Will Denmark demand just payment for Greenland?

And will America then be able to exploit the Inuit of Greenland enough to make purchasing the island pay? Really?

One of the more interesting people on the Internet is gwern, who researches topics of interest to him with monk-like dedication to figuring out the truth. He is much better at scholarship than at monetization, he makes me look like like Larry Ellison. So he has been living a life of monk-like austerity for years.

Lately, Donald Trump has been talking about annexing Greenland, Canada, the Panama Canal zone, and Gaza. The only one he spoke of during his first Presidency was buying Greenland from Denmark, which seems like the kind of not obviously unreasonable thing than an American President ought to consider, unlike conquering Canada or whatever.

Back during the first Trump Administration, gwern looked into the question of why did Denmark turn down America’s offer in 1946 to buy Greenland for $100 million. He concluded that it was in Denmark’s economic interest to sell, and mostly it was due to their wounded amour propre that they didn’t.

Still, we are talking about the Danes, the people who produced Kierkegaard and Bohr, so maybe they had a better reason?

And gwern’s reasons that Greenland is not terribly valuable to Denmark might also suggest that it wouldn’t be a good deal for the US to acquire it.

gwern marvels over why Denmark wouldn’t sell Greenland to the U.S., but the reasons are also good explanations of why the U.S. should be dubious of buying Greenland from Denmark in 2025. gwern writes:

Reasons of State: Why Didn’t Denmark Sell Greenland?

Exercise in pointing out the obvious: Greenland has been, is, and will be indefinitely, a white elephant. Denmark turned down 100m USD from the USA in 1946; I discuss how this was a bad idea—America got what it needed anyway while Denmark kept control of a loser.

2011-01-01–2019-08-17 finished certainty: possible importance: 2 backlinks

After WWII, the Cold War motivated the USA to offer $100 [1946; $1,419 in 2025] million for ownership of Greenland, which was declined. The USA got the benefit of using Greenland anyway.

I discuss how the island otherwise remained a drain since, the dim prospect it will ever be useful to Denmark, and the forgone benefits of that offer.

I speculate on the real reasons for the refusal.

Looking one day at obscure WP articles on Reddit, I ran into a curious historical trivia:

Following World War II, the United States developed a geopolitical interest in Greenland, and in 1946 the United States offered to buy Greenland from Denmark for $100,000,000 [1946; $1,419,015,295 in 2025], but Denmark refused to sell.

The reason why the US would want to buy Greenland is clear: being able to install anti-Russian military installations such as early-warning radar and nuclear bomber bases (Greenland being fairly close, on a great circle, to Russia)^1. … It would not even have been the first sale of Danish land to the USA, as there was at least one other, the United States Virgin Islands in the Treaty of the Danish West Indies. (As should be no surprise: transfers of land are an important way that geopolitics can be improved without requiring war.)

This appears to have been a large offer:…

The reason why Denmark would want to not sell Greenland is… less clear. At first glance, it’s not clear. Nor the second.

Costs

By the economics, holding on to Greenland is a bad idea. …

We can deal with the economy of Greenland in one fell swoop: Greenland’s entire GDP is around $2b. The overall trade deficit is a few hundred million and has been in place for 21 years, since 1990. The official Danish subsidy was $512m in 2005. Greenland is not a going concern and would collapse within years. …

To get a better understanding, convert to per capita (multiplying by 60), to get a range from $180b to $960b—at which point it becomes clear that this is no laughing matter for a small country like Denmark. This money could have funded major projects like the Øresund Bridge.

Benefits

So what can we put on the positive side of the balance-sheet? Before evaluating something we need to ask ourselves whether Danish sovereignty over Greenland matters—sovereignty is what Denmark was asked to sell, nothing else. If something would benefit Denmark regardless of whether it sold Greenland or not, then it cannot count as a benefit. We are also interested in the changes on the margin based on Denmark not selling.

