early years of the Cold War.

At well over 800,000 square miles, the island is enormous and rich with natural resources including oil and rare earth minerals such as neodymium and dysprosium, both of which originate most often from China and Russia, according to the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Has the United States tried to buy Greenland before?

Yes. President Andrew Johnson’s administration commissioned a report in the 1860s that found Greenland’s natural resources might make it a strategic investment, but the idea did not gain momentum.

Shortly after the end of World War II, President Harry S. Truman’s administration made a $100 million offer for the island.

The idea of expanding the United States by purchasing land isn’t new. In 1803, the United States purchased 530 million acres of land from France for $15 million in what became known as the Louisiana Purchase. Almost 65 years later, the United States bought Alaska from Russia for $7.2 million following negotiations led by Secretary of State William Seward. For years, skeptics called the purchase “Seward’s Folly,” though the discovery of gold deposits decades later reversed those sentiments.

How much would it cost to buy Greenland?

In a purely hypothetical exercise, The Post estimated in 2019 that the purchase of Greenland could cost up to $1.7 trillion, given the island’s industries and natural resources. Of course, it does not have a real cost if it is not for sale in the first place.