"We want Greenland, we need it for national security," said Donald Trump , US President, with his administration having first threatened to use military force to obtain the territory belonging to Denmark and then corrected its aim by talking about the possibility of purchasing it.

But how much would it cost to buy the enormous 2.1 square kilometer island, 56,000 inhabitants, rich in oil, natural gas, diamonds, gold, uranium and lead?

According to a reconstruction carried out by Corriere della Sera, Greenland is “worth” almost 2.8 trillion dollars and it is not the first time that Trump has mooted its purchase.

“It would essentially be a huge real estate deal,” the Tycoon said in 2019. And it wouldn’t even be the first time the United States has acquired territory: for example, in 1868 the US purchased Alaska from Russia, and Secretary of State William Seward considered acquiring Greenland, along with Iceland, for $5.5 million, but a formal proposal never came to fruition.

In 1946, President Harry Truman offered $100 million in gold to convince Denmark to sell . He failed. The sum would be equivalent to about $1.6 billion today. However, according to the think tank American Action Forum (AAF), it would be more accurate to update it based on the growth of the American gross domestic product between 1946 and 2025, meaning Trump would have to put up about $12.9 billion to match Truman's offer.

To value the Arctic island, it is also necessary to quantify the value of its deposits. The island is estimated to contain mineral resources worth $4.4 trillion: approximately $1.7 trillion in oil and gas—the extraction of which has been prohibited since 2021 for environmental reasons—and $2.7 trillion in metals, including the highly valuable rare earths.

The American Action Forum has estimated the value of the island's currently exploitable deposits at around $186 billion. Based on the values of Iceland—a country similar to Greenland in terms of geostrategic positioning—the AAF itself estimates a price per square kilometer of $1.38 million, which, applied to the entire Greenlandic territory, would bring the total price to $2.76 trillion, approximately 9% of the US GDP and 7% of its public debt.

(Unioneonline/lf)

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