Proceeding through possible benefits in descending order:

1. … The fact that a small, obscure, distant country like Denmark has been permitted by the much larger or much more closely located powers like the USA, UK, USSR, France, Germany etc to retain Greenland for so long implies that it is either not that valuable or Denmark is not gaining its value.) Likewise, Denmark has failed to capture the indirect geostrategic value of Greenland: not only did it refuse the US offer, it then—as a founding member of NATO, joining 1949-04-04—proceeded to let the US use Greenland as much as it pleased, expanding the US WWII installations into the gigantic Thule Air Base (linchpin of the Strategic Air Command nuclear bombers aimed at Russia) and agreeing to govern Thule under a 1951 treaty which specifically says (emphasis added):

Without prejudice to the sovereignty of the Kingdom of Denmark over such defense area and the natural right of the competent Danish authorities to free movement everywhere in Greenland, the Government of the United States of America, without compensation to the Government of the Kingdom of Denmark, shall be entitled within such defense area and the air spaces and waters adjacent thereto: …

In other words, after refusing to sell Greenland for $100,000,000 highly valuable greenbacks in the bleak European economy of 1946, Denmark let the US have the vastly valuable air force base of Thule for free, where my brother-in-law spent several years tracking Soviet and then Russian aircraft.

Paywall …

The USA had plans to exploit Greenland’s location even more thoroughly with Project Iceworm (“a network of mobile nuclear missile launch sites under the Greenland ice sheet”); it was canceled not due to Danish objections but technical problems with the ice tunnels.

Much of the International Geophysical Year of 1957-1958

was a cover for Project Iceworm, a plan to make American ICBMs impervious to Soviet first strikes by moving them around under the Greenland icecap:

But it turned out that the glaciers of Iceland are not a stable launching pad for ICBMs, so the whole idea was stupid.

When Denmark’s military is active in the 20th/²¹st Century, it is in roles where Greenland is of no possible value to it (eg. serving as peacekeepers & advisors in Afghanistan).

In Afghanistan, 43 Danish soldiers died fighting alongside Americans, and seven in our dumber Iraq war.

Thanks, Danes. I, at least, appreciate your sacrifice.

What is the Danish Navy supposed to do with a Greenland base, intervene in the Cod Wars? With the ending of the Cold War, Greenland’s value is likewise diminished. Yes, the US would still like it for use with the anti-ballistic missile shield and for shortening air routes, but that’s a preference and not an existential necessity (the need for bombers is now largely moot given subsequent developments like aerial refueling and missiles).

1. Economics: the Northwest Passage
   

2. Perhaps, like how Spain refuses to let Catalonia secede, Greenland represents a large chunk of national GDP and cannot be allowed to? But no, the GDP contribution is negative. Perhaps the location is economically rather than strategically valuable, particularly for the North-West Passage? But Greenland’s territorial waters extend out only 12 nautical miles. Even the Greenland EEZ does not cut off the Passage. The only obvious way to monetize the Passage is military, which as already noted, is politically impossible for Denmark. Nor was the North-West Passage important in the 1940s and still is not important despite global warming.

3. Fishing grounds

   Fishing is one of the few viable Greenland industries;

4. Hydrocarbons: oil/natural gas/methane

   An old hypothetical, raised by almost everyone, but one that totally fails. Proof of the farsightedness of predictions that Greenland will turn into another Alaska and gush oil or minerals can be seen in the fact that after a century, there remains not a trace of this in sight—future exploitation of natural resources has always been a justification for Greenland, and, one suspects, always will be. Being covered by kilometer-thick ice is unhelpful.

OK, but maybe global warming will cause all the ice to melt and expose vast mineral riches. The USA can marginally encourage global warming, although hardly as much as China or India, while Denmark can’t. Booooooo-ya!

Of course, encouraging global warming will wipe out Miami, Jacksonville, perhaps New York, New Orleans, perhaps Houston, and small parts of the West Coast. Is that a fair trade?

