Greenland, yes. Colonialism, no.

Why Greenland should be American. Also, Jimmy Carter goes home, a long goodbye.

Why shouldn’t America have Greenland? And a better question: why shouldn’t Greenland be American? It’s totally zany, but politically-speaking, there is no reason why Greenland remains ruled by the Danes. Copenhagen has no more right to be the center of government for that frozen island than the U.S. has to be the government of Guam. Or Puerto Rico, for that matter. (Note: if you want to read about Jimmy Carter, the last honest politician, skip down to the end. You can come back and read about Greenland later.)

Col. Theodore Roosevelt stands triumphant with his regiment on San Juan Hill in Cuba after his "Rough Riders" captured this location and its sister, Kettle Hill during the Spanish-American War, circa 1898. Unknown source, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

I don’t want to be cruel toward Puerto Ricans. They are Americans, and they are wonderful people, inhabiting an island that misses the mark of a true paradise only by the political mismanagement that 100 years of bleeding-heart liberals and corrupt leadership carries with it. But Guam is more deserving of the gift of American citizenship than that island in the Caribbean. And they’ve had it just as long, and obtained it in the same way.

I’m going to take the long way around in a parade through history. I feel like I have to do this, because history is going to inform the basis of any reasoning why Greenland, of all places, needs to be American.

See, it should have been Cuba, not Guam, or Puerto Rico, or the Philippine Islands. President James K. Polk, who oversaw the greatest expansion of U.S. territory in the country’s history since the Louisiana Purchase, offered Spain $100 million for Cuba in 1848. He did this high off his four years of mixing political pressure with military might to get what he wanted, that being more American soil.

Beginning in 1844, the more extreme wing of the Democratic Party wanted “fifty-four forty or fight,” for pushing the Oregon border up to the Russian-held Alaska territory, thus freezing the British—and Canadians—out of the Pacific. Instead, Polk used his extremists to play hardball to get the British to cede the 49th parallel, keeping all but the San Juan Islands (in current Washington State) of Vancouver Island for themselves. (In a funny footnote of history, read about the Pig War that resulted from Polk’s incomplete deal, as a conflict over a pig spiraled toward war in 1859.)

Polk also incited war with Mexico to obtain California and New Mexico. First he offered $20 million, plus taking over the claims of damage by Americans from the Mexican government. Mexico declined. So Polk sent Gen. Zachary Taylor and his 4,000 troops to the Rio Grande to reinforce his point. The Mexicans perceived this as an act of war and fired on Taylor’s force. In response, Congress declared war on Mexico, which went poorly for the Mexicans. (Another footnote: the Mexican-American war is where many Civil War generals cut their teeth in battle, including U.S. Grant and George Meade.)

With a U.S. “Army of Occupation” taking Mexico City in September 1847, the Mexican government finally agreed to cede California and New Mexico, for $5 million less than Polk’s original offer, in 1848. Polk drove a harder bargain than his negotiator, Nicholas Trist. Trist was instructed to include Baja in the final treaty, but he allowed the border to be drawn north of Baja, in a straight line north of current day Tijuana to a sharp turn at the Colorado River and the border of Arizona. Just think: we could have had Cabo to ourselves.

By 1848, Polk was feeling his oats and wanted Cuba, which, rightfully, just 90 miles south of Florida, was well inside our economic area of influence, and under the umbrella of the Monroe Doctrine. Spain declined as Cuba was not for sale. This caused exiled insurrectionist Gen. Narciso López to gather troops for “filibustering” expeditions out of New Orleans to take the island from Spain. (An interesting word study: “filibuster” was originally a term meaning unsanctioned warfare in foreign countries.) After three failed attempts to overthrow Spanish rule in Cuba, Spain finally executed López and 51 members of his final expedition in 1851. Polk never got to see this, having died in 1849 shortly after leaving office.

America never added Cuba to our growing list of territories—except for Guantanamo Bay—but we did finally overthrow Spain 40 years later. Between 1849 and the Spanish-American war, we tried, secretly, to buy Cuba again, this time for $120 million, but President Franklin Pierce objected and the Ostend Manifesto never went anywhere. In 1868, Cuban rebels began the Ten Years’ War, which brought a long train of Cuban immigrants into the U.S. In 1875, Carlos Manuel de Céspedes y Céspedes, a son of one of the rebellion’s leaders, was elected mayor of Key West.

