THE ORIGINS OF AN OBSESSION

How Greenland became both a prize and a marker in a world Trump is reordering

- ERIC CORTELLESSA

DONALD TRUMP'S PURSUIT OF GREENLAND started with an intelligence briefing in the Situation Room. It was early 2018, and rising Russian submarine activity and the increased presence of Chinese vessels in the Arctic represented a security threat, Trump was told. At that meeting, according to a senior White House official at the time and a second person familiar with the conversation, Trump became preoccupied with the idea that the U.S. required a bigger and more permanent presence in Greenland, because of its strategic location in the North Atlantic.

That May, Trump was visiting Long Island for a political event when he met briefly with Ronald Lauder, a longtime friend and heir to the cosmetics fortune. Lauder told him Denmark was struggling economically and suggested that the U.S. could leverage that strain to buy Greenland outright, according to the former White House official.

When Trump's interest in buying Greenland was first reported that year, it struck critics as a characteristically provocative but unserious gambit—expansionist bluster from a President given to floating outlandish ideas. But Trump was serious. Nor was he the first Commander in Chief to entertain the idea. In the 19th century, William Seward, the Secretary of State who negotiated the purchase of Alaska under Andrew Johnson, argued the case for acquiring Greenland was “political and commercial,” citing its vast territory and mineral wealth. But no offer was ever made. President Harry Truman revived the idea in 1949, at one point proposing to purchase the island from Denmark in exchange for $100 million in gold and oil rights in Alaska.