1. The Greenland state oil company, NUNAOIL, is small; and if I read their 2010 report correctly, they lose money some years and the profitable years yield only a few million dollars. There may be ton of oil there, but there will always be vast oil deposits somewhere which are uneconomical to extract, and Greenland seem to hold a lot of them. (When oil companies prefer working with tar sands to your oil, you either have very little or very expensive oil!) Given that Greenland oils & minerals have been so expensive to extract that they haven’t been over the past centuries, any technology making Greenland exploitation feasible will benefit many more viable competitors and also implies that the marginal costs of extraction will be so high that even if at some point meaningful levels of resource extraction happen, the profit of each unit will be near zero—Saudi Arabia, Greenland is not!

2. Worse, Denmark has agreed that future oil profits will go to Greenland, left-overs will only go to reduce the annual Danish subsidy, and anything past that goes back to Greenland to foster further autonomy/independence, a trend which seems likely to repeat itself if there turn out to be any exploitable resources in or near Greenland such as by the North Pole4. ^…

Greenland is 88% Eskimo, 12% white.

How does a white place like Denmark rule a nonwhite place like Greenland in the 21st Century?

By being really, really nice to the nonwhites.

Lots of MAGAs assume that we can profit from Greenland’s supposed mineral wealth by first paying Denmark for it and then by paying Greenland’s Inuit for it because … why?

According to their brilliant plan, we’ll just steal it from our Danish allies because the strong do what they can while the weak suffer what they must. And then we’ll then violate all the promises the Danes made to our new Inuit minions because we can because we are racially superior.

You know, though, Americans don’t really like behaving like jerks, so we probably aren’t going to do that. Perhaps we’ll abuse the Danes on the grounds that they are blond and thus deserve it, but there’s no way that we will steal from the Eskimos of Greenland in the mid-21st Century.

My guess is that Denmark, by turning down the US offer to buy Greenland in 1946, was embodying the post-WWII notion that countries shouldn’t get bigger. This strikes me as one of the dominant ideas of the post-WWII era, but one that has hardly ever been articulated. So maybe I’m wrong, but maybe I’m not.

Human history up through 1914 was mostly a Game of Thrones. But the meat-grinder of 1914-1918 led the most advanced countries to rethink the idea that aggressive conquest was glorious. The Kellogg-Briand pact of 1928 outlawed starting a war to conquer territory, which had previously been the chief duty of kings.

Calvin Coolidge’s Secretary of State, Frank B. Kellogg, a rural Minnesota grade-school dropout, was about the least uncucked diplomat imaginable. Why was a chud like him against wars of conquest?

Because war is bad.

Consider: 121 countries participated in the 1972 Olympics, up from 69 countries participating in the 1952 Olympics, up from 59 countries participated in the 1948 London Olympics, up from 49 in 1936, up from 28 in 1912.

In contrast, 206 countries participated in the 2024 Olympics, up from only 204 in 2008. We seem to be approaching the maximum optimal number of countries. At this point, Greenland, with 57,000 inhabitants, is not quite a reasonable independent country: it’s comparable to British Bermuda and American Samoa in population.

I tried to look up “territorial expansion” on Wikipedia, but it’s not a thing anymore.

Instead, countries have tended to get smaller since about 1950. In the late 1940s, countries got bigger as part of clearing up the problems created by the Second World War. The last annexations by the U.S. were in 1947 when Washington added a few Pacific Islands wrested from the Japanese.

In 1945 the Soviet Union was rewarded for the Red Army’s immense sacrifices by being allowed to expand its western border about 200 miles westward. But Stalin compensated Poland by allowing it to expand its western border about 200 miles westward, while ethnically cleansing it of just about all Germans.

This was mercilessly brutal, but, on the other hand, not as mercilessly brutal as the Nazis would have done to the Slavs. So …

On the other hand, if Greenland proves more mineral resource rich than the Danish government demands payment for, then its indigenous population will no doubt demand payment for this windfall.

Now, sure, the U.S. could just ruthlessly expropriate the nonwhite people of Greenland … but, really? Are you 100% absolutely convinced that the US government would do that? Maybe Trump would, but would second term President JD Vance in 2035 do that?

Really?