Three Other Times the US Tried to Buy Greenland

By Todd DePastino

It’s the question of the day: why does President Trump want the United States to own Greenland?

President Trump may be singular in his approach to the Presidency and foreign affairs, but his pitch for Greenland isn’t without precedent. Long before climate change, rare earth minerals, and the China rivalry came into play, American officials understood Greenland as strategic ground, a place central to North American security.

The US made three bids for Greenland before Donald Trump came on the scene. None of the proposed trades came through, but the last one yielded an agreement that made ownership unnecessary.

Bid #1: William Seward’s Gambit, 1867

After the Civil War, Lincoln’s Secretary of State William H. Seward (inherited by Lincoln’s successor Andrew Johnson) purchased Alaska from the Russian Empire for two cents an acre. Then, he turned his sights east to Greenland and Iceland. He opened negotiations with Denmark to purchase these two island colonies for the United States. The timing, he thought, was perfect: slavery had ended in the United States, so there was no longer the worry about territorial expansion breaking up the country or spreading slavery northward.

Greenland, in Seward’s view, was a place of extraordinary promise with immense mineral wealth, vast fisheries, and an unusually long and protected coastline. He foresaw steamship traffic linking the US to Alaska, the Pacific, and even Asia through coaling stations and harbors on the Greenland coast.

What’s more, Seward saw Greenland as an important bulwark against Great Britain. In 1867, Great Britain had just granted Canada Dominion status, uniting its provinces into one body stretching from Halifax to the Pacific. The British, who had flirted with siding with the Confederacy during the Civil War, were clearly setting up a rival power to the north.

Having flanked this British American project on the northwest with the Alaska purchase, Seward targeted Greenland on the other side of the continent to complete the encirclement. Who knows? Maybe Canada would even “cheerfully” request US annexation.

Seward almost pulled it off. But, when word leaked of Seward’s plan to spend public money on Greenland, Iceland, and Danish islands in the Caribbean, Congress revolted. President Andrew Johnson had become deeply unpopular, and Congress began making plans for his impeachment.

Apart from the public’s contempt for Johnson, Americans also then, as now, were wary of overseas empires. Most saw imperialism as un-American and were content with limiting the nation’s land claims to the North American continent. Americans disliked the idea of taking over far-off lands dependent on maritime supply lines.

Seward’s dream of acquiring Greenland, then, evaporated in 1868. It would take a half-century for it to re-emerge in new form.

Bid #2: Taft’s Three-Way Land Swap, 1910

Theodore Roosevelt was the first President to envision the United States as a Great Imperial Power. TR brandished the Great White Fleet across the globe and relished control over Panama, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic. In 1910, TR’s successor, President William Howard Taft, quietly entertained a proposal to add Greenland to America’s collection of colonies.

The State Department’s gambit was this: offer Denmark some islands in the Philippines that the US had acquired in the Spanish American War. Denmark, in turn, would trade those islands to Germany, whose Kaiser Wilhelm II yearned for his own imperial “place in the sun.”

As a concession to Denmark, the Kaiser would return to its northern neighbor Schleswig-Holstein, territory Germany had wrested from the Danes back in 1864.

Finally, as a sort of broker commission, Denmark would cede Greenland to the United States.

The deal bordered on fantasy. Germany saw Schleswig-Holstein as rightfully theirs and was wary of rocking Europe’s balance of power by taking on far-flung colonial possessions. Denmark, for its part, had no interest in giving up Greenland. And TR’s brand of flamboyant imperialism was starting to wear thin.

But Greenland would not lose its strategic value. Indeed, its potential stations for coaling and radio and telegraph communications only enhanced the island’s appeal as a North Atlantic nexus.

Bid #3: Truman’s Gold Offer, 1946

In 1940, Denmark was invaded by Germany, making Greenland vulnerable to Nazi occupation. For Greenlanders, the more immediate threat was that Canada, Great Britain, Free Norwegian Forces, or all of these together would take over the territory and drag it into the European War.

President Franklin Roosevelt took special interest in Greenland’s fate and orchestrated complicated diplomacy to cut Greenland loose from its mother country and turn it into an independent neutral nation under the protection of the United States.

When the US entered the European War on December 11, 1941, Greenland served as a giant aircraft carrier in the North Atlantic, providing services for fighter, cargo, and bomber fleets in route to Europe. The Arctic island also hosted radio and weather stations, supply depots, sea ports, and all sorts of other military services for the Allies.

By 1946, having experienced Greenland’s strategic value first-hand, the United States made a formal offer to Denmark: we’ll give you $100 million in gold in exchange for Greenland.

Denmark refused.

But the US would not take no for an answer. The budding Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States made Greenland, once again, a strategic lynchpin, standing halfway between Russia and North America.

Cold War Agreement: Access without Sovereignty, 1951

Instead of folding up and departing the island after World War II, the United States Armed Forces dragged its feet until Denmark and the US could negotiate some kind of deal to allow the US to stay.

That deal, built on NATO security guarantees, came in 1951 with Greenland Defense Agreement. This agreement gave the US extensive rights to build and operate military bases in Greenland for NATO defense, while respecting Danish sovereignty.

And the US got busy right away expanding its military presence in Greenland. The crown jewel of this effort was the secret construction of Thule Air Base (today Pituffik Space Base) on the country’s northwest coast. Thule became home to Strategic Air Command bomber operations and early-warning surveillance systems to detect and deter Soviet nuclear attacks.

Even after post-Cold War downsizing in the 1990s and 2000s, the US Armed Forces remained in Greenland under amended versions of the 1951 agreement. The United States, in effect, opted not to disturb Greenland’s or Denmark’s sovereignty but to enjoy the strategic benefits of Greenland without owning it.

Trump’s New Bid for Ownership, 2026

President Donald Trump’s proposal to purchase Greenland outright breaks with 75 years of US practice and revives earlier American understandings of ownership as necessary for control.

In 2026, his administration has threatened economic coercion in the form of tariffs and hinted at using military force to gain possession of Greenland. This departure from the postwar NATO collective security consensus redefines the US interest in Greenland as not merely defensive or cooperative, but territorial.

President Theodore Roosevelt would probably approve, even if Franklin wouldn’t.