The Emperor's New Foreign Policy

You can only see it if you're very, very clever

Sorry about this piece of AI dreck, I saw it and couldn't resist it. I think the source has something to do with crypto, I won't link it.

Question to Radio Yerevan: Is it true that Democratic President Harry S Truman attempted to buy Greenland in 1867? (Hint: Truman was born in 1884, and his presidency was between 1945 and 1952.)

The Fox Friend in blue at the far left in the video—I believe it's Katie Pavlich, who used to blog at the truly demented Heritage website Townhall, and now hosts Fox Nation's "Luxury Hunting Lodges of America", is that a real thing? where they burnish their anti-elitist cred by worshiping people like Harlan Crow?—really says those words. Click the link and watch if you don't believe me. I think I know what happened: there's a moment, around 30 seconds in, where she casts her eyes down at the table, as if checking her notes, and my idea is that's what the notes say, just "1867" and "Harry Truman", maybe drawn from a quick scan of the Wikipedia article on "Proposals for the United States to Purchase Greenland". A brief look of panic crosses her face as she realizes what she's saying can't be right, but she soldiers on with a smile.

It's part of a concerted effort on the part of the Trump Republican party, of course, to pretend there's nothing outlandish about Trump's suggestions, re-aired in his Tuesday press event, that the U.S ought to purchase Greenland, acquire Canada as a 51st state, reconquer the Canal Zone, and rename the Gulf of Mexico, and I don't know what all else. Look, folks, your Democrat Harry Truman did the same stuff, or some of it! It's not abnormal at all!

The first time American officials contemplated buying Greenland was, in fact, in 1867, when the president was indeed a Democrat, though of course not Harry Truman—it was Andrew Johnson, the Union Democrat Lincoln had chosen to put a nonpartisan gloss on the Civil War as the war came to an end. But buying Greenland was the project of Radical Republican Secretary of State William H. Seward, who actually did arrange to purchase Alaska that year, from the Russian empire ("Seward's folly", as we were taught in school), and thought about picking up Greenland from Denmark as well, along with Iceland, but nothing came of it.

Greenland was also part of a plot for a massive swap of territories in the Taft presidency, in 1910, when some influential Danes hoped to trade it for an enormous chunk of the southern Philippines (Mindanao and the Palawan Archipelago) which they would then exchange with Germany in return for some of the old Duchy of Schleswig, which Germans had conquered from them in 1864. Greenland and Iceland weren't really part of Denmark at all, historically, but (Viking colonies going all the way back to the 10th century) of Norway, which was itself a Danish possession from 1397 until 1814, when it passed to Sweden, but for some reason Denmark got custody of Norway's own colonies, like an innocent stepfather in the center of a messy divorce.

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But North Schleswig was all they really wanted, and they got it out of Germany's defeat in World War I and Woodrow Wilson's principle of self-determination. This is as far as I can determine the only time in history when anybody in Denmark ever showed an interest in offloading Greenland on the US.

The story of the Truman-era scramble for Greenland is kind of a hoot, though Truman himself seems to have had little if anything to do with it; this was in 1946, not so many months after Roosevelt's death and VJ Day, when I imagine Truman was still struggling to get up to speed on foreign policy. After the Germans occupied Denmark in April 1940, the US (at that point long before going to war) had quietly begun taking over the defense of Greenland, the only important source of the mineral cryolite, at that time an indispensable agent for the smelting of aluminum. So, with the consultation of the Danish ambassador in DC, and invoking the Monroe Doctrine, which I think would have startled Monroe, they dotted the island's coastline with military outposts.

Once the war was over and the Danish government reinstalled in power in Copenhagen, the Danes wanted their territory back ("Tusind tak!"), but the Americans weren't listening: another war, the cold one, was just beginning, and the Soviet enemy, with its immense Arctic coastline, was the thing to worry about. It was a Republican senator, Owen Brewster (R-ME), who called Greenland "a military necessity" for the US, and the US military agreed, proposing to buy it off the Danes, for a hundred million dollars in gold, or in exchange for some oil-rich land around Port Barrow:

In April 1946, State Department official John Hickerson attended a meeting of the planning and strategy committee of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and reported that ''practically every member ... said that our real objective as regards to Greenland should be to acquire it by purchase from Denmark.’'

''The committee indicated that money is plentiful now, that Greenland is completely worthless to Denmark (and) that the control of Greenland is indispensable to the safety of the United States,’' Hickerson said in a memo.

Though Hickerson himself was skeptical on that:

He said he told the committee that he doubted the Danes could be induced to sell the 844,000-square-mile island...

Nevertheless, Secretary of State James Byrnes did make the offer to the Danish ambassador, Gustav Rasmussen, that December, and finally found out that Denmark wasn't interested:

After discussing other security arrangements for Greenland, Byrnes said he told Rasmussen that perhaps an outright sale to the United States ''would be the most clean-cut and satisfactory.’'

''Our needs ... seemed to come as a shock to Rasmussen, but he did not reject my suggestions flatly and said that he would study a memorandum which I gave him,’' he said.

That is, Rasmussen brushed him off, and the idea vanished for the next 73 years until 2019, when Trump first made his own demand, and the Copenhagen paper Jyllands-Posten dug up the 1946 documents (quotes here from AP). It vanished for a good reason: in 1949 NATO was formed, Denmark and the US became allies with a precisely equivalent interest in US bases in Greenland, and the question, to whatever extent there was one, disappeared. There has been less reason, over the last 75 years now, for incorporating Greenland into the US than there has ever been before, and there was never much reason before.

