Counteroffer: What if Greenland bought the U.S.?

The Danes are in “crisis mode” after a “horrendous” call in mid-January between President Donald Trump and Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen in which Trump in no uncertain terms reiterated his desire to acquire Greenland.

What are the Danes to do — ponder and vacillate like Hamlet? Or remember that offense is the best defense? In the latter case, they would do well to recall an amusing proposal made by Greenland’s prime minister in 2019, when Trump first set his sights on the world’s largest island.

Kim Kielsen, who was prime minister of Greenland from 2014 to 2021, formulated a tantalizing counteroffer to Trump’s claim. According to Kielsen, it should be Greenland that acquires the U.S. — not the other way around. And the prime minister had a good historical argument behind his satirical claim.

“It was Leif the Lucky who discovered America,” Kielsen told the Danish newspaper Politiken in 2019. “And it was his father, Erik the Red, who discovered Greenland and settled here. So, it’s only natural for us to get America back.”

Although ethnically Norse (and thus not closely related to the Inuit, who make up 90% of Greenland’s current population of less than 60,000), Leif Erikson was a resident Greenlander when he sailed to America.

Blown off course on a voyage back home from Norway, Leif Erikson was the first known person of European heritage to set foot in continental North America, around 500 years before Columbus “discovered” the New World. (By the way, Leif earned his nickname not for his American adventure, but for rescuing a crew of shipwrecked fellow Vikings — lucky for them.)

The exact location along the Atlantic coast of North America of the place Leif called “Vinland” is still debated. A strong contender is the area around the Norse settlement dug up by archaeologists at L’Anse aux Meadows, on the northern tip of the Canadian island of Newfoundland. Some have suggested locations as far south as Cape Cod, well within the present-day United States.

Kielsen has not offered any estimate as to what would be a fair amount for Greenland to pay in order to assert its “finders keepers” rights on America. It is clear, however, that he is singling out the United States, and not Canada or the entire North American continent, for acquisition: “The price should be relatively low, considering the colossal size of the U.S.’s national debt.”

That debt is currently in the neighborhood of $37 trillion, but Kielsen is not satisfied with subtracting that sum from the going rate for the United States, whatever that turns out to be. Taking a leaf out of The Art of the Deal, he is looking to maximize his advantage, and argues for an even bigger discount: “If we have to take Donald Trump into the bargain, the price should be even lower.”

While it is not very likely that the Erfalasorput, Greenland’s flag, will fly over the White House any time soon, it doesn’t hurt to visualize what the Greenlandic argument for a takeover looks like. If for no other reason than to give people on both sides of the cold, cold Northern Atlantic Ocean something to chuckle about.

The legends on this map provide a taste of Kalaallisut, the tongue-twisting native language of the world’s largest island. The title reads: “The U.S. belongs to Greenland.” The statue is labeled: “Leif Erikson, discoverer of America. And the caption inside the U.S. reads: America, part of Greenland.”

(Note that this map was not produced by the Leif Erikson Brigade, or other imaginary irredentist outfits operating in the underworld of Nuuk, the Greenlandic capital. It was made purely to illustrate this article, and not to escalate any spat between the U.S. and Denmark, Greenland’s current Big Brother.)

In at least one way, however, the Greenlanders have already won. The Leif Erikson statue illustrating the map stands in front of the Minnesota State Capitol in St. Paul. It is one of more than half a dozen graven images of the lucky discoverer to be found in the United States — others are in Boston, Chicago, Milwaukee, Newport News, and Seattle, to name a few. There are, as yet, no statues of Donald Trump on Greenland.

Strange Maps #1267

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