Denmark’s own history helps make case for US to buy Greenland

In 2005, while serving as an officer in the U.S. Coast Guard, I was warned that I could face a court-martial for writing an op-ed in The New York Times. My offense was arguing that the Arctic, long dismissed as a frozen periphery, was fast becoming a region of serious national-security importance. In a post-9/11 world when the U.S. had all but abandoned the region, this view was treated as heretical. The Arctic was supposed to stay frozen; geography, Americans assumed, was no longer destiny.

From 2007 to 2009, as a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, I continued making the case. Arctic sea ice was disappearing faster than scientists had predicted. New shipping routes were opening. Vast mineral, energy, and strategic resources were becoming accessible. Yet Washington shrugged. Hamstrung by the self-inflicted shipping policy disaster that is the Jones Act, the United States allowed its icebreaker fleet to wither, neglected Arctic diplomacy, and had higher priorities than the higher latitudes (Alaskan leadership excepted) while Russia and China increasingly teamed up in the high north.

I saw that indifference up close. When I testified before the Senate and House Foreign Affairs Committees during those years, a representative from Greenland would often sit in quietly on the hearings, not to oppose U.S. policy, but in the hope that any American attention to the Arctic might finally materialize. Around the same time, ambassadors from several Arctic coastal states invited me for the same conversation; they were searching for any angle that might persuade the Obama administration to take the region seriously. While on a task force advising the administration, the Arctic was still treated as a fringe topic.

Nearly two decades later, the world has caught up. Climate change and the emerging Cold War between the U.S. and China have done what policy debates could not: they have rewritten the map. And now, the Trump administration’s interest in purchasing Greenland – an idea widely mocked when first raised – looks less like provocation and more like overdue realism.

Greenland sits at the strategic crossroads of the Northern Hemisphere. It anchors the northern approaches to North America, dominates access to the North Atlantic, and flanks the Greenland-Iceland-U.K. gap, a maritime choke point central to NATO naval strategy since World War II. As Arctic ice retreats, Greenland’s importance only grows. It lies adjacent to the Northern Sea Route and the Northwest Passage, two sea lanes that are moving from theoretical curiosities to commercially and militarily viable corridors. The Arctic is on pace to be ice-free in summer within the next two decades, ahead of schedule.

Misunderstanding the past

In a world of renewed great-power competition, geography has reasserted itself with a vengeance. The world is not flat.

Then there are resources. Greenland is rich in energy and critical minerals, especially rare-earth elements. Today, global supply chains for these materials are dangerously concentrated in China. Diversifying and securing access is not an abstract economic goal; it is a strategic imperative in the traditional definition of American national security interests. The Arctic, and Greenland in particular, will play a central role in that effort.

Critics often frame the idea of buying Greenland as imperialist or legally absurd. This misunderstands both history and law.

Greenland has a population of roughly 57,000 people, nearly 90 percent of whom are Inuit, an indigenous population whose presence predates Danish rule by centuries. Denmark’s modern claim to Greenland rests not on continuous settlement but on a much later colonial assertion, invoked in the 19th century by reviving a distant Viking presence that had disappeared hundreds of years earlier. That history matters, especially when modern critics invoke sovereignty as if it were timeless and uncontested.

Denmark’s history underscores the point. Like other European nations, in the 18th and 19th centuries it was an active colonial power, including slave trading and overseas possessions in Africa and the Caribbean. This is not an indictment of modern Denmark; it is a reminder that appeals to moral absolutism in territorial questions often rest on selective memory.

Legal precedents

The United States, while having its own complicated experience with colonialism and race, also has a lawful tradition of acquiring territory through purchase. Lest we forget the Louisiana Purchase doubled the nation’s size. Florida was acquired from Spain.

Our existing Arctic coastal state of Alaska, dismissed at the time as “Seward’s Folly,” turned out to be one of the greatest real-estate transactions in history. In 1917, the United States purchased the U.S. Virgin Islands from Denmark for $25 million in gold, explicitly to prevent Germany — or any other hostile power — from gaining a strategic foothold in the Western Hemisphere.

Americans explored acquiring Greenland in 1946, during President Truman’s administration, after the U.S. had assumed responsibility for Greenland’s defense during World War II. While territorial purchase has fallen out of fashion in modern statecraft, negotiated alignment remains valid in the rarest and most consequential circumstances.

History has vindicated those decisions. It is hard to imagine modern America without them.

