Should Trump Conquer Greenland?

Is Greenland rightfully ours?

As we all know, Global Warming has been exposed as an utter hoax as shown by how nobody has been talking about it at all in 2026. And as soon as Global Warming melts Greenland’s ice caps, Greenland will turn out to be a bonanza:

It can be easy to get swept up by flurries of excitement on Twitter/X, at least until you start to stop and wonder: Wait a minute, who are these people who are demanding that Trump Just Do Something?

Bangladeshi call center workers?

AI bots rigged up by Bangladeshi call center workers’ little brothers?

Elon Musk recently allowed you to look up the country of origin of X accounts. It would be helpful if he could figure out a way to require approximate age as well, because I suspect that Callow Youth play an inordinate role in various enthusiasms seemingly sweeping the digital public square.

For example, the attack on Venezuela has aroused demands for the conquest of Greenland. As I wrote in Taki’s Magazine last March:

As Donald Trump recently ominously observed:

We need Greenland for national security and even international security. And I think we’re going to get it one way or the other.

For example, with Second Lady Usha Vance soon to visit Greenland due to her newly discovered fascination with dogsled racing, JD Vance told Fox News:

Denmark, which controls Greenland, it’s not doing its job and it’s not being a good ally. So you have to ask yourself: “How are we going to solve that problem, solve our national security?” If that means that we need to take more territorial interest in Greenland, that is what President Trump is going to do, because he doesn’t care about what the Europeans scream at us. He cares about putting the interest of America’s citizens first.

Of course, objectively, Denmark is a pretty good ally. It has let America build up our Thule Air Base (now renamed Pituffik Space Base), where my brother-in-law served in the 1980s, for free since 1951. During WWII the Danish government-in-exile endorsed the U.S.’s occupation of Greenland, and likely would in the case of WWIII unless America made itself too obnoxious.

Denmark has also fought alongside the U.S. in our post-9/11 wars. On a per capita basis, little Denmark lost three-fourths as many men in combat in Afghanistan as the U.S. did.

Denmark currently devotes 2.4 percent of its GDP to defense, less than America’s 3.4 percent, but above average for NATO and more than Britain, France, or Germany spends. It has committed to boosting military spending to at least 3 percent of GDP next year.

It’s been the world’s second most generous relative contributor of aid to Ukraine, following only Estonia, giving four times as much proportionally as the U.S.

And Denmark’s immigration restriction policies ought to have served as a role model for America over the past two dozen years.

In other words, Denmark is close to America’s ideal ally.

These are all reasons why nobody in America was sore at Denmark until Trump decided he was. Now, though, many are scrambling to come up with rationalizations for why Denmark deserves to have Greenland stolen from it.

Presumably, Trump doesn’t really want to go to war with Denmark, he just wants to extort a lower price.

But vindicating wars of conquest is one of the worst ideas imaginable in 2025. After all, Washington wants a Taipei that remains independent from Beijing. But America doesn’t have much of a legal argument for that, having recognized China’s legal claim to Taiwan since the 1970s…other than that aggressive wars are bad.

Which they are.

I realize that a bunch of kids on Twitter think that Nietzsche made modern war sound like great fun. But that turned out not to be true in World War I, due to the artillery and machine guns. And combat sure isn’t in Ukraine, what with all the flying death robots.

In contrast, proposing to buy Greenland from Denmark at a fair price was one of the more interesting initiatives of the first Trump administration’s fairly amiable foreign policy, which saw some unexpected successes, such as Trump charming Mexico’s leftist president Andrés Manuel López Obrador into cooperating with his effective Remain in Mexico plan for slowing the influx of Central Americans through the southern border. …

One reason that payment for territory is out of fashion are ideologies associated with nationalism and decolonization. For example, when Imperial Germany bullied the Bolsheviks into relinquishing Ukraine at Brest-Litovsk in January 1918, Germany didn’t formally acquire Ukraine the way it had annexed Alsace and Lorraine after the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. Instead, Berlin sponsored an independent Ukrainian state (which, presumably, would have been an economic underling of Germany).

Hence, it’s likely that the U.S. would end up paying twice for Greenland, once to Denmark and then again to the indigenous Inuit population. To me, it sounds like a tedious imbroglio to take on responsibility for a bunch of drunken Eskimos who owe zero loyalty to America. But you can just do things, so what do I know relative to teenage Trump enthusiasts on X?

Yet another reason that you never hear anymore about payment for territory is because land, unless it has cheaply accessible oil and gas, isn’t all that valuable anymore, relatively speaking. For instance, you hear lots of chatter about Greenland’s purported vast wealth of rare earth elements, but the total revenue from all the rare earth elements mined in 2024 was a measly $4 billion.

Nations used to worry about their population expanding more than could be fed by their farmland, but since the development of the Haber-Bosch process for generating nitrogen fertilizer from the air in 1913, the supply side of the problem has dwindled. And lately the demand side of the problem is disappearing outside of Africa.

Am I overlooking something?