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  e
will deploy [missile] defenses as soon as possible," said state-department
official Lucas Fischer in late April.
"Therefore,
we believe that the ABM treaty will have to be replaced, eliminated,
or changed in a fundamental way."
Replaced! Eliminated! These words, spoken just a few days before
President Bush's speech on missile defense, provided the first concrete
clue of a major U.S. policy shift on an issue of supreme importance
to conservatives.
So why in the heck were they delivered in Denmark?
The answer is simple: Denmark plays a unique role in determining
how the United States may deploy a missile-defense system, because
it administers the frozen island of Greenland, where the Pentagon
will very much want to place an early-warning radar that doesn't
comply with current ABM-treaty specifications. If the Danes refuse
to go along with this, the United States will have to search out
less desirable locations.
It's a shame a piddling little country like Denmark might hold so
much sway over such an important national-security decision for
the United States. The Bush administration appears to be approaching
the matter with an appropriate amount of diplomatic delicacy. But
wouldn't it be nice if we didn't have to kowtow to the Danes at
all?
There may be an alternative: Let's buy Greenland! It wouldn't be
the first time the United States has purchased a big chunk of territory,
of course. We bought Alaska from Russia in 1867, for the basement-bargain
price of $7.2 million. Critics slammed the sale as "Seward's Folly,"
after Secretary of State William Seward, who negotiated the deal.
It's a little-known fact that Seward also was interested in Greenland.
In 1946 — long after Seward's time — the United States
seems to have made a formal offer of $100 million for Greenland,
according to declassified documents discovered about ten years ago
in the National Archives. The purpose of the acquisition, wrote
a state-department official, was to provide the United States with
"valuable bases from which to launch an air counteroffensive over
the Arctic area in the event of attack." Secretary of State James
Byrnes suggested the idea to the Danish foreign minister, but the
record does not reveal whether the Danes formally turned down the
offer or just ignored it.
Let's let them know the deal's still on the table, and that we think
it's awfully rude of them not to have responded by now.
Buying Greenland will have plenty of critics, but so did the Alaska
sale — and who in their right mind would want to rethink that
transaction?
Greenland has a population of about 60,000 people, who have the
island's 840,000 square miles all to themselves. They acquired home
rule in 1979, so these folks probably would have to sign off on
the sale in some capacity, too. Maybe we could promise them school
choice.
Greenland's natural resources are — let us put it mildly —
limited. The island got its name from Viking explorer Eric the Red
in the 10th century; he wanted to encourage people to move there
from Iceland. Wouldn't you rather live in Greenland than
in Iceland? There is said to be a huge deposit of gold beneath
the ice, but so far nobody has figured out how to extract it economically.
Like so much real estate, Greenland's value is its location: A lot
of missile shots coming toward the United States from Russia would
fly right over it, or at least near it. We will want to chart their
precise trajectories so our missile defenses can blow them to pieces.
And if this whole global-warming thing turns out to be worse than
expected, at least we'll all have a place to live.
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