President Donald Trump has been emphatic about his desire to acquire Greenland — the latest development in an eventful saga going back over 150 years.
The world’s largest island has long presented an attractive prospect for American power projection. Located on the United States’s northeastern flank, developments in technology and the changing need for resources have only made the target more tempting.
Before Trump’s efforts in 2019 and 2024-25, the U.S. undertook at least three major attempts to acquire Greenland throughout its history.
Here’s what happened the last three times the U.S. tried to acquire Greenland.
1867The first serious attempt to acquire Greenland was the brainchild of Robert J. Walker, the former treasury secretary under President James K. Polk and an avowed American expansionist. At various points, he advocated the acquisition of Texas, all of Mexico, Danish possessions in the Caribbean, all of Canada, and more, according to German historian Ingo Heidbrink.
In 1867, he came to Secretary of State William Seward with an ambitious proposal: The U.S. should purchase Greenland and Iceland from Denmark, which then controlled both.
In the process of his most famous accomplishment as secretary of state, the purchase of Alaska for roughly $7.2 million, Seward received the plan positively, commissioning a report on the importance of the two islands. Walker tasked the United States Coast Survey with putting together the report.
Seward had given hints of his sympathies as early as 1846.
“Our population is destined to roll its resistless waves to the icy barriers of the north, and to encounter oriental civilization on the shores of the Pacific,” Seward was quoted as saying.
Even in 1867, the Walker report found that Greenland possessed “great mineral wealth” and “most extensive and protected fishing grounds.” Its harbors presented the possibility of “summer ocean steam navigation 1,500 miles to Alaska” and onward into the Pacific. The island’s western coast held bountiful “good” and “valuable” coal that could be “most cheaply mined, and close to good harbors.”
Walker also reported that Greenland was the only place on Earth that contained cryolite, “a most important mineral” of “very rapidly increasing use and value” that appeared to be “inexhaustible ... mined in large quantities, its rapid development being due in great part to American enterprise.”
Aside from the rich mineral deposits, Walker’s primary goal was to surround British Canada to force its annexation.
Only the acquisition of Greenland would “flank British North America for thousands of miles on the north and west, and greatly increase her inducements, peacefully and cheerfully, to become a part of the American Union.”
Walker also foresaw the acquisition of Greenland bringing forth an age of American global supremacy. The island’s “vast fisheries and extensive coasts and numerous harbours, especially with abundant good coal there, must greatly antedate the period when the United States will command the commerce of the world.”
Unfortunately for Seward and Walker, the plan to acquire Greenland never made it to the negotiation stage. Walker’s report was leaked to Wisconsin Rep. Cadwallader C. Washburn, who revealed the plans in a speech on the House floor while arguing against the acquisition of funds for Alaska. Critics sarcastically pronounced how vital it was to acquire the glaciers of Greenland. The mere mention of acquiring the island was laughed down by members of Congress, with critics even sneering at the possibility of purchasing the Danish Caribbean possessions.
With Congress unwilling to go ahead with purchasing the Danish West Indies, Seward and Walker saw the writing on the wall and abandoned their effort. It would go largely untouched for nearly a half-century, though it led to interest from some American companies.
1910In 1910, U.S. Ambassador to Denmark Maurice Francis Egan put forward the most complicated scheme to purchase Greenland, the first plan presented directly to Denmark.
According to the terms of the deal, Denmark would give the U.S. Greenland in exchange for the Philippine islands of Mindanao and Palauan. Denmark would then cede the Philippine islands to Germany — then eager to expand its far eastern empire — in exchange for parts of Schleswig, lost to Prussia in the Second Schleswig War in 1864.
In a letter to the U.S. assistant secretary of state, Egan was confident that Copenhagen would have little issue parting with the island.
“Greenland is looked on by the Danes very much as our people formerly looked on Alaska. The Government here is so much occupied with internal economic and political differences in Denmark that it gives very little attention to the development of the resources of Greenland, which is practically terra incognita,” he wrote.
Despite his confidence, the Danes rejected the proposition.
1946The closest the U.S. came to acquiring Greenland was during and in the immediate aftermath of World War II when it occupied the island.
The cryolite mentioned in Walker’s 1867 report became as important as he prophesied. During World War II, the Hall-Heroult process was the U.S.’s only known way of producing aluminum, the critical component of which was cryolite. The mining town of Ivittuut in Greenland held the only naturally occurring deposit of cryolite that was widespread enough to mine commercially.
After Denmark capitulated in a single day during the Nazi invasion in 1940, the Danish ambassador to the U.S., Henrik Kauffmann, went against his government and signed a deal with the U.S. over Greenland. As part of the deal, the U.S. would preserve Greenland’s status as an essentially sovereign nation, protecting it from any outside invasion. In turn, the U.S. got the rights to set up airfields, military bases, and mine resources on the island.
According to Heidbrink, World War II coincided with the most dramatic development in Greenland’s history, with the U.S. granting the islanders access to commercial markets for the first time, setting up vital infrastructure, providing electricity, radio, kerosene lamps, guns, modern tools and machinery, and much more.
Once World War II ended, Denmark believed the agreement with the U.S. was obsolete and U.S. forces should be withdrawn. Washington eyed the island as having taken on critical importance, particularly as its gaze moved from Nazi Germany to the Soviet Union.
Danish Foreign Minister Gustav Rasmussen traveled to Washington, D.C., in December 1946 to discuss the possible withdrawal of U.S. troops from Greenland with Secretary of State James Byrnes. Byrnes presented three options to Rasmussen, one of which was the outright purchase of the island. The exchange was documented in a declassified contemporary document.
“Secretary Byrnes also suggested that possibly the best solution might be the outright purchase of Greenland by the United States under an agreement concluded in accordance with the principles and purposes of the Charter of the United Nations,” the summary of the meeting said. “Secretary Byrnes’ suggestions were detailed in a memorandum handed to Foreign Minister Rasmussen at the close of the December 14 conversation. Foreign Minister Rasmussen appeared to regard the Secretary’s proposals as more drastic than may have been anticipated, but he agreed to give them careful study.”
Despite the classified nature of the proposal, Time magazine caught wind of the plans in 1947. The strategic necessity of the island was already known publicly.
“Greenland’s 800,000 square miles make it the world’s largest island and stationary aircraft carrier. It would be as valuable as Alaska during the next few years, before bombers with a 10,000-mile range are in general use. It would be invaluable, in either conventional or push-button war, as an advance radar outpost. It would be a forward position for future rocket-launching sites. In peace or war it is the weather factory for northwest Europe, whose storms must be recorded as near the source as possible,” the 1947 article noted.
More details of the deal were made public in 1991 when a Danish newspaper came across newly declassified documents. The U.S. offered Copenhagen $100 million in gold for the island.
The possible purchase of Greenland was also nearly unanimously popular among the U.S. high command. At an April 1946 meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff strategy committee, attended by State Department official John Hickerson, he noted 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.
U.S. officials were also confident that there would be little objection from the Danes. William C. Trimble, assistant chief of the State Department’s division of northern European affairs, noted in a May 24, 1946, memo, "In the final analysis, there are few people in Denmark who have any real interest in Greenland, economic, political or financial.”
President Harry Truman’s secretary of war, Robert Patterson, said that securing the island, up to the extent of purchasing it outright, was a “good idea.”
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
According to Heidbrink, the Danes were “taken by complete surprise” by the proposal. While their exact response wasn’t recorded, the matter was rejected in some way, with the U.S. instead being granted extensive rights to the island.
The matter would remain dormant until 2019.