The Indicator from Planet Money

Episode•January 21, 2025•9 min

Add to cart: Greenland

President Donald Trump's proposal that the United States take "ownership" of Greenland has raised a lot of eyebrows. Can the U.S. just buy itself this big territory? Is that a thing? Turns out if you look at U.S. history, it's absolutely a thing. Today on the show: how massive land deals called "sovereignty purchases" have shaped the country we live in today, and why the idea of the U.S. buying Greenland is a lot more complicated than it would have been in the past. For sponsor-free episodes of The Indicator from Planet Money, subscribe to Planet Money+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org (http://plus.npr.org/). Fact-checking by Sierra Juarez (https://www.npr.org/people/g-s1-26724/sierra-juarez#:~:text=for%20Planet%20Money-,Sierra%20Juarez%20is%20a%20researcher%20and%20fact%20checker%20at%20the,and%20fact%20checking%20in%20Mexico.). Music by Drop Electric (https://dropelectric.bandcamp.com/). Find us: TikTok (https://www.tiktok.com/@planetmoney), Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/planetmoney/), Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/planetmoney), Newsletter (https://www.npr.org/newsletter/money). To manage podcast ad preferences, review the links below: See pcm.adswizz.com (https://pcm.adswizz.com) for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices (https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices) NPR Privacy Policy (https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy)

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Transcript

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Npr.

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Donald Trump is Now officially the 47th President of the United States. And if Trump gets his way, what we even think of as the United States might come to look very different.

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And we're not talking metaphorically, we're talking geographically, topographically, maybe. You caught this statement of his a couple weeks ago.

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Well, we need Greenland for national security purposes. I've been told that for a long time, long before I even ran.

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Trump has been kicking this idea around for years, which is that the U.S. should take, quote, ownership of Greenland, a partially self governing territory of Denmark.

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People really don't even know if Denmark has any legal right to it, but if they do, they should give it up because we need it for national security. That's for the free world.

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So short of using military force or economic coercion, which he has not ruled out, how exactly does Trump imagine the US Taking ownership of Greenland? Well, one thing, he's proposed simply buying it.

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To which many observers then said, wait, really? This is the indicator for Planet Money. I'm Adrian Max.

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Hi.

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And I'm Waylon Wong. Can the US Just buy itself a country? Is that a thing? Turns out when you look at our history, it is absolutely a thing. It's called a sovereignty purchase.

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Today on the show, how these massive land deals shape the country we live in today, and why the idea of the US Buying Greenland is a lot more complicated than it would have been in the past.

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For those of you who didn't immediately Google Greenland after Trump's press conference, here is a quick primer. It is a great big land mass, bigger than Texas and California combined. Greenland sits way up north in the Atlantic Ocean between Canada and Europe. It's a semi autonomous territory of Denmark with a population around 56,000 people. Now, because of its location and natural resources, the territory has long been eyed with interest by countries like China.

2:13

So this goes to why Trump has proposed buying Greenland. And while a lot of people heard his comments and thought, well, that's just bananas, Stephen Press says it's not as bananas as you might think. Stephen's a history professor at Stanford University who studies Europe and international affairs. And to start, he just wanted to make one thing clear.

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I don't endorse the specific talk about Greenland that has come from President Trump. I do, however, think there's a really deep history here that involves the United States and really a very large portion of the world.

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He says the idea that one country might buy a territory from another is called a sovereignty purchase, and it's a practice that actually happened all around the world and dates back thousands of years.

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So first thing I'd say is the word sovereignty is notoriously difficult to define, and political leaders won't help you in any way. But sovereignty is something like supremacy in relation to political rights, governmental powers.

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If you think of governments as having a basket of rights, like the right to conduct military and economic affairs, to impose taxes or laws on people in a particular place, a sovereignty purchase is when one government buys some or all those rights from another government. And this is something the United States has a long history of doing.

3:32

Alaska, Florida, California, and basically the whole middle section of the continental U.S. those are part of the U.S. today because the U.S. bought the rights to that land from some other colonial power.

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If you just kind of quickly add things up, you're talking about an enormous portion of territory, past and present.

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Stephen says about 40% of the United States was acquired through sovereignty purchases. This is not to say, though, that these deals don't have some very troubling aspects.

