U.S. Policy in Greenland: An Ethical and Legal Overview
By: Hayes Chitty
Since his first presidency, Donald Trump has floated the idea of the United States buying Greenland. At that point, the notion that Greenland was a commodity that could be bought or sold was largely dismissed by the general public. However, roughly a year into his second term, the idea has been recirculated and discussed by both the Trump administration and the citizenry. This article aims to outline the ethical and legal arguments taken by the Trump administration in justifying the tentative purchase of Greenland. In doing so, I aim to consider The Red, White, and Blueland Act of 2025 proposed by congress and reveal its ethical motivators, as well as the political conditions by which such an act was made possible.
The bill discussed in this article was proposed by congress in February of 2025. This bill, called The Red, White, and Blueland Act of 2025 (H.R. 1161), sought to give President Trump the authority to purchase Greenland and change the name to Red, White, and Blueland. While the notion of renaming Greenland as such has been exclaimed by many critics to be somewhat comical, the ethical arguments for purchasing Greenland are subject to a more serious analysis.
The first point worth mentioning is that Greenland itself is not a sovereign state. Greenland is an autonomous territory within the state of Denmark, and as of 2009, retains sovereignty over only domestic matters (such as education, policing, etc.), while Denmark rules over the territory regarding international matters, as well as issues of security. Thus, while Greenland’s own citizenry retain control of their domestic sovereignty, their fate regarding security and international matters is reliant upon an outside sovereign entity. Such a system of governance makes Greenland vulnerable to Trump’s campaign, as arguments can be made that, since Denmark is sovereign over Greenland’s foreign affairs, they could theoretically transfer this authority to a different governing entity. Without this fact, the proposition of purchasing Greenland would be nonsensical, as there would be no entity from which Greenland could be bought, and no state with the authority to sell it. From this it becomes evident that the negotiations for purchasing Greenland are not subject to the wills of the citizens within Greenland whatsoever, but are instead entirely dependent on what Denmark wishes to do with the territory. To wrap up this point, the fact that Greenland is an autonomous territory of a sovereign state does not itself give the U.S. ethical permission to take it, but it does open the door for arguments that justify a legal transfer of sovereignty from Denmark to the United States.
From this idea, the Trump administration has launched a two pronged argument justifying the tentative purchase of Greenland. In this, Trump has appealed repeatedly to the notion that the United States needs Greenland for purposes of national security. The ethical argument behind this is as follows: 1) the U.S. has an obligation to ensure the security of its citizens, 2) owning Greenland would ensure the security of American citizens, and 3) therefore, the U.S. should own Greenland. As to not get into the soundness of these premises, I will focus on how this argument contains hidden assumptions that make it easily defeasible.
This argument becomes subject to criticism as it assumes that the U.S. obligation to ensure security overrides Denmark’s sovereignty over the state. Perhaps it would be beneficial for the United States’ security to own Scotland as well, but this fact alone would not give the U.S. justification in actually completing this transaction. In other words, just because Greenland may offer advantages in national security, this alone does not imply that there is a justification for transferring the territory’s rights to the United States.
I conclude this article by discussing the second facet of the Trump administration’s justification for purchasing Greenland. This argument can be summarized as an argument that stems from historical precedent. In this, Trump and other officials claim that since the U.S. has bought territories before (such as with the purchase of Alaska, the Louisiana Purchase, etc.) that it is justified in doing it again. This argument closely resembles that of the United States judicial system, that is, once something is ruled legal or illegal by the supreme court, it sets a precedent for future instances.
While this argument, when applied to Greenland, may seem valid, there is no coherent ethics behind the core of the position. The simple fact that the U.S. has purchased a territory before has no bearing on the genuine ethical considerations behind buying Greenland today, as there is no logical connection between these events that impact the moral considerations relevant here. Thus, while such an argument may deem the purchase of Greenland legally permissible, this legality exists in a world separate to ethics, and cannot be construed as a moral argument whatsoever.