The other thing we need to talk about is just how stupid the whole thing is, and how stupid we're making ourselves by talking about it. Monsignor Ross Douthat, pretending to take Trump seriously on the proposal to annex Canada ("O Canada, Come Join Us")—

My great-great-grandmother was born in Saint John, New Brunswick, and first saw the United States as a 10-year-old. My great-grandfather was an Irish Canadian who married a Maine girl. My wife’s father was born in Ontario, descended from a long line of Newfoundlanders, and a print of skaters on Ottawa’s Rideau Canal decorates our pantry even now.

I offer these bona fides, proofs of a current of maple syrup running through my children’s veins, as a preface to a controversial claim: that Donald Trump’s kidding-or-is-he suggestion that Canada belongs inside our union is not a threat but an opportunity, that Canada might be better off joined to our continental Republic, with the wintry 1775 defeat of Richard Montgomery and Benedict Arnold finally reversed.

—even though, as he acknowledges, polls show Canadians around 90% opposed (or as Douthat puts it "extremely cool") to the idea, and hail "Well, we're not American" as a point of national pride. Bret Stephens comes from Mexico, sort of, will he call for annexing that next? It's just embarrassing.

(And would have been even more embarrassing 250 years ago: the reason Arnold and Montgomery invaded was that the taking of Fort Ticonderoga had opened up the road to the province of Québec, where their intelligence suggested the French-speaking population would welcome them as liberators from the hated British who had forcibly expelled their compatriots from maritime Acadia, in the brutal ethnic cleansing of the 1750s and 60s, and put their own province under military occupation. English-speaking Canada back then was a redoubt of Tories; the plan wasn't a fraternal embrace of Mrs. Douthat's ancestors but a war with them.)

But also stupid in a particular way—it's retrograde. In 1867, buying Greenland wasn't at all an irrational idea, just maybe more difficult, and maybe less rewarding, than buying Alaska. It didn't happen, but it could have happened. In 1910, it was still not implausible, though there was a newish element informing the plausibility, the idea of self-determination for the Danes of North Schleswig, for whose benefit the whole scheme was to be set up, in the age of new nationalisms from Greece to Hungary, in Germany and Italy, for the Irish and the western and southern Slavs, and so on (nobody in the diplomatic world was thinking at the time of self-determination for the Indigenous Greenlanders, of course, any more than they did for the inhabitants of the Gold Coast of Africa, or of Cochinchina); the force that was to dissolve the empires of the Ottomans and Germans and Austrians when they lost World War I, but yet not those of the British and French victors, or of Russia, or of the new American empire, which had just acquired the Philippines and Hawaii and Guam and Puerto Rico and a kind of protectorate over Cuba, and the Panama Canal Zone.

The Canal Zone is another one of the bees in Trump's bonnet, and one of the most explicable ones, since he was alive when it was a political issue, after Presidents Nixon and Ford had negotiated the agreement to hand it over to the the Panamanians, and the Reaganauts campaigned on it against Ford in 1976:

“I think that basically the world is not going to see this [giving away the canal] as a magnanimous gesture on our part, as the White House would have us believe,” noted Reagan. “They are going to see it as once again American backing away and retreating in the face of trouble.” When it came to giving the canal away, Reagan strongly stated: “I’m going to talk as long and as loud as I can against it.”

But Reagan "noticeably muted" his rhetoric after Carter pushed the treaty through the Senate in 1978, and never tried to do anything about it when he became president himself.

Trump's cluster of ideas on foreign policy is stupid, and weird, but it's not incoherent: just very, very old-fashioned, from the 19th-century opposition to liberalism, named with one of those awful words we used to have to learn in 10th or 11th grade: "mercantilism", the idea that a country should export as many goods as possible and import as few as it could, so that it would have the most positive possible balance of trade, which favored the acquisition of empires and the imposition of high tariffs, typified for US history by the McKinley presidency from 1896 to his assassination in 1901. Sure enough, Trump's got a thing about McKinley; he's been making the white nationalist demand that our highest American mountain, Denali in Alaska, revert to its old name of Mount McKinley, and I think he's been getting lessons on the subject from somebody (Bannon?) on how America was at its most powerful and respected in those days (it was when American income and wealth inequality was at its peak).

I don't think he'll particularly succeed in expanding the American empire: the time is long past for that—free trade really does make everybody richer, tariffs are for protecting young industries, and self-determination has become a real thing, even in Greenland—and he's too inept. The stupidity is as evident as the colonialist nastiness in the visit to Greenland by Trump Junior and Charlie Kirk:

Danish media reported Thursday that a series of photos featuring Kirk and Greenlandic residents in MAGA hats was staged. The MAGA cohort reportedly rounded up homeless people from the area—including one person from under a bridge—promising them a meal at the Hotel Hans Egede in exchange for their participation in the pro-Trump photo circuit.

Videos of the trip that circulated on X describe the Greenlandic participants as “the local community in Nuuk,” but several local sources that spoke with DR News described the photographed individuals as “homeless and socially disadvantaged” people who are often outside the supermarket directly across from the hotel where the Trump event was held.

“All they have to do is put on a cap and be in the Trump staff’s videos. They are being bribed, and it is deeply distasteful,” Tom Amtoft, a 28-year resident of Nuuk, told the Danish news outlet.

The emperor's foreign policy is naked.