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President Trump says he wants the U.S. to take ownership of Greenland. One proposal to make it happen - buying it. And the act of buying a territory or even a country didn't come out of nowhere. Wailin Wong and Adrian Ma, with our Indicator podcast from Planet Money explain.
WAILIN WONG, BYLINE: For those of you who didn't immediately Google Greenland after Trump's press conference, here is a quick primer. It's a semi-autonomous territory of Denmark with a population around 56,000 people. Now, because of its location and natural resources, the territory has long been eyed with interest by countries like China.
ADRIAN MA, BYLINE: So this goes to why Trump has proposed buying Greenland. And while a lot of people heard his comments and thought, well, that's just bananas, Steven Press says it's not as bananas as you might think. Steven's a history professor at Stanford University who studies Europe and international affairs.
STEVEN PRESS: There's a really deep history here that involves the United States and really a very large portion of the world.
WONG: He says the idea that one country might buy a territory from another is called a sovereignty purchase.
MA: If you think of governments as having a basket of rights, like the right to conduct military and economic affairs, a sovereignty purchase is when one government buys some or all those rights from another government. And this is something the United States has a long history of doing.
WONG: Alaska, Florida, California and basically the whole middle section of the Continental U.S., those are part of the U.S. today because the U.S. bought the rights to that land from some other colonial power.
PRESS: It's a kind of a weird chapter of international affairs or relations, but sometimes sovereignty purchases are seen as a relatively peaceful alternative to war or the continuation of war.
MA: But you're saying, like, given the context, it's really almost like "The Godfather" where it's like an offer they can't refuse.
PRESS: Yeah, it certainly can be. On the other hand, it isn't always. We know of cases that were, by comparison, free of coercion.
WONG: In the late 1860s, Russia was contemplating selling off the territory of Alaska. The U.S. secretary of state at the time, William Seward, was like, yeah, we should buy it. And believe it or not, this is when Greenland first appears on the U.S. shopping wish list.
PRESS: So Seward saying, OK, purchase Alaska from Russia. Also look at Denmark looking ahead, doesn't really have the means to maintain its presence in far-flung places.
MA: The idea of buying Greenland did come up a few more times under later presidents, under Woodrow Wilson and FDR and Harry Truman.
WONG: So by now you are probably getting the picture. The idea of sovereignty purchases did not start with Trump. These are deals with problematic aspects that gave the U.S. some big economic advantages and are a big reason why the U.S. looks the way it does today. But is it possible for the U.S. to just buy a huge swath of territory like Greenland today?
MA: Yeah, probably not. And there are multiple reasons for that. For one thing, in the past, these deals happened without any real input from the people living in the places that got bought. And Steven says in today's international order, the right of self-determination, consent of the govern, these things carry a lot more weight than they used to.
WONG: Denmark, for its part, has said that the territory is not for sale, but it is open to doing business with the U.S.
MA: Adrian Ma.
WONG: Wailin Wong, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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