[NY Post] Trump wants to buy Greenland, again, after claiming US could take back ownership of Panama

gift link will work for everyone

In Greenland, a cold shoulder for Trump, but curiosity about U.S. ties
Greenland residents spoke to The Washington Post about President-elect Donald Trump’s proposed acquisition.

https://wapo.st/3PFkayo

excerpt:

NUUK, Greenland — The people of Greenland, the Inuit, the people of the farthest north, are famously quiet. At church, you can barely hear them when they sing. In conversation, you have to lean in. This doesn’t mean they are passive. They eat polar bears.

Greenland is not for sale. That’s the dominant refrain from the people in the subzero capital of the world’s largest island.

But might Greenland be for rent? Or amenable to a Compact of Free Association? Just as the United States has in the Pacific with the Marshall Islands, Micronesia and Palau?

Based on interviews here, President-elect Donald Trump would have his work cut out for him convincing people of the merits of his desire to “make Greenland great again” by acquiring it, somehow.

“I don’t trust the guy,” said Bilo Chemnitz, who drives a snowmobile at the local ski slope in the half-light of winter. “I want Greenland to stay like it is.”

After Mass at the red-painted Nuuk Cathedral, Ida Abelsen pointed her finger toward her mouth, in the universal gesture of “gag me,” saying, “I don’t like the way he talks about Greenland.”

Yet there are also some here who are Trump curious — who want to hear more about how their lives might improve with closer ties to the United States.

Those lives today are not bad: free health care, free education for all, and for the needy, subsidized housing. As a self-governing territory of distant Denmark, Greenland has limited self-rule but is also a welfare state. A third of the gross domestic product and half the state budget are supplied by Denmark, about $500 million a year.

That’s about what the U.S. government announced in military financing for the Philippines last year. So it’s not hard to envision upping the bid for influence in Greenland.

***
Whatever else the president-elect has done for Greenland, he has certainly raised its profile. The place has been crawling with journos doing TV stand-ups against a frozen, pitiless backdrop.

“This is a great opportunity for Greenland,” said Kuno Fencker, a member of parliament and its foreign affairs committee, from the dominant Siumut Party. “We know Donald Trump. He’s a politician. He’s a businessman. You shouldn’t take him literally. But you should take him seriously.”
​

long article, more at the link

​

 

https://thefederalist.com/2025/01/15/yes-trumps-bold-greenland-plan-could-actually-work/

Yes, Trump’s Bold Greenland Plan Could Actually Work
Greenland coming closer to the United States has solid precedents in both international law and our own constitutional system.
BY: THOMAS D. GRANT
JANUARY 15, 2025

President-elect Donald Trump’s suggestion that the United States explore a closer relationship with Greenland — up to and including that immense territory, the largest island in the world, joining the Union — epitomizes his out-of-the-box thinking. President Trump deployed that sort of thinking to powerful effect in his first term in office. It’s how he tackled such seemingly insoluble problems as energy supply, immigration, and Middle East peace.

The president-elect’s Greenland suggestion has triggered predictable hyperventilation and pearl-clutching among editorial page writers and elites in Washington, D.C., and foreign capitals alike. However, the United States getting closer to Greenland has obvious geopolitical benefits — and less obvious but strong grounding in international law. Let’s unpack the geopolitics and then the international law.

Greenland holds a crucial position facing the Arctic Ocean, and the Arctic Ocean is a focal point of growing contestation over the vast natural resources that its seabed contains. Russia is maneuvering aggressively to dominate the Arctic, a challenge to the United States that Greenland would help meet.

Greenland itself contains important wealth, not least of all rare earth metals. China seeks to corner the market on rare earth metals because these are indispensable to a range of technologies critical to American national security. Greenland would help with rare earth metals.

Greenland’s long Atlantic coasts, east and west, are also strategically important, adjacent as they are to the transit routes from Europe to America. If global warming really happens, Greenland’s geopolitical importance will only grow, in part because Greenland commands the eastern entrance to the Northwest Passage — the Arctic route connecting the Atlantic to the Pacific that would become one of the world’s chief oceanic lines of communication if its waters turn less icy.

What about international law? Isn’t it against the law to take another country’s territory? Since World War II, countries have largely come to accept that territory does not change hands between independent nation-states unless they agree. This is a good arrangement. It takes away one of the biggest causes of war.

For hundreds of years before, countries thought that armed conquest was a lawful means to gain territory from other countries, and many wars broke out when one sovereign tried to take a territory against the wishes of the nation-state that owned it. Largely ending the forcible taking of territory from independent nation-states was arguably the biggest gain for international peace and stability in modern times. It would be imprudent to go back to the old days of country-against-country land grab by military force.

But countries have always accepted that a sovereign might acquire a territory by agreement. This used to mean agreement between kings and other sovereigns. Today, it also means the consent of the inhabitants of the territory.

Interestingly, the United Nations, of all institutions, accepts that particular territories have a broad right to choose their own future. Greenland, for a time, was explicitly one of those territories. From 1946 to 1954, Greenland was a non-self-governing territory for purposes of Chapter XI of the UN Charter. Denmark discontinued Greenland’s formal UN status in 1954, in part out of concerns over UN interference in the territory.

However, from 1979 onwards, Denmark has recognized under its own domestic law that Greenland is self-governing; and in 2009 Denmark made clear that Greenland has the right to declare independence through a referendum, if its people choose to hold one. For over a half-century, most international lawyers have accepted — and the UN has, too — that a right of that kind entails several options for a territory like Greenland. Greenland’s people may choose to keep the status quo. They may choose independence. They also have the right to choose association with, or even union in, another nation-state. It is under this third available option that a clear path opens, if both Greenland and the United States want it, for Greenland to enter a new sovereign relationship with the United States.

What would such a relationship look like? Again, it would be for Greenland and the United States to negotiate. Experience shows that sovereign nations — including the United States — may encompass territories under a variety of constitutional settlements. A number of territories are part of the United States without being states of the United States — Guam, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico in particular. Other creative relationships are possible — for example, the Federated States of Micronesia, Marshall Islands, and Palau are independent nation-states (and UN Member States) in Free Association with the United States. Free Association is a close and deep relationship, which, if designed and led properly, assures the vital security interests of both parties. It’s one among a range of possible deals that Greenland and the United States might consider.

So President Trump’s call for a fresh look at our relationship with Greenland hopefully will open a dialogue, at least in Washington to start, because a closer relationship would bring great benefits for American security. Moreover, Greenland coming closer to the United States has solid precedents in both international law and our own constitutional system.

President Trump has confounded the political elite — both in Washington, D.C., and foreign capitals — time and again with bold ideas that work. With Greenland, he is doing it once again — with great possibilities ahead.

Thomas D. Grant practices international law and is an academic at the University of Cambridge. He served in the first Trump administration, 2019-2021, as Senior Advisor for Strategic Planning under the Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security. The opinions expressed in this article are his alone and do not necessarily reflect views or positions of the Trump Transition or any other organization or individual.



​