Some men see things as they are, and ask why. I dream of things that never were, and ask why not.

This morning, I'm pairing the famous RFK quote with the coat of arms of Greenland.

ADDED: Picture the map of the world with Greenland as the 51st state:



What a legacy for the real-estate mogul!

AND: If what they're saying about global warming is true, Greenland is the place to which the entire population of the United States could relocate. If we bought Alaska from Russia, why can't we buy Greenland from Denmark? We're already using Greenland for military purposes — there's an air force base — and our military protects Europe....

ALSO: The Mercator projection is like the wide-angle lens in real-estate photos on Zillow.

MORE: From "Trump Eyes U.S. Buying Greenland" in The Wall Street Journal:

The idea of the U.S. purchasing Greenland has captured the former real-estate developer's imagination, according to people familiar with the discussion, who said Mr. Trump has, with varying degrees of seriousness, repeatedly expressed interest in buying the ice-covered autonomous Danish territory....

Some of his advisers have supported the concept, saying it would be a good economic play, two of the people said, while others dismissed it as a fleeting fascination. It is also unclear how the U.S. would go about acquiring Greenland even if the effort were serious.

It's a great topic for conversation. There's even potential for racial politics, I think. Trump seems to love the Nordic places (in contrast to "shithole countries")?

With a population of about 56,000, Greenland is a self-ruling part of the Kingdom of Denmark, and while its government decides on most domestic matters, foreign and security policy is handled by Copenhagen....

U.S. officials view Greenland as important to American national-security interests. A treaty between Denmark and the U.S. gives the U.S. military virtually unlimited rights in Greenland at America's Thule Air Base. Located 750 miles north of the Arctic Circle, it includes a radar station that is part of a U.S. ballistic missile warning system.

The U.S. has sought to derail Chinese efforts to gain an economic foothold in Greenland. The Pentagon worked successfully in 2018 to block China from financing three airports on the island.

People outside the White House have described purchasing Greenland as an Alaska-type acquisition for Mr. Trump's legacy, advisers said...

Greenland relies on $591 million of subsidies from Denmark annually, which make up about 60% of its annual budget, according to U.S. and Danish government statistics. Greenland is culturally and politically linked to Europe. Following World War II, the U.S. under President Harry Truman developed a geopolitical interest in Greenland and in 1946 offered to buy it from Denmark for $100 million. Denmark refused to sell.

Truman tried to buy it! Trump endeavors to close the deal that was Truman's! If Greenland is draining $591 million a year from Denmark, they should pay us for taking it off their hands and taking care of it well and preventing China from acquiring dominance. But if China is so ambitious in Greenland, Denmark should wait for a good bidding war between the world's 2 superpowers. And every year gets us closer to the global warming disaster that will make Greenland the most desirable place on earth. In that light, Denmark should hold on as the landlord, charging exorbitant rents and until things become so catastrophic that Greenland is snatched away from them by military force.

At a dinner with associates last spring, Mr. Trump said someone had told him Denmark was having financial trouble over its assistance to Greenland, and suggested that he should consider buying the island, according to one of the people. "What do you guys think about that?" he asked the room, the person said.

The person described the question less as a serious inquiry than as a joke meant to indicate "I'm so powerful I could buy a country," noting that since Mr. Trump hadn't floated the idea at a campaign rally yet, he probably wasn't seriously considering it.

The person believed the president was interested in the idea because of the island's natural resources and because it would give him a legacy akin to President Dwight Eisenhower's admission of Alaska into the U.S. as a state....

PLUS: Kudos to the stable genius if he floated this idea intending to get his antagonists to declare it stupid and knowing that on further examination it would actually make enough sense to intrigue us to talk about this rather that whatever the hell we were talking about before this came up. I see WaPo is getting ahead of the curve with "Trump reportedly wants to buy Greenland. So did the Truman administration" (by Antonia Noori Farzan):

[The idea of the U.S. buying Greenland] was first floated in the 1860s, when a report commissioned by the State Department under President Andrew Johnson concluded that the icebound island’s abundance of fish and mineral resources could make it a valuable investment.

And in 1946, President Harry Truman’s administration went even further, offering to purchase Greenland from Denmark in exchange for $100 million in gold.

“People have forgotten about how important places like Greenland were in the Cold War,” said Ronald E. Doel, an associate professor of history at Florida State University and a co-editor of “Exploring Greenland: Cold War Science and Technology on Ice.”...

In the late 1940s, the Soviet Union had just become the United States’ main adversary. The shortest distance between the two rival powers was over the North Pole, and the Arctic region started to look like a potential battleground. Greenland sat practically dead center between the population centers of the United States and several major cities in the U.S.S.R. To Pentagon strategists, that made Greenland a valuable piece of real estate. If the Soviets launched an attack, American bombers stationed on the island would already be halfway to Moscow....

[R]esearchers weren’t quite sure how the northern lights, known as the aurora borealis, would affect navigational equipment and radio dispatches, or if the ice cap would muffle the seismic signals if the Soviets conducted nuclear tests. By 1946, “practically every member” of the planning and strategy committee of the Joint Chiefs of Staff agreed that the United States should try to buy Greenland, John Hickerson, a State Department official, wrote in a memo. The consensus among the group was that the territory was “completely worthless to Denmark,” he reported, and “indispensable to the safety of the United States.”...

And though Denmark’s government hasn’t suggested that it would be interested in putting Greenland up for sale, the notion of a U.S. takeover has reared its head occasionally since then. In the 1970s, Vice President Nelson Rockefeller reportedly suggested buying Greenland for its mineral resources....