'Will never be for sale': Trump’s proposal to buy Greenland gets 'resounding no'

23 December 2024

In 2019, when Donald Trump was serving his first term as U.S. president, he proposed buying Greenland — an idea he is revisiting as he gears up for a nonconsecutive second term.

Danish journalist Sanne Wass examines the president-elect's proposal in an article published by Bloomberg News on December 23. Many people have been wondering whether or not Trump's proposal is realistic, and according to the Copenhagen resident, it isn't realistic at all.

Wass, noting that Greenland is "the world’s biggest island and a self-ruling territory of Denmark," reports, "Both then and now, the response from the other side of the imagined transaction has been a resounding 'no.' And it’s still not clear whether such a deal is even feasible."

Wass recalls that in 2019, Trump argued that a Greenland purchase would benefit Denmark financially; now, he is promoting it as a national security matter.

"Lying in the northern Atlantic Ocean between Europe and America," Wass observes, "the island has long been a nexus of tensions among global powers. Besides being bigger than Mexico and Saudi Arabia, Greenland has a strategic location straddling the North Atlantic and the Arctic — a region whose vast stores of critical minerals and fossil fuels are coveted by the U.S., Russia and China."

According to Wass, Greenland Prime Minister Mute Bourup Egede responded to Trump's recent proposal by saying that Greenland "will never be for sale."

"Under the U.S. Constitution, Congress would have to approve money for any such purchase," Wass reports. "But Trump has previously shown a willingness to try to go around Congress' power of the purse. During his first term, when Congress refused to appropriate money for more fencing on the U.S.-Mexico border, Trump raided the Pentagon's budget to find funds for it — and the Supreme Court backed him up."

Read the full Bloomberg News article at this link (subscription required).

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