In 1898, amid a flurry of anti-Spain propaganda published in New York newspapers, detailing abuses by Spanish Gen. Veleriano Weyler y Nicolau, who was known as “the Butcher,” or El Carnicero, President William McKinley sent the battleship U.S.S. Maine to Havana harbor to protected U.S. citizens and interests on the island. On February 15, 1898, the Maine exploded, killing 260 of her crew. Spain never accepted responsibility for the sinking (and we may never know the reason), though it agreed to arbitration; the U.S. wanted blood: “Remember the Maine, to hell with Spain!”

McKinley sent Spain an ultimatum they were not prepared to accept: Cuba must be free or there would be war. The Spanish knew they could not win a war with the U.S., but they also knew it was unavoidable. So Spain declared war on April 24, 1898, retroactive from April 21. By July 18, the war was over. Unfettered by diplomacy, and with a declaration of war against anywhere Spain’s flag flew, the U.S. took Manila in the Philippines on May 1st.

In Cuba, things didn’t go much better for Spain. On July 3, Admiral Pascual Cervera y Topete’s flotilla of cruisers and destroyers, which had holed up in Santiago harbor, attempted to escape to the west, and were promptly sunk or lay burning and beached by the U.S. Navy. The “Rough Riders,” irregulars and veterans organized by Teddy Roosevelt, had fought the battle of San Juan Hill, and breached Santiago’s defensive positions on July 1, prompting Cervera’s evacuation.

Cuba won its independence from a U.S. takeover only by dint of the fact that so many Cubans were residents of the United States. I believe had there not been such a great lobby from Cuban-Americans we would be vacationing in Havana under the U.S. flag to this day. The resulting treaty saw Spain hand over the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam to the United States. Of those islands, Puerto Rico and Guam remain territories, and the Philippines gained official recognition of its independence (officially granted by the Treaty of Paris with Spain in 1898 but ignored by the United States) in 1946, as a reward for four years of Japanese occupation.

Guamanians earned their U.S. citizenship: they resisted hard in WWII, enduring a brutal occupation by the Imperial Japanese Navy from 1941 to 1944, the island playing a pivotal role in the Pacific theater, as well. On the other hand, Puerto Ricans have, on and off, flirted with statehood. The latest plebiscite, held in 2012, resulted in over 60 percent of Puerto Ricans who voted on the second question choosing statehood. (The first question asked if Puerto Rico should continue as a U.S. territory or seek independence.) Unfortunately, implementation of Puerto Rican voters’ wishes would require an act of Congress, and a signature by the U.S. president. Even in friendly political times, under Democratic Party administrations, this has been unlikely in the extreme. It’s not going to happen in a Trump term.

But Greenland, in this term, that can happen. I think it very well might happen. And if it doesn’t happen now, maybe it will gain enough momentum to happen in the future, versus never. Armed with history, let’s look at the reasons. Also, let me make this one concession: I am not going to write about the Panama Canal here, at least not in this context. There’s a tie-in with the other big story of the day, the death of Jimmy Carter, but I won’t deal with Panama in relation to “places Trump wants to annex.”

First, geography and geology. After all, Greenland is part of North America, geologically speaking. Geology and geography is squarely in America’s column. Greenland is in our continent, a continent that has had no European colonial ownership since Canada officially broke all political ties (but not cultural or monarchy) with London in 1982. With the U.S. purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867, Greenland became the only non-North American controlled land mass in this continent. South America still has French Guiana, an “overseas department of France,” but the everywhere else in our hemisphere, apart from a few small islands, is run by countries in the western hemisphere—except Greenland.

Political history, that’s a long story and mostly Denmark’s tale.

Through trade, land claims, and the Treaty of Kiel following the Napoleonic Wars (with exactly zero battles fought outside Europe), Denmark inherited Greenland in 1814 as a colony, along with Iceland and the Faroe Islands. Vikings had visited the frozen slopes as early as 986, and the Danes began colonization in the 18th century. In 1953, after Iceland had earned its independence after WWII, Greenland was made a Danish county (kind of like an overseas department of France), which further integrated the island into Denmark’s political establishment. In 1979, Greenland established its own parliament, but remains a territory within the Kingdom of Denmark. History is in Demark’s favor, but culturally, Danes remain in Greenland’s minority, with the great majority of Greenland’s 56,000-odd inhabitants native Inuits.

