Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house

Greenland is Danish. That is it.

It is not about defence nor about the minerals as cynics assure us – it is about the personal legacy of an ambitious man in a hurry. In his second inaugural address, The Donald invoked William McKinley: “President McKinley made our country very rich through tariffs and through talent”. Actually, he impoverished the county with those tariffs, which was quite foreseeable had he read The Wealth of Nations, the quarter-millennium of which we celebrate this year.

The other thing about McKinley is that he created an American empire – he seized Hawaii and Samoa, and took the Philippines, Guam and Puerto Rico from Spain. Trump will see Greenland as McKinley saw those tempting islands; emulating him and making America greater on the map.

It’s not yours, Donald. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour’s.

It was not empire which made America great – McKinley harmed America, and caused his party to be thrown out at the next election. America became great for reasons set out by Adam Smith – freedom, commerce and unlimited land. It had nothing to do with sticking its flag across the Pacific and the West Indies. (The only modern empire which created prosperity wherever it went was the British Empire, through taking responsibility rather than power and imposing freedom). McKinley did not make America great – he put the brake on its greatness.

The hunt for a visible legacy is too tempting for politicians. French Presidents leave their names on buildings encrusting the outside of Paris, while American ones have wider ambitions and larger armies to realise them.

Trump may also see the United States as having slowed down in a historic mission. From 13 states when they began, there was over two hundred years a process of adding more, whether in new territory, or turning territories into states. To date every president but one has come to office when there were more states than when he was born (the exception being Barack Obama; born in 1961, two years after his birthplace became the last state added). The adding of states has stopped, and with no more territories to add, except maybe Puerto Rico, it leaves a covetous president little room to stretch his arms. Mr Trump has wide arms, and big, grasping hands. He makes his places big, flashy and vulgar – Americans love that sort of thing. He has three years left in office, which is little time to establish a big, flashy, vulgar legacy. Anywhere in his sight may tremble.

This is not now an empty prairie waiting to be be tamed, not a forest of savages awaiting government, and it is not what faced McKinley – shards of a dying Spanish Empire waiting to fall as provinces rebel: Greenland is part of one of the most civilised nations on Earth, Denmark, and there is nothing rotten in that state. They are freer and more commercial than much of the United States.

A noticeable thing since the United States withdrew from most of the Pacific: in the whole of its territory, in the fifty states, there is not a single territory which has a serious secessionist movement. Puerto Rico has not become a state partly because it does have an independence movement. A country whose identity is utterly tied to democracy cannot easily hold a territory in thrall against its will. Greenland almost universally opposes the Americans leaving a threat of a takeover incoherent, without the doublethink of politicians.

For annexation to work, the island would have to be heavily settled by Americans to leave the natives in a small minority, like Hawaii.

I have come to realise meeting Americans that they cannot understand that not everyone wants to be them. My fusty clinging to culture, politeness, good taste and the value of my heritage is inexplicable. Perhaps they assume that, like American Samoa, they just have to introduce burgers and a baseball league and all Greenlanders will within a generation become as American as New Yorkers. Depressingly, they might be right.

There is a world which is not American and has no wish to be, which actually loves what we inherit and that which we can develop within our own context. Hands off what is not yours: Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house.