Greenland fits squarely within that tradition. Like Alaska in the 19th century, it is vast, underdeveloped, strategically located, and poised to grow in importance as technology and climate reshape global trade and security. Acquiring it would not be an act of aggression, but of foresight.

The transaction would be straightforward. Denmark would transfer sovereignty over Greenland to the United States in exchange for a negotiated package combining an agreed purchase price, enhanced trade and tariff concessions favorable to Denmark, and binding U.S. security guarantees. Greenland itself would enter a Compact of Free Association–style framework (COFA) that preserves self-government, anchors U.S. defense responsibility, and shares future mineral wealth through an Alaskan-style permanent fund.

Negotiation, not coercion

As Secretary of State Rubio has emphasized, the administration’s focus is on negotiation, not military force. Such a transaction is not coercion, but the art of the deal applied to geopolitics: classic Kissingeresque realpolitik for all parties.  This is economic statecraft; leverage, incentives and diplomacy, not conquest.

Price, moreover, is not limited to cash. A serious negotiation could involve trade concessions, tariff adjustments, or deeper economic integration. Denmark’s largest firms, including Novo Nordisk and Lego, rely heavily on access to U.S. markets. Its shipping champion, Maersk, temporarily headquartered in New York during World War II until American forces helped liberate Europe, moves America’s trade.

Security guarantees matter even more.  Denmark enjoys extraordinary benefits from NATO membership, and presumably – along with other European allies – would ascribe massive geopolitical value to America tipping the balance of power in the Ukrainian war.

These national security considerations carry enormous value, even if they do not appear on a balance sheet and should be on the table in a Greenland negotiation. Diplomacy, at its core, is the exchange of national interests. Everything has a price; nation states have forever optimized for their self-interest, despite sometimes pretending publicly otherwise.

Critically, such an arrangement would also serve the interests of Greenlanders themselves. Under various U.S. territorial frameworks, from Puerto Rico to the U.S. Virgin Islands to the Marshall Islands, local populations have retained cultural identity and local governance while gaining access to American capital, infrastructure, and markets. Greenland is physically closer to North America than to Europe. Deeper integration with the U.S. economy would unlock investment, accelerate development, and reduce reliance on Chinese capital, which never comes without strings attached. An Alaskan-style permanent fund, distributing annual dividends to Greenlanders from resource revenues, would offer a tangible model for shared prosperity.

Preserving self-determination

Self-determination need not be sacrificed under existing home rule. On the contrary, expanding Greenland’s options at a moment of intensifying great-power competition is the surest way to preserve it.  History offers precedents — for example, in Norway’s constitutional self-rule after its 1814 realignment from Denmark into union with Sweden — where a smaller society changed strategic alignment and emerged with greater autonomy under a stronger guarantor.

Norway, of course, is today a vibrant, independent democracy. Greenland’s 2009 Self-Government Act recognizes its Inuit population as a people under international law with the right to decide their future.  Maybe the right historical metaphor is not the Danish West Indies, but tomorrow’s Norway.

For more than two decades, I have argued that the Arctic would become a hinge point in American foreign policy. That moment arrived later than expected, but in starker form. China now styles itself a “near-Arctic state” and is coordinating closely with Russia across the region. The Arctic is no longer a frozen buffer; it is a theater of competition, shaped by power, resources, and access.

This is the world as it is, not as we might wish it to be. As the historian’s old friend Thomas Hobbes understood, order flows from power, and security from foresight.  The United States can either shape this new Arctic reality – as it is doing elsewhere from Latin America to the Middle East – or react to it.

Seen in that light, the question is not why the United States would consider buying Greenland. The question is why it took climate change, renewed great-power rivalry, and the “Donroe Doctrine” to force a long-overdue reckoning with America’s Arctic strategy.

Geography endures.  History offers guidance. When strategic real estate comes on the market, America has rarely regretted buying.

Any opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Arctic Today.

Dr. Scott Borgerson is a serial entrepreneur currently building clean energy companies. He previously served as President of Independence Hydrogen, CEO of CargoMetrics Technologies, and co-founded and managed a quantitative hedge fund. A former U.S. Coast Guard officer, he commanded the USCGC Point Sal, served as navigator aboard the USCGC Dallas, taught at the Coast Guard Academy, and founded its Institute for Leadership.  He is the author of “The National Interest and the Law of the Sea and the Foreign Affairs” essays “Arctic Meltdown,” “The Great Game Moves North,” and “The Coming Arctic Boom.”  His writing has also appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The Atlantic, among other publications.