Greenland? Manifest Destiny!

I ran across this video by a UK YouTuber that gives an entertaining perspective on Trump;s current effort to buy Greenland. The key takeaway is that acquiring Greenland has been a US strategic objective since 1867, when Secretary of State William H Seward attempted to purchase it from Denmark along with his purchase of Alaska from Russia. (He also wanted to buy Canada from the UK.) According to Wikipedia,

Since the 19th century, the United States has considered, and made, several attempts to purchase the island of Greenland from Denmark, as it did with the Danish West Indies in 1917. Internal discussions within the United States government about acquiring Greenland notably occurred in 1867, 1910, 1946, 1955, 2019 and 2025 and acquisition has been advocated by American secretaries of state William H. Seward and James F. Byrnes, privately by vice president Nelson Rockefeller, and publicly by president Donald Trump, among others. After World War II, the United States secretly offered to buy Greenland; public discussion of purchasing the island occurred during Trump's first term in 2019 and again after Trump's 2024 reelection as part of his Greater United States policy.

This largely unrecognized history tends to undermine the current accepted view that "Manifest Destiny" was a doctrine limited to the 19th and early 20th century and controversial at that. For instance, at Britannica:

Manifest Destiny, in U.S. history, the supposed inevitability of the continued territorial expansion of the boundaries of the United States westward to the Pacific and beyond. Before the American Civil War (1861–65), the idea of Manifest Destiny was used to validate continental acquisitions in the Oregon Country, Texas, New Mexico, and California. The purchase of Alaska after the Civil War briefly revived the concept of Manifest Destiny, but it most evidently became a renewed force in U.S. foreign policy in the 1890s, when the country went to war with Spain, annexed Hawaii, and laid plans for an isthmian canal across Central America.

. . . Some found the opinion intriguing, but others were simply irritated. The Whig Party sought to discredit Manifest Destiny as belligerent as well as pompous, beginning with Massachusetts Rep. Robert Winthrop’s using the term to mock Pres. James K. Polk’s policy toward Oregon.

Britannica then argues that the runup to the Civil War and its aftermath led to the end of a first phase of Manifest Destiny, which resumed only as the influence of Alfred Thayer Mahan's theory of sea power refocused US interests on the Pacific, which led to the annexation of Hawaii as a US Territory in 1898, as well as the acquisitions of the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico as territories after the Spanish-American War. But Britannica concludes that it's a phenomenon that came and went:

Those who promoted it might have done so from venal or virtuous motives, and those who opposed it were seemingly vindicated by the Civil War in their grim warnings about the steep costs of a spreading imperium, but the events of American expansionism were a tale more than twice-told in the course of history.

William H Seward, as noted above, bought Alaska from Russia in 1867 and was nearly able to acquire both Greenland and much of the Danish West Indies from Denmark soon afterward:

Finding Denmark considerably more amenable to selling than the current president, Seward was wheeling and dealing with his counterparts in Copenhagen. He came to terms very similar to the Alaskan bottom line (the enormous, erstwhile Russian colony had cost the U.S. $7.2 million): $7.5 million for much of the Danish West Indies, only to have Congress scuttle the treaty.

It was around this time that Seward also began to openly covet Greenland. As with their Caribbean holdings, the Danes appeared primed to sell their northern island possessions, as well. Seward put the power of the State Department to work at once, commissioning scientists and political partisans to produce a report on the virtues of Greenland.

. . . Congress refused to consider buying Denmark’s West Indies (later purchased and renamed the U.S. Virgin Islands), let alone take seriously Seward’s pitch for Greenland.

According to History.com, the US continued to be interested in the Virgin Islands:

Negotiations started up again in the 1890s but fizzled with the onset of the Spanish-American War in 1898.

. . . The U.S. was a larger imperial power now, with a greater interest in expanding. It had also set its sights on building the Panama Canal, and this made it even more interested in purchasing St. Thomas, St. John and St. Croix in order to secure the future canal’s route. Again, another secretary of state (this time John Hay) negotiated a treaty with Denmark. The Senate ratified the treaty in 1902, but this time, the Danish parliament rejected it.

In 1915, the fear of German takeover motivated the U.S. to make another try for the islands. Especially after the sinking of the Lusitania, President Woodrow Wilson and Secretary of State Robert Lansing feared that Germany might annex Denmark and launch more attacks from the Danish West Indies. Danish leaders resisted ceding the islands and their majority-black inhabitants to the racially-segregated United States.

Angry at this, Lansing insinuated that if Denmark didn’t sell the U.S. the islands, it just might go and seize them to prevent Germany for getting to them. It was a bullying tactic, and it worked.

Eager to prevent a U.S. military attack (Denmark was currently a neutral party in World War I), Denmark negotiated a treaty with the U.S. that President Wilson signed on January 16, 1917. On March 31, 1917, Denmark formally transferred governance over the islands to the U.S., and the U.S. reciprocated by paying Denmark $25 million in gold coin.

The US has in fact continued with expansionist spurts via initiatives from presidents of both parties, from a variety of motives, and often concluding the deals with actual military action, as in the Mexican and Spanish-American Wars, or the threat of it, as with Denmark. The idea of acquiring Greenland is nothing new, but it looks as though Trump is now determined to follow through.