Balkinization  

Thursday, January 08, 2026

Greenland is the new Santa Domingo

Gerard N. Magliocca

Anyone who's read Ron Chernow's terrific biography of Ulysses S. Grant will remember Grant's bizarre obsession with annexing Santa Domingo (now the Dominican Republic). The President spent years on this project to no avail. He was convinced that Santa Domingo would be a great military and economic asset and couldn't understand why others didn't see it that way. So there's nothing new about a President musing about acquiring some remote island. 

In Grant's day, though. nobody thought that the President could do this on his own. Grant negotiated a treaty with Santa Domingo (by then an independent nation) to join the United States. But he could not get the treaty ratified by the Senate, largely due to Charles Sumner's opposition. That was that.

The same should be true for any acquisition of Greenland, via a treaty with Denmark. This mode would mean, of course, that two-thirds of the Senate would have to concur to make Greenland part of the United States. All prior territorial acquisitions from a foreign nation were formalized by a Senate ratified treaty. In other words, this cannot be done unilaterally or through an executive agreement ratified by a majority in each house of Congress.


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