The plan would replace the $600 million in subsidies Denmark gives the island each year
The Donald Trump administration is reportedly considering giving about $10,000 to each Greenland resident as part of its plan to annex the island.
The possibility would seek to replace the $600 million Denmark gives the territory in subsidies every year, and has stopped being mere rhetoric to become official U.S. policy, according to The New York Times.
The outlet detailed that the plan already includes several cabinet departments and that the White House’s National Security Council has met several times to advance on it, recently sending specific instructions to different offices.
Why so stingy? The Greenland population is about 56,000. You could offer every Greenlander a million dollars, and it would only come to $56 billion, still a bargain in the grand scheme of things. If you actually want to buy someone’s country out from under them, that’s the kind of money you need to be talking about.
A million? In this economy? I’d want at least $100m to sell out my own country.
No one wants America
This is the same government that brought us the Louisiana Purchase and Seward’s Folly, both of which were really cheap land grabs. They just need to find a quasi-official way for someone to accept the terms and then execute the terms by force. The $10,000 agreement is their legal shield for taking the land by force.
It’s not the same government though. The Alaska purchase was in 1867. The US has an entirely different kind of government than it did back then. And we’re in an entirely different historical era. You can’t just blindly assume what worked in 1867 is going to work or be remotely applicable in 2025.
Oh, jesus. Of course it’s not the exact same government, but it’s America and America is comprised of people and people are fundamentally the same as they were 200 years ago. Ignoring that, this will work because if anything Land Grabs are waaay more common now than they were back then.
We talking about 19th century land grabs? There’s a really interesting (to me) law called the Guano Islands Act of 1856. The United States needed fixed nitrogen, and therefore could just take it?
The history of the US—the real history—is wild.
Land grabs are more common now than in the 19th century? That’s just completely false. That was the age of Manifest Destiny and overt colonization by European powers. Conflicts like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine are so notable because they are so rare in the modern era. Today, global powers are more about economic influence, trading relationships, and economic spheres of influence. Turns out it’s a lot cheaper and more efficient to just trade with people than to pay for the huge expense of maintaining an old-fashioned colonial empire. Look at China. They’re expanding their influence through their Belt and Road Initiative, not through outright conquest and imperial subjugation. Or look at the US trade and influence machines it built after WW2 like the WTO, the World Bank, etc. It is very very rare for the great powers to outright seize land anymore. The US doesn’t need to conquer Congo and become responsible for its people in order to gain access to its resources. It can just cut a check for them.
And no, it really isn’t the same government. The federal government in 2025 has an entirely different relationship with the US population than it did in 1867. Hell, the entire way the US conducts military and diplomatic policy changed after WW2 and the dawn of the atomic era. The US hasn’t formally declared war on anyone since WW2, when previously it was the norm for every conflict. Programs like Social Security or policies like anti-drug laws would have been unfathomable to a US citizen in 1867.
And if you want to say it’s the same people, it really isn’t. We’re not the same people we were then, culturally or genetically. Even just ethnically, we’ve had so many waves of immigrants that our ethnic admixtures have completely changed. That’s to say nothing of how much our norms and culture have fundamentally shifted. Try explaining gender nonbinary people to someone from 1867.
Look, I get it. It’s tempting to adopt the old world-weary saying that nothing is new under the Sun, but I don’t see how one can possibly look at the monumental changes in global technology, history, and culture over the last century and a half and conclude that things are basically the same. If nothing else, the introduction of nuclear weapons fundamentally changed the way the great powers manage their affairs.
Yes, you can be incredibly pedantic and say that, “well, human nature is the same, so fundamentally nothing has changed.” But at that point you might as well be arguing that the US and ancient Babylon are the same country.
That’s a really scary wall of text without a single citation or hard fact. You went to a lot of effort just to say you’re really not informed on this matter at all.
I’ll point you to the work the Land Deal Politics Initiative has done over the past decade. Or even just do a simple Google search “are land grabs more common now”. Simple stuff.
Good day, sir.