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Yeah. For example, in 1803, President Thomas Jefferson persuaded Congress to fund the Louisiana purchase for about $15 million. France sold off a chunk of its empire, this vast territory in the middle of the continent. And specifically in the deal, the French gave the US Exclusive authority to take control of the territory from indigenous tribes. Whether they did that through contracts or

4:24

through force, that's problematic, but it's a big part of the United States history.

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Another problematic aspect to sovereignty purchases, sometimes the key ingredient is coercion.

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Some of the purchases made in relation to Mexico, for example, were in the context of ongoing, often armed, disputes over territory.

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Maybe you've heard of the Mexican American war. In the 1840s, the US expanded its borders by annexing Texas. Then it declared war on Mexico. That war ended in 1848 with the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which was followed a few years later by something called the Gadsden Purchase. As part of these agreements, Mexico ceded over half its territory to the US in exchange for $25 million and taking on some back debt.

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And that territory today includes what we call California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, plus parts of Colorado, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming, and

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all that for $25 million. I think that's what you call a steel. At least the Mexicans probably did.

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It's kind of a weird chapter of international affairs or relations, but sometimes sovereignty purchases are seen as a relatively peaceful alternative to war or the continuation of war.

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But you're saying, like, given the context, it's really almost like the Godfather, where it's like an offer they can't refuse.

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Yeah. It certainly can be. On the other hand, it isn't always. We know of cases that were by comparison, free of coercion.

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Here's one example. In the late 1860s, Russia was contemplating selling off the territory of Alaska. The US Secretary of State at the time, William Seward, was like, yeah, we should buy it. It'll be great for commerce. And so for about $7.2 million, the US did just that. And believe it or not, this is when Greenland first appears on the US Shopping wish list.

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So Seward's saying, okay, purchase Alaska from Russia. Also look at Denmark, a relatively old imperial power and one that, looking ahead, doesn't really have the means to maintain its presence in far flung places.

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It's like the Amazon recommender that's like, you just bought Alaska. People like you also looked at Greenland,

6:46

but on a much, much larger scale.

6:50

William Seward, he's like scrolling, he's like, I am interested in these recommend.

6:57

Yeah, one of those far flung Danish possessions, if you want to call it that, was Greenland. Although at the time Congress did not go for this idea. The idea of buying Greenland did come up a few more times under later presidents under Woodrow Wilson and FDR and Harry Truman. And obviously this deal never came to fruition.

7:19

So by now you are probably getting the picture. The idea of sovereignty purchases did not start with Trump. These are deals with prominent problematic aspects that gave the US some big economic advantages and are a big reason why the US looks the way it does today. But is it possible for the US to just buy a huge swath of territory like Greenland today?

7:40

Eh, probably not. At least not how it used to go down. And there are multiple reasons for that. For one thing, in the past, these deals happened without any real input from the people living in the places that got, and Stephen says in today's international order, the right of self determination, consent of the govern, these things carry a lot more weight than they used to.

8:03

Any arrangement that doesn't really kind of center the potential benefits and consent of the affected people is really flawed, not just practically speaking, but also morally. It's really hard to justify this in terms of public opinion and public perception.

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And even if Denmark would entertain the idea of selling Greenland, which it's not, there are currently about 56,000 people living there and many of those folks want Greenland to declare complete independence from Denmark. Greenland, for its part, has said that the country is not for sale, but it is open to doing business with

8:40

the U.S. stephen says while sovereignty purchases for big swaths of territory don't happen as often as they used to, they've sort of lived on in a smaller scale and perhaps by a different name. For example, a lot of countries will pay other countries for the right to install military bases. The US has these all over the world. And you might not quite call that a sovereignty purchase. Maybe something more like a sovereignty lease.

9:06

What about like a sovereignty buy now, pay later?

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I think you might have just come up with a new business idea.

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I'm going to pitch a VC right now.

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This episode was produced by Cooper Katz, became with engineering by Sina Lofredo and Neil Rauch. It was fact checked by Sierra Juarez. Paddy Hirsch edited this episode. Cait Concannon is our editor and the indicators of production of NPR.

Add to cart: Greenland

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