Compared to this latest conceit, changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America is chump change.
This is an idea that is bold, transformative, and wacky. Our president, Donald J Trump, is vowing to annex Greenland.
“Annex” meaning to take and to hold permanently. By hook or by crook, he literally wants it to be part of the United States. He wants this despite the furious objection of its 57,000 current residents and its longtime owner, the Kingdom of Denmark.
Give me a break, you say. Denmark is a founding member of NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and Trump would never mess with a fellow member of the most successful mutual defense pact in modern world history.
Aside from the laughter and head shaking the notion caused when announced, most observers now believe President Trump is dead serious.
There is nothing technically to prevent the United States or any other nation from negotiating the sale or purchase of real estate, however grandiose.
In 1803, America bought the Louisiana Purchase from Napoleon, a huge swath of territory that became the American Midwest. Following our Civil War, in 1867, we bought the formerly Russian territory of Alaska from Czar Alexander II.
As recently as 1917, the United States was still expanding, purchasing several of the Virgin Islands in the Caribbean. Interestingly, Denmark owned the islands at the time. Maybe that is how Trump got the idea.
Nowadays, the usual way for countries to expand or contract is by armed conflict.
Vladimir Putin, no doubt, deeply regrets his czarist predecessors having sold Alaska. Perhaps in consolation, Putin is willing to wage war to incorporate all or most of Ukraine back into Mother Russia. Hopefully, no one in the Trump administration is pondering an invasion of Greenland, although with this crew, you never know.
Unlike his musings about cancelling the 2026 mid-term elections or running for a third term in the White House in 2028, Trump is serious.
Too bad about Denmark. Too bad about the will of the Greenlandic people, and too bad about the objections of most of the United States Congress.
To get critics objecting to this bold-faced robbery to concede, President Trump is now threatening to impose a 25% tariff on any nation opposing our usurpation of Greenland. An ugly trade war with Europe looms.
Why does the United States even need title to Greenland?
We currently have a treaty dating back to 1951 that gives the United States access we deem necessary to build bases or harbors to ensure Greenland and the Arctic remain a bulwark against Russian or Chinese expansion.
Most of the bases are empty, deemed unnecessary after the Cold War. They could easily be restarted. The same treaty allows for the exploitation of the infinite cache of raw materials, waiting beneath Greenland’s melting ice cap.
Occupy Greenland used to be a joke. No longer.
Now the idea poses a threat to the NATO Alliance, which, since the end of World War II, has represented security and safety for the Western world.
What is motivating Trump’s discordant geography is his sense of his own mortality. Trump wants to leave behind an indelible reminder that he alone in the 21st Century could redraw the world’s maps to include the planet’s largest island as part of the territory of the United States of America.
A 51st state? whether we want it or not.
