Share

August 16, 2019After making a name for himself on the most famous island in the world, Manhattan, now Donald Trump wants to buy the largest island in the world: Greenland. The president of the United States is showing with insistence to his advisers the possibility of making an offer to Denmark to buy the huge island between the North Atlantic and the Arctic Circle, with its 56 thousand inhabitants and the layer of ice that it is melting due to global warming. The Wall Street Journal reports that some of the advisers would have said to the president that it would be a great deal, but others would have advised against it.

President Trump made his name on the world's most famous island. Now he wants to buy the world's biggest. https://t.co/GSOXri7lj3

- The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) August 15, 2019


It is not clear how the United States could acquire territory from a foreign country, but it is likely that Trump will talk about it in the upcoming official visit to Denmark, scheduled for early September. The White House declined to provide any other information. No comment also from the Danish embassy in Washington.

Thanks to a treaty between the United States and Denmark, Greenland, which is technically part of North America, is already under American influence: here is the northernmost US military base, Thule Air Base, to only 1,200 kilometers from the Polar Circle. But for Trump it is not enough: his idea would be to buy it, as if it were a real estate property, to widen its military influence and at the same time go down in history as the American president who bought the immense island has extended the territory to the North of the United States.

In fact, someone had already tried it. After the Second World War, President Harry Truman, in 1946, offered Denmark 100 million dollars, but the proposal was rejected. But now, according to the Wall Street Journal, things would have changed. At an official dinner last spring, someone told Trump that Denmark would be struggling with some financial problem and that the possibility of selling Greenland, to which the Copenhagen government pays 591 million dollars in subsidies each year, could become a necessity.

The American financial newspaper does not explain with what tone, whether serious or joking, this possibility was represented. But Trump likes the idea: he would like to leave a territory as a legacy, as did his illustrious predecessor, President Dwight Eisenhower, under which Alaska was annexed to the United States.