Back in 1945, a Republican senator from Maine breathed new life into an old idea: that the United States should buy frigid and desolate Greenland from Denmark.

“Greenland is a military ‘must’ for America,” Sen. Owen Brewster wrote in Collier’s magazine.
He said the island “lies squarely athwart the shortest route from our Middle West to Europe and Moscow” and called it “one of the great aerial highways of the future.”

Brewster’s idea caught the attention of President Harry Truman, who saw enough merit in it to offer Denmark $100 million in gold for the territory. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen called the proposal absurd and turned it down.

I’m not sure why President Donald Trump, fresh off his work in Venezuela, seems so determined to make Greenland part of the United States.

“We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security,” he said this week, without troubling to explain further. God knows how we’ve stayed safe all these years with Greenland firmly in the hands of, well, almost nobody.

Trump clearly doesn’t feel bound to listen to allies or follow international law. When he threatens a takeover of Greenland, he probably means it. He’s shown, in Venezuela and beyond, that he’s capable of almost any foolish thing.

It’s not like he’s the first American leader to focus on the thinly populated, ice-covered island. At least as far back as 1867, U.S. officials closely weighed its acquisition.

Secretary of State William Seward, who championed the purchase of Alaska, weighed a similar deal for Greenland but never followed through, perhaps figuring one supposed folly was enough. Yet the proposal got kicked around repeatedly in the decades that followed.

Dismissing the jingoist appeal of buying Greenland in 1897, the Lewiston Daily Sun warned that acquiring “large areas of practically worthless territory is a knife that would cut both ways.” The Bangor Daily News in 1903 termed the idea “alluring,” though added that it considered the commercial value of the Danish territory insignificant.

But, the Bangor paper cautioned, “the great silent land” might contain treasures not yet known. In the meantime, the editorial noted that Greenland’s fisheries were productive and it held “the only large deposits of cryolite,” a mineral used in the production of aluminum.

One advantage of acquiring Greenland, it added, is that nothing would need to be spent to fortify the island — because nobody would want it. “Probably the worst thing that could happen to an enemy in time of war would be an unrestricted right to enter the country,” it sniffed.

Not long after that, arctic explorer Robert Peary of Maine claimed the northern wastelands of Greenland for the United States, spurring more talk and even some official chitchat about the validity and merit of the assertion. That came to an end in 1917, when the U.S. bought the Danish Antilles — now the U.S. Virgin Islands — from Denmark for $25 million. As part of the deal, the U.S. formally said it would “not object to the Danish government extending their political and economic interests to the whole of Greenland.”

That deal, by President Woodrow Wilson, didn’t preclude anyone in the future from trying to convince Denmark to hand over the world’s largest island. But these days, with Greenland having a measure of self-rule, the decision on its fate rests with the island’s population as well as Danish leaders in Copenhagen.

And there are more residents of Androscoggin County than in the whole of Greenland — so we’re not talking about huge numbers of people.

Brewster, Truman and Trump may have a point about acquiring Greenland. If the president wants to try to cut a deal to acquire Greenland