The question today is, who gets to decide who rules Greenland? Does Denmark get to speak to Greenlanders right to self-determination? Or can Greenland vote itself out of Copenhagen’s orbit and into Washington’s?

If James K. Polk can offer $20 million for Cuba, and then four decades later, Cubans and Teddy Roosevelt fight for their island’s freedom, getting the U.S. Puerto Rico and Guam in the bargain, it should be a relatively straightforward matter for President Donald Trump to negotiate for Greenland. And he intends to do it.

“For purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World, the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity,” Trump’s Truth Social post read.

Denmark offered no immediate comment. Greenland responded:

"Greenland belongs to the people of Greenland," its prime minister said on Monday, a day after Trump repeated comments about the Arctic island that he first made several years ago.

Greenland's Prime Minister Mute Egede said, “we are not for sale and we will not be for sale.” But Greenland is not free from foreign ownership right now, is it? In other words, Greenland saying Greenland is not for sale is not the last word on whether Greenland is for sale. That word goes to Denmark. Greenland’s residents have been treated as a colony for hundreds of years.

And America has yet to make its best play. We haven’t really put an offer on the table for what Greenlanders will get.

What is that play? How about U.S. citizenship and recognition as an independent nation. In other words, the same arrangement Puerto Ricans, U.S. Virgin Islanders, Mariana Islanders, and American Samoans enjoy. That’s right, a blue passport, full rights to travel to the U.S., work and live in any state, and full independence. How about a pile of cash, jobs, and rights to mine valuable resources, too? How about the security of being under America’s (and Canada’s) security umbrella? Can Denmark compete with that?

Sure, Denmark is in NATO, but the United States is NATO, and if the U.S. (i.e. Trump) wants to call off NATO, Denmark can be part of whatever NATO becomes, but the U.S. will still be the world’s greatest superpower. If Greenlanders were given the opportunity to vote on this deal, would they choose it?

Maybe. Maybe not right away. But it’s a powerful, intoxicating opportunity. And America is literally right around the corner, not across a freezing ocean. Thule air base is U.S.-run and Americans have been on Greenland a very long time. We’re not coming in as a conquering power, we’re coming in as liberators.

I think the main reason Greenland and Denmark are reacting in the way they are is they aren’t taking Trump seriously. But I believe Trump is serious. He wants to make his mark on the world in his second term, and if he can’t do what James Polk did, he at least wants to do some of what William McKinley (who he recently praised) did.

Greenland isn’t just a frozen island with bragging rights either. There are valuable resources buried under the ice. Significant deposits of rare earths like Dysprosium, Terbium, Yttrium, Neodymium, Praseodymium, and Cerium, which are used in various technical and mechanical sectors, including defense, can be mined, and are being mined in Kringlerne. The Kvanefjeld site in southern Greenland is reported to contain one of the largest deposits of light rare earth elements (LREEs). The U.S. wants access to these minerals for the burgeoning cold war with China.

Is it worth gaining U.S. citizenship and a pile of American federal money for Greenlanders to cede those rights? Should Denmark get to make that decision? If I were one of President-elect Trump’s advisers on Greenland, I’d make this a cause of national liberation, of self-determination, of throwing off the yoke of colonialism, of breaking ties with old European kings, and enjoying the freedoms of American style democracy.

Yes, I think Greenland has a place in American hearts, and would make a wonderful addition to our nation. Not to mention, a giant boon the the map and globe-making industry, which hasn’t had a major change since the fall of the Soviet Union. And for map nerds, finally, the U.S. would take its place in the Mercator Projection, joining Russia as the beneficiary of arctic distortion (besides Alaska). Look how big America will appear on the map. That might be the reason Trump wants Greenland (think the mind of a toddler), but regardless of that, Greenland belongs here. They just have to begin taking that seriously.

Say yes to a free Greenland, and no to European colonialism. I can get behind that.

Don’t speak badly of Jimmy Carter, the last honest politician

President Jimmy Carter went home. Mike Luckovich, the Atlanta Journal Constitution’s cartoonist, captured this the best, in my opinion.

People are already speaking ill of the dead. This post on X represents most of the complaints. “Jimmy Carter sold the Panama Canal to Panama for 1 dollar. He started the department of energy and department of education, two wildly bloated and corrupt government agencies. He supported Shah of Iran which ushered in an Islamic revolution in Iran. He was horrible at combating inflation and stagflation. He was a horrible president. It’s almost impressive Joe Biden was worse.”

