Proposed United States purchase of Greenland

Proposals to purchase Greenland from Denmark have occasionally been made both within the United States Government and in direct offer to the Danish Crown. While the United States has acquired other Danish territory, namely the Danish West Indies, as of 2019 Greenland remains an autonomous country of Denmark.
Background
In 1775 Denmark declared Greenland its territory over competing claims made by Norway. The United States recognized the Danish claim 142 years later, in 1917, in order to foil an attempt by the United Kingdom to secure a right of first refusal to Greenland should Denmark ever decide to sell it. The United States landed United States Coast Guard personnel from USCGC Northland, under arms, in Greenland to hold the territory for the United States. Prior to landing, the Coast Guardsmen were formally discharged from service and reconstituted as a force of American "volunteers" to create a legal fiction that would avoid charges of an American invasion of the country, the U.S. being neutral at the time and the Danish government-in-exile not having agreed to the landing.
Proposals
1867 proposal
In 1867, United States Secretary of State William H. Seward who had, the same year, negotiated the purchase of Alaska from the Russian Empire considered the idea of United States annexation of both Greenland and Iceland an idea "worthy of serious consideration". Under Seward's orders, a report ([https://books.google.com/books?idU9lIAAAAMAAJ&pgPP13#vonepage&q&ffalse A Report on the Resources of Iceland and Greenland], Peirce 1868) was commissioned on the subject, but no offer ultimately made.
1946 proposal
In 1946, the United States offered Denmark $100 million in gold bullion for Greenland. The necessity of American acquisition of Greenland was identified by the planning and strategy committee of the Joint Chiefs of Staff which determined that the country was "practically worthless to Denmark"; however, control of Greenland would allow the United States staging areas from which to launch military operations against its adversaries over the Arctic Circle.
The memorandum described the U.S. position on what to do about an informal agreement made in 1941 by Henrik Kauffmann to station U.S. forces on Greenland, and laid out three alternatives: a 99-year lease on the existing U.S. bases there, an agreement that the U.S. wholly take over the defence of Greenland, or the United States' preferred option of the outright purchase of Greenland for millions.
Rasmussen reported afterwards that this came as somewhat of a shock.
The Danish government had responded publicly to rumours at the time that the U.S. wanted to purchase Greenland, and it had been the Danish government's position in 1945 that the matter was settled, and that the U.S. was going to withdraw its troops after the end of World War Two, based upon language in the 1941 Kauffmann agreement that it remained in force "until agreement has been reached that current threats to the peace and security of the American continent have ended" and the understanding that those "threats" were the World War.
The Danish government did not appreciate that the U.S. understood this differently, and took this to include post-war threats from the Soviet Union as well.
Rasmussen declined all three options, and returned to Denmark.
Talking to the U.S. ambassador to Denmark Josiah Marvel, to whom he related his reaction of shock, he said "hile we owe much to America I do not feel that we owe them the whole island of Greenland".
All political parties in Denmark had indignantly rejected the notion when the rumours had surfaced, an example of which can be seen in the remarks in a 1947 budget debate by :
Rasmussen himself had responded in that debate that the idea was absurd, and had declared Denmark unwilling in any way to cede sovereignty over Greenland.
Rasmussen's surprise at the memorandum was in part down to duplicity by Henrik Kauffmann, who in concert with a friend at the United States Department of State was encouraging the outcome of a U.S. presence in Greenland whilst not fully informing the Danish government.
Kauffman had underplayed in his reports the likelihood of the 1945 resolution in the U.S. House of Representatives calling for a purchase, saying that the idea was considered ridiculous by the U.S. government, when in fact it was not at all.
He had also not conveyed several important parts of the United States' 1945 proposal to keep its bases on the island after the war.
Rasmussen had gone to Washington in 1946 with the expectation of annulling the 1941 agreement, not understanding thanks to Kauffmann's duplicity why the Danish government's previous overtures in that regard had yielded nothing.
The surprise was also in part down to how little Denmark understood the strategic importance of Greenland to the United States, something which it was not to come to fully appreciate for another decade or so.
The Danish government's own outlook on national security was more parochial, and did not extend much to viewing Greenland as a part of that.
In the meantime, the legal status of the World War Two arrangement was in limbo, unsettled with the United States still pressing for purchase and Denmark rejecting the offer, leaving matters at the status quo ante until well into the 1960s.
After the change of government in Denmark in November 1947, the new government of Hans Hedtoft recognized and adopted for itself Kauffmann's strategy of duplicity, even compounding it further.
To the Danish public, it maintained that the U.S. was going to withdraw from Greenland as expected; to the United States it stated that its own private position was that the U.S. presence was going to remain; whilst its own private position was, in fact, that it was seeking ways in which the U.S. could be made to withdraw.
Kaufmann likewise continued with his own prior personal agenda.
However, the Danish government was not duplicitous on the one point: that it was not going to outright cede Greenland to a foreign power.
The proposal by the United States to acquire Greenland was classified and not reported until the 1970s when documents related to it were discovered by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten.
According to the Wall Street Journal, American president Donald Trump later discussed the idea of purchasing Greenland with senior advisers. News of the reported discussions were first broke in 2019, prompting Soren Espersen of the far-right Danish People's Party to declare that "the thought of Denmark selling 50,000 citizens to the United States is completely ridiculous".
Impact of acquisition
An acquisition of Greenland by the United States would make the U.S. the second-largest nation in the world by land area, after the Russian Federation. It would be the single-largest territorial acquisition in American history, slightly larger than that of the Louisiana Purchase. In 2019, the Washington Post estimated the purchase price of Greenland would fall between $200 million and $1.7 trillion, with a middle estimate of $42.6 billion. The lower figure was based on an inflation and size-adjusted valuation of what the United States paid for Alaska, and the higher figure based on a price-to-earnings ratio of 847, which the newspaper said might be justified based on future valuations of its mineral deposits combined with the possibility that it might become a residential destination due to climate change.

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