Plausibility check: U.S. buying Greenland from Denmark

Pre-WWII? I'd say no.

1. Denmark has no incentive to sell the great white north.

2. The U.S. has no wish to buy even more ice.

3. Great Britain probably would not want to have Canada flanked from both sides.
 
Greenland was the world's primary source of cryolite up to the 1930s (when synthetic cryolite became economically competitive). The U.S. imported $218,000/year worth of cryolite in 1917, the same year Denmark agreed to sell the Virgin Islands for $25 million; maybe they'd agree to throw in Greenland for another 2 or 3 million?
 
Denmark had tried to sell the West Indies to the US since 1867, in which year the US Senate declined to retify the treaty and before that thought of exchanging them with Prussia for South Slesvig post 1864.
Recognition of Danish sovereignty over Greenland was part of the 1917 deal.
In the 1890'ties Denmark tried to convince the US to buy the islands and in 1901-2 the parties were about to make a deal but the Danish Landsting backed out.
WWI certainly served to facilitate the deal - to the benefit of Denmark, or so it seemed. Would be nice to have a piece of West Indies real estate to visit during winter. :D
 
I don't think it's unrealistic that Denmark would want to sell it, but why would the US want to buy it? It's just ice, and not particularly strategically valuable ice (well not till the cold war anyway, but that's a long way off)
 
I'd look up Danish constitutional history, see when Greenland was considered what part of Denmark, how its legislatures work, is it a separate 'crown' etc

Best Regards
Grey Wolf
 

Valdemar II

Banned
I'd look up Danish constitutional history, see when Greenland was considered what part of Denmark, how its legislatures work, is it a separate 'crown' etc

Best Regards
Grey Wolf

It was a colony until 1953 and from there to 1979 a integrated danish region. Today it's a autonom region.
I could see USA "buy" it in the periode 1945-1953, but after 1953 I can't see it happening.
 
Okay, I can get that the Danes wanted to get rid of the ice cube factory, and much like the Santo Dominicans and Yucatan, for whatever reason, wanted to sell their land to the U.S.

But if the U.S. doesn't want it, why don't they get the British or whomever to buy it?
 
William Seward, Secretary of State under Presidents Lincoln and Johnson, and the man behind the US purchase of Alaska, wanted to purchase Greenland from Denmark at around the same time that the US purchased Alaska, but the deal didn't go through.

Seward was a big advocate of expanding US territory as much as possible - he had somewhat unrealistic plans for acquiring Cuba and other Caribbean islands, and also believed for some reason that British Columbia could be enticed into joining the United States instead of the Dominion of Canada, thus giving the USA control of the entire Pacific coastline from the Arctic to Mexico.
 
Dammit, between this and the relatively uncommon knowledge of Santo Domingo's desire to join the U.S., we should create a masterlist of actual OTL historical attempts of U.S. expansion.
 
Dammit, between this and the relatively uncommon knowledge of Santo Domingo's desire to join the U.S., we should create a masterlist of actual OTL historical attempts of U.S. expansion.

Honestly, we'd control I believe nearly all (if not the entirity) of geographical North America when I tried that years ago and everything went ridiculously right (Canada taken in 1812, All-of-Mexico movement succeeds, interventions in the Carribean/Central America and don't move out...)
 
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