By Steve Brawner , © 2019 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Sen. Tom Cotton is serious about the United States buying Greenland, so let’s take the idea seriously and examine it from both sides.

President Trump’s interest in purchasing Greenland from Denmark was first reported Aug. 15 by the Wall Street Journal. When Denmark’s prime minister rejected what she called an “absurd” offer, Trump cancelled a planned visit to that country.

He shouldn’t have cancelled the trip.

Offering to buy Greenland? Well, he is big into real estate, and Greenland covers 836,000 square miles. It’s the world’s biggest island, although 80% of it is covered by ice. In fact, the ice sheet is three times the size of Texas. About 58,000 people live there, mostly along the western coast. The island has its own parliament and prime minister but is part of the Danish Kingdom. The United States has an air base there.

During an interview with Roby Brock in Little Rock August 21, Cotton said he had suggested Trump make an offer for Greenland and personally had proposed the idea to the Danish ambassador.

This is the kind of national security, geopolitical issue that most interests Cotton. And on Monday, he published an opinion column in the New York Times laying out the case for acquiring Greenland. The island is rich in resources – it has oil, natural gas and other minerals – and is located strategically along the Arctic Circle. China has tried to build military bases there until it was blocked by Denmark.

Meanwhile, Cotton argued, the United States has a history of expanding by buying land – including the Louisiana Purchase, which brought what’s now Arkansas into the country. As Cotton pointed out, the United States and Denmark have done a land deal before. In 1917, President Woodrow Wilson bought what is now the U.S. Virgin Islands for $25 million. And this is not the first time high government officials have cast an eye toward Greenland. Secretary of State William Seward, who negotiated the $7.2 million purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867, looked into acquiring Greenland and Iceland. President Harry Truman’s administration offered Denmark $100 million for Greenland in 1946.

This time the issue arose in the middle of campaign season. Cotton’s Democratic opponent, Josh Mahony, responded Sunday with a fundraising email where he was pictured standing next to the highway sign welcoming visitors to Greenland, Ark. That’s the “only Greenland we need to be concerned with,” the email said. Then on Tuesday, Cotton’s campaign sent his own fundraising email saying the media and liberal Twitter users were mocking the idea “because they hate me and President Trump.”

Back to the issue at hand. Geographical boundaries change often. In recent decades, the Soviet Union split apart, East and West Germany reunited, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia disintegrated, South Sudan seceded from Sudan, and Hong Kong became part of China. Alaska and Hawaii didn’t even become states until 1959.

So the map will change, one way or another. It’s not a bad idea to be peacefully proactive about it, to the mutual benefit of those concerned.

On the other hand, the idea of just “buying” Greenland seems imperialistic in this day and age, when great powers don’t just exchange land that’s home to indigenous people who don’t want to be sold, traded and occupied. If somehow the United States did acquire Greenland, what would happen next? Would we see a responsible use of Greenland’s resources, or a rush of corporate extraction and exploitation?

And what would be Greenland’s status? Its population is too small to make it a state, so presumably it would become the United States’ sixth inhabited territory, along with Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, American Samoa and the Northern Mariana Islands. Those four million inhabitants are American citizens but can’t vote in federal elections and don’t pay federal income taxes, though they pay other taxes such as payroll taxes. Puerto Ricans’ separateness was on display in the federal government’s inadequate response to Hurricane Maria. They’re Americans, but not equally, unless they move to the mainland. Which many did.

For now, Greenland remains part of the Danish Kingdom. For how long, who knows? One thing is certain: the map will keep changing, just like it always has.