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“If you had advised me 10 years in the past that I’d be interviewing about Greenland, I might not have put that prime up on my listing of potential matters the media can be keen on,” says historian John C. Mitcham of Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. “But additionally it is actually fascinating, considerably troubling too, that we’re listening to the echoes of the previous with Victorian language about sovereignty and safety.”
He provides: “You and I are speaking about this in context of Greenland, Canada, and Trump, however the identical might be utilized to a number of the rhetoric surrounding Russian annexation in Ukraine, of Chinese maritime ambitions within the Pacific. It actually is sort of… What’s the phrase? New wine in outdated bottles.”
Critics might deride the president-elect for his expansionist ambition to annex Greenland, however geopolitical concerns and army logic have prompted U.S. diplomats earlier than to supply to purchase the island.
The first time was in 1867 when the then highly effective secretary of state William H. Seward, recent off shopping for Alaska from Russia, floated the concept. It was “worthy of significant consideration,” he mentioned.
An ardent expansionist, Seward, who additionally coveted Canada, commissioned a positive examine, a lot as Trump would possibly do to lure traders to again one more on line casino lodge. “The remaining doc — which Seward had printed and distributed to lawmakers— was hardly goal in its findings,” wrote historian Jeff Ludwig, director of training on the Seward House Museum in Auburn, in a 2019 article.
Certainly, ‘A Report on the Resources of Iceland and Greenland’ didn’t under-sell the potential of Greenland, and its creator, Benjamin Peirce, a surveyor, waxed enthusiastically concerning the island’s ample wildlife, sport and fisheries, its nice mineral wealth, together with coal, and the truth that it was “largely greater than half the scale of all Europe.”