Jimmy Carter was not a horrible president. He was an honest politician, and honest people don’t really belong in politics, at least the brutally honest ones. Carter’s mix of humility and honesty played well in the aftermath of Watergate. It got him elected to the White House. But once in power, Carter, who trusted in his own smarts far more than anyone else’s, couldn’t deal with Congress, or his own advisers. His micromanagement made him difficult to please. And because of that, people in Washington hated him.

But Carter was not the terrible president the ill-speakers say.

Yes, Carter had terrible instincts regarding Iran and the Shah. His entire State Department staff warned him if he brought the Shah to America bad things would happen. Carter ignored them and allowed the Shah to get cancer treatment here. Bad things happened. People remember the bad things.

Desert One was what the military calls a Charlie-Foxtrot. It was ill-advised but Carter wanted the hostages back. He didn’t want to negotiate with the Islamic Republic government. They wanted to embarrass Carter, which they did quite effectively. Carter should not have ordered Desert One.

But Carter’s biggest fans were Republicans, who viewed him as a political goldmine—for a Democrat, he was the best target they’d had since Harry Truman, and they took massive advantage. There may have been nobody in Washington who hated Carter more than (Massachusetts Democrat) Speaker Tip O’Neill. O’Neill reportedly smiled when Carter lost in a landslide to Ronald Reagan. O’Neill couldn’t stand Reagan either, but would rather work with someone he was expected to hate than Carter, who he was expected to respect.

But Carter did some good things, things President George W. Bush would have done had be been in office 20 years earlier. The peace treaty between Israel and Egypt is the most stable in the Middle East, and is still in effect. It even survived the Arab Spring, and the brief rule of the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo.

Carter’s consolidation of four existing agencies into the Department of Energy, and the separation of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission into its own independent body was not a case of bloat, it was a national security work of art. The NRC is horrible, not because of its sclerosis, but because it’s staffed with no-nuke people. I wouldn’t necessarily blame Carter—a nuclear engineer—for that. But Carter, like many Navy nuke officers, believed civilians had no business running reactors. (I’ve written extensively about the 50 years of lies that have hampered nuclear development.)

Similarly, the Department of Education elevated an existing bureau, part of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, to its own cabinet position. The Department of Education has not grown that much over the years from its size when it was embedded in DHEW, not nearly as much as its sibling, the leviathan HHS. Compare this to Bush’s Department of Homeland Security, and tell me who made a worse monster.

Republicans got the biggest gift from Carter in the Department of Education. From Ronald Reagan on, Republicans have campaigned on killing that department, while they lavishly funded it when in office. It’s the gift that keeps on grifting, under the cash shower of lobbying from the teachers unions and education industry.

And the Panama Canal deal, it was necessary. In 1903, when the original treaty for the canal was signed, there was no Panama. We created Panama with the canal treaty. The American Canal Zone was a colony in every sense, including repressive military tactics. Carter’s treaty gave us everything we wanted or needed, including permanent right of defense, which we still enjoy. Owning the land in the Canal Zone was untenable, and would have led to worse outcomes, like Panama running to Cuba or the Soviet Union (look at Nicaragua and the mess Reagan made there).

Carter’s biggest problem was that he was incapable of telling a convincing lie to motivate Americans. He told us somberly about stagflation, about the growing threat from the USSR, about the oil crisis, about Iran. We didn’t want to hear that kind of news. We wanted a cheerleader like Reagan, or a crook like Nixon (as long as those crimes didn’t go public).

We got everything we wanted after Carter left office. We got the communicator in Reagan, the spy master in George H.W. Bush (who was also a poor liar), the crook in Bill Clinton, and another Carter in George W. Bush, who is a better liar than he lets on. And then we recycled and got silver-tongued liar Barack Obama, and the king of all liars, Trump—twice.

Are you going to stack up 444 days of Americans held hostage in Tehran against 17 years of war that G.W. Bush gave us, and President Joe Biden botched on the exit?

I haven’t even touched the decades of public service Jimmy Carter did when he left office. Don’t speak ill of Carter. He was the last honest president, the last honest politician, to reach the Oval Office. He deserves praise and honor, not nitpicking.

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