Trump Has More To Say About Greenland

As of this morning:

Political leaders in Greenland strongly rejected U.S. President Donald Trump's proposal to bring the Arctic island under American control, saying Greenland’s future belongs to its people.

In a joint statement on Friday, Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen and four party leaders made it clear that any decisions about the territory’s status, which is now a self-governing part of the Kingdom of Denmark, must be made by Greenlanders themselves.

“We don’t want to be Americans, we don’t want to be Danes — we want to be Greenlanders,” they said.

As of yesterday,

US President Donald Trump on Friday again suggested the use of force to seize Greenland as he brushed aside Denmark's sovereignty over the autonomous Arctic island.

"We are going to do something on Greenland, whether they like it or not," Trump said at a White House meeting with oil executives looking to benefit in Venezuela, where the United States last week overthrew the president.

"I would like to make a deal, you know, the easy way. But if we don't do it the easy way, we're going to do it the hard way," Trump said when asked of Greenland.

. . . "We're not going to have Russia or China occupy Greenland. That's what they're going to do if we don't. So we're going to be doing something with Greenland, either the nice way or the more difficult way."

Commentators keep referring to the Louisiana Purchase as a sort of paradigm for US expansion, I assume because they learned about it in middle school history class. But the Louisiana Purchase brought about a number of other complex issues they don't talk about in middle school, such as the status of Florida. For instance, just how far to the east of New Orleans did the purchase extend? And Spain laid claim to "East Florida", the Florida peninsula, but Spain had never been in actual control of the interior, which was an increasing problem at the Georgia border.

To stop the Seminole based in East Florida from raiding Georgia settlements and offering havens for runaway slaves, the U.S. Army led increasingly frequent incursions into Spanish territory. This included the 1817–1818 campaign by Andrew Jackson that became known as the First Seminole War, after which the U.S. effectively seized control of Florida; albeit for purposes of lawful government and administration in Georgia and not for the outright annexation of territory for the United States. According to [Secretary of State John Quincy] Adams, the U.S. had to take control because Florida . . . had become "a derelict open to the occupancy of every enemy, civilized or savage, of the United States, and serving no other earthly purpose than as a post of annoyance to them". . . . Some of President Monroe's cabinet demanded Jackson's immediate dismissal for invading Florida, but Adams realized that his success had given the U.S. a favorable diplomatic position.

Trump's view of Greenland at this point isn't too far from the Adams-Monroe view of Florida: unless the US owns it, it's going to be open to anyone. In the case of Florida, Andrew Jackson had already effectively seized it; in the case of Greenland, Trump is aggressively pursuing de facto seizure and ownership, the easy way or the hard way.

Spain officially ceded Florida to the US via the 1819 Adams-Onis Treaty that cleaned up ambiguities in the Louisiana Purchase by giving Florida to the US, establishing the boundary between the Louisiana Purchase and Spanish Mexico, and eliminating any Spanish claim to the Oregon Country.

This piece linked yesterday at Real Clear Politics takes the position that the US already has, but hasn't effectively exercised, the ability to take full de facto control of Greenland, short of acquiring it outright:

[T]he administration should do exactly what Denmark has been asking it to do – request expansive military access under the terms of the 1951 Defense of Greenland Agreement. Copenhagen repeatedly argues that Washington does not need closer relations with Greenland because it enjoys broad military access under the terms of the 1951 treaty, yet has rarely exercised those rights in recent decades. President Trump should take this issue off the table immediately by requesting Danish cooperation in transferring substantial U.S. assets to Greenland, including anti-submarine warfare aircraft; Arctic training and support personnel and equipment; intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets; and appropriate Special Operations units.

. . . Finally, to make clear the long-term view of Greenland as an integral part of the Western Hemisphere and a key node in hemispheric defense, the administration can designate Greenland as a “Tier-1 Strategic Territory of the United States,” bureaucratic nomenclature equivalent to Guam or Diego Garcia. This sends a powerful signal to the world, and to Congress, that the administration will resource its long-term effort to bring Greenland closer to the United States commensurate with its strategic significance.

When I read this, I had an immediate sense that Trump would be impatient with all this bureaucratic shilly-shallying, and he'd want to cut the Gordian Knot. He did this yesterday afternoon in the same remarks he gave at the oil executives' roundtable:

President Donald Trump says the US needs to "own" Greenland to prevent Russia and China from doing so.

"Countries have to have ownership and you defend ownership, you don't defend leases. And we'll have to defend Greenland," Trump told reporters on Friday, in response to a question from the BBC.

We will do it "the easy way" or "the hard way", he added. The White House said recently the administration is considering buying the semi-autonomous territory of fellow Nato member Denmark, but it would not rule out the option of annexing it by force.

. . . Under existing agreements with Denmark, the US has the power to bring as many troops as it wants to Greenland.

But speaking to reporters in Washington, Trump said a lease agreement was not good enough.

"Countries can't make nine-year deals or even 100-year deals," he said, adding that they had to have ownership.

"I love the people of China. I love the people of Russia," Trump said. "But I don't want them as a neighbour in Greenland, not going to happen."

"And by the way Nato's got to understand that," the US president added.

When I was in school, getting mostly the middle-school version of US history even through my time as an undergraduate, questions like the Louisiana Purchase, the Mexican War, Seward's Folly, manifest destiny, the Spanish-American War, and the Mexican Punitive Expedition seemed little more than remote footnotes. The US boundaries had been firmly and finally established with the 49th and 50th states, a perfect round number; the whole question of how they'd gotten that way was a recondite footnote. US history, frankly, was over. The borders are established. Everything that needed to be done has been done.

All of a sudden, renewed US expansion has become a front-burner issue, and everything is open to rethinking.