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In August 2019, President Donald Trump created a stir when he asked aides to explore the possibility of purchasing Greenland from Denmark. As Fox News reported, Trump explained that “essentially, it’s a large real estate deal, ” and said it would beneficial to Denmark, which provides the equivalent of hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies each year to the island. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen quickly nixed any deal, noting that Greenland, which became a self-autonomous region within Denmark back in 1970 and has its own separate parliament, premier and flag, is not Denmark’s property to sell.
Leopold turned out to be a greedy, horrifyingly brutal ruler. Eventually, international outcry against Leopold’s atrocities, which caused the country’s population to decline by more than half, grew so great that Leopold was forced to give up his personal country. The king transferred control to the Belgium’s parliamentary government in 1908, in exchange for a personal payment of 50 million Belgian francs, plus a donation of 40 million francs to the king’s foundation and assumption of another 110 million francs in debt – roughly about $63 million in today’s U.S.
Can one country actually buy another entire country? Back in the 1880s, King Leopold II of Belgium and a syndicate of investors made deals with hundreds of local rulers, and eventually claimed control of almost the entire Congo River basin. Has It Happened Before? The new country was recognized by other European colonial powers at the Berlin West Africa Conference of 1884-1885, giving it a thin veneer of legitimacy. Oddly, though, there’s at least one historical example of that happening in the 19th century. The group aggregated the land and proclaimed it to be a new independent nation, the Congo Free State, with Leopold as the sovereign. It’s a mind-boggling concept.
Google translation of her remarks as published in Sermitsiaq, a Greenland newspaper. And the U.S. and Denmark have done business before, though it was slightly more than a century ago. And back in 1946, the administration of a previous U.S. 1803 Louisiana Purchase, and the 1867 deal to buy Alaska from the Czarist government of Russia. President, Harry Truman, even secretly explored buying Greenland from Denmark, as detailed in this National Public Radio story. In 1917, the U.S. Still, Trump’s proposed deal would have gone further than any of those, because he offered to buy an island that in many ways is now actually a separate nation-within-a-nation. Virgin Islands from the Scandinavian nation. Some argued that Trump’s interest in buying Greenland wasn’t that outlandish. From the 1800s to the early 1900s, the U.S.
