The Unseemly Greenland Gambit

The Unseemly Greenland Gambit 

By Lawrence W. Reed

In the 236 years between 1788 and 2024, Americans gave their electoral blessing to only one man for a second, non-consecutive term as their President. That was Grover Cleveland. Then, last year, Donald Trump equaled Cleveland’s achievement.

Naturally, comparisons between the two men will be made. Cleveland restrained government spending; Trump is attempting the same. Cleveland pushed for lower tariffs; Trump is raising them.

In terms of foreign policy, Cleveland practiced non-interventionism. Trump is looking more and more like the expansionary imperialists that Cleveland’s successors were (William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt).

The present dust-up over Greenland painfully illustrates the stark foreign policy difference between Trump and Cleveland. While I am cheering on the efforts of the Trump administration to cut federal spending, regulation, and bureaucracy, I wince in pain every time I hear the President talk about Greenland. When he said earlier this year, “One way or the other, we’re going to get it,” I was horrified.

Danish claims to Greenland date back to 1380, more than six centuries. When Denmark and Norway separated in 1814, Greenland was internationally recognized as Danish. In 1953, the island was formally and constitutionally incorporated into the Danish state. Denmark is a friend of the U.S. and a NATO ally. Now out of the blue, Trump says the U.S. must have Greenland and won’t rule out the use of force to take it.

How un-American! We’ve rarely treated our avowed enemies in such a callous fashion. The very thought of American troops landing in Nuuk to seize the Greenlandic capital seems bizarre and other-worldly to me, and just the hint of it is turning friends into foes.

And what a stunning contrast to how Cleveland handled Hawaii at the start of his second term in 1893!

In the last weeks of Benjamin Harrison’s presidency, before Cleveland assumed office a second time, American business interests in the Hawaiian Islands staged a coup. With the support of the American minister to Hawaii, they overthrew Queen Liliuokalani and pressed Harrison to put forth a treaty of annexation. The U.S. Senate had not yet acted on it when Cleveland re-entered the White House in March 1893, but most people expected he would support it.

Cleveland would have none of it. He condemned the coup as illegal and disgraceful. He endorsed the restoration of the Queen, supported the sovereignty and independence of Hawaii, and reaffirmed American non-interventionism. He did it with words that President Trump would do well to emulate in the Greenland affair:

I regarded and still regard the proposed annexation of Hawaii as not only opposed to our national policy but as a perversion of our national mission. The mission of our nation is to build up and make a great country out of what we have, instead of annexing islands.

To be chairman of a committee to investigate the shenanigans in Hawaii, Cleveland appointed a former Georgia congressman, James H. Blount. The subsequent report of the Blount committee denounced the coup and its mostly American conspirators. It urged the restoration of Hawaiian sovereignty and home rule. Hawaii would not be annexed until the McKinley administration in 1898.

If you visit Grover Cleveland’s grave in Princeton, New Jersey, today, you will usually find his headstone adorned with flowered leis and other trinkets left there by Hawaiian visitors. All these many decades later, Hawaiians appreciate Cleveland’s principled, noninterventionist sympathies.

Americans ought to let Trump know that we do not want Greenland “one way or the other.” Such unseemly language should always be beneath us.

Read President Cleveland’s statement on Hawaii here: https://www.hawaii-nation.org/cleveland.html

(Lawrence W. Reed is president emeritus of the Foundation for Economic Education in Atlanta, Georgia.)