If We Weren’t Broke, Buying Greenland for $700bn Would Be a Great Idea

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Thursday, January 15, 2026

 

The Independent reports:

 

President Donald Trump’s plans to acquire Greenland could reportedly cost $700 billion, despite it being deeply unpopular with Americans.

 

Trump has vowed that he would take over the Danish territory “one way or the other,” a statement officials from Denmark and Greenland have vehemently rejected.

 

The $700 billion price tag is an estimate crunched by scholars and former U.S. officials for planning purposes, and is more than half the Defense Department’s annual budget, according to NBC News.

 

I have no problem believing that the idea of buying Greenland is “deeply unpopular with Americans.” For that reason, I doubt it could go through Congress. And, of course, we are more than 38 trillion dollars in debt, with no plans to fix the annual deficits that make that number worse each year, so, unless Congress is willing to cut something or to raise taxes, the cost within our current budget would be prohibitive.

 

But, in a vacuum, it ought to be noted that $700 billion for Greenland would be an absolute steal. Greenland covers about 836,000 square miles — which is three times bigger than Texas, and around one quarter as big as the contiguous United States. It features 90 billion barrels of oil, and 1,700 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. It has a whole bunch of rare earth elements, including neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium, as well as large deposits of uranium, graphite, lithium, cobalt, copper, nickel, lead, zinc, gold, and iron ore. It’s located between the United States and Europe, which makes it extremely useful militarily.

 

Historically, the United States has bought quite a lot of land — most notably in the Lousiana Purchase, the Gadsden Purchase, the Alaska Purchase, and the Adams-Onís Treaty (that one was not literally a purchase, but we assumed millions of dollars of claims) — and this has always worked out spectacularly well. Together, those additions constitute 40 percent of the contemporary United States. Adding Greenland to the roster is not a new idea, either. The notion was first studied in 1867, by William Seward, who had masterminded the (unpopular-at-the-time!) Alaska Purchase, and it has come up at various points since, including in 1946, when President Harry Truman made a serious attempt to buy it from Denmark. President Trump may be a weirdo, but this is not an innovation of his.

 

As such, I am in the “want it, but can’t afford it” camp. Over time, we have got ourselves into a terrible pickle, and that terrible pickle cannot be wished away by magical thinking. $700 billion is about what we spend on Medicaid each year; it is slightly less than what we spend on all discretionary outlays; and it is around three quarters of what we spend on servicing our debt. Those are facts, and they cannot be dismissed simply because there is something else that we might like to buy instead. My point is merely that if, as a polity, we did not do that — if, instead of borrowing to support our everyday political choices, we borrowed only when making actual investments — buying Greenland would be a prime candidate for pushing the envelope. The move would instantly increase the size of the United States by 22 percent, and, unlike its current owners, who seem to treat it like some sort of zoo, we would follow up our acquisition by doing what Americans have always done: building, drilling, extracting, expanding, and making ourselves rich, powerful, and generally more useful than everyone else in the world.