America’s Greenland Fixation Isn’t New. It’s the Old Story of Expansion—Updated for the Arctic Age

The latest flirtation in Washington with the idea of buying or annexing Greenland has a familiar ring. It revives a distinctly American tradition: expanding borders to match ambition. In a political culture that once treated land as the engine of destiny and prestige, the world’s largest island is not just a curiosity—it’s a strategic prize in a warming Arctic and a symbol in a long-running story of U.S. power.

That story mixes commerce and conquest, treaty and force. It also collides with modern norms—sovereignty and inviolable borders—that only hardened after World War II. Some voices around U.S. power now dismiss those guardrails as “niceties.” The symbolism remains potent: a Greenland-shaped cake at a Republican gathering in Washington, D.C., frosted with Stars and Stripes and joked about as “the 51st state,” conveyed that the appetite endures, even if the politics and law do not.

A nation built on acquisitions

From the start, the United States pursued territory as strategy. The 1783 Treaty of Paris established sovereignty over 13 former colonies and land reaching the Mississippi. Two decades later, the Louisiana Purchase from France—$15 million in 1803—doubled the young republic and secured the Mississippi River, New Orleans and a breadbasket of fertile plains that underwrote an agrarian vision. It also accelerated the dispossession of Native American nations and set in motion conflicts still unresolved today.

Spain ceded Florida in 1819 under the Adams–Onís Treaty; the United States, in turn, recognized Spanish sovereignty over Texas—temporarily. By 1845 Congress annexed Texas from Mexico, sparking war and a new rationale: Manifest Destiny, the assertion that American expansion was preordained. The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo transferred more than half of Mexico’s territory—including modern California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona and parts of Colorado and New Mexico—again for $15 million. The Oregon boundary deal with Britain that same era pushed the U.S. line to the Pacific Northwest. The Gadsden Purchase in 1853–54 added slices of today’s Arizona and New Mexico to complete a transcontinental rail corridor.

In 1867, Secretary of State William Seward bought Alaska from imperial Russia for $7.2 million, derided at first as “Seward’s Folly” before gold, oil and geostrategy vindicated the gamble. The moment stretched American horizons westward—into waters and resources that now define an era of Arctic competition.

Manifest Destiny’s long shadow

By the late 19th century, expansion moved overseas. The Spanish–American War delivered Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines. In 1898, the U.S. annexed Hawaii after engineering the overthrow of its monarchy—a breach Washington has since formally regretted. In 1917, the U.S. bought the Danish West Indies—now the U.S. Virgin Islands—for $25 million in gold, with the acquisition cementing a wider understanding: Denmark retained sovereignty over Greenland.

Greenland, however, never drifted far from American plans. Seward had mused about buying it in the 1860s. In 1946, the Truman administration reportedly offered Denmark $100 million in gold for the island. Copenhagen refused. The Cold War settled the matter for decades even as it deepened U.S. presence on Greenlandic ice.

Greenland’s strategic pull

There is a reason Greenland returns as a fixation. Geography makes it a forward operating theater between North America, Europe and the Arctic Ocean. It anchors early-warning radar, missile defense and space tracking. Pituffik Space Base—formerly Thule Air Base—sits at the top of the world as a quiet sentinel of Western security. As sea ice thins, the northern passages that once repelled navies and tankers are opening to shipping, resource extraction and great-power competition.

That competition now includes China and Russia. Beijing frames itself as a “near-Arctic state,” investing in ports, mining and research. Moscow is reviving Soviet-era bases and weaponry across the Northern Fleet’s footprint. The United States and Denmark, working within NATO, have recently moved to strengthen Arctic defenses and coordination, signaling that formal sovereignty is nonnegotiable but strategic alignment is essential.

Nuclear legacies and Nordic friction

The U.S. military footprint in and around Greenland is not without scars. In 1968, a U.S. B-52 bomber carrying four thermonuclear weapons crashed near Thule, scattering radioactive materials across the ice sheet and triggering a diplomatic crisis with Denmark. The incident remains one of the most serious ruptures in an otherwise deep alliance.

Farther afield, the Pacific testifies to the costs of projection. Between 1946 and 1958, the United States detonated 67 nuclear devices in the Marshall Islands, displacing communities and leaving a radioactive legacy that lingers. These episodes complicate the narrative of American expansion as a clean arc of progress. They also inform Greenlandic skepticism about promises made from afar.

The law of borders—and the lure of nostalgia

Modern international law and the U.N. Charter treat sovereignty as a baseline, not a bargaining chip. Borders, once redrawn by force or fiat, hardened after 1945. That shift does not erase history; it constrains it. In the 21st century, “buying a country” is less a policy than a provocation—good for headlines, bad for alliances. Yet the nostalgia it taps is real: a belief that American greatness correlates with physical expansion, with flags planted on maps and, increasingly, on other worlds.

Invocations of Manifest Destiny have migrated from the prairies to orbit. The old language of “new and beautiful horizons” echoes in space programs and great-power rivalry in low Earth orbit. The impulse is the same: expanding reach to secure advantage and script meaning. But where the 19th century met its day with treaties and wars, the present demands coalition-building, rules and technology that outpace climate and conflict.

What the Arctic stakes are now

Greenland today is an autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark, with its own government and a growing voice in decisions about mining rare earths, fisheries and defense. Any path forward runs through Nuuk and Copenhagen—and through NATO. Washington’s real task is not annexation but alignment: investing in Greenlandic communities; partnering on infrastructure that respects local priorities; and coordinating Arctic policy with allies who share both the risks and the costs.

That approach matches the moment. The Arctic is warming four times faster than the global average. New sea routes shorten Asia–Europe trade and expose fragile ecosystems. Mineral wealth promises both prosperity and political friction. Russia’s war in Ukraine has sharpened NATO’s northern focus; China’s ambitions add complexity. In this environment, a Greenland “deal” is less plausible—and less useful—than a durable framework of defense, development and diplomacy.

America became America in part by acquiring land. But its 21st-century influence will hinge on whether it can partner as deftly as it once purchased, and whether it can restrain an old reflex long enough to lead in a region where trust, not territory, confers the real strategic edge.

That means recognizing the lesson hiding in all the maps and myths: the pursuit of greatness endures, but the measure of it has changed. In the Arctic, power will flow to those who can build quietly, share credit and keep faith with the people who live there. A cake shaped like Greenland makes for a viral clip. The harder work is earning a foothold that doesn’t need frosting.

By Abdiwahab Ahmed
Axadle Times international–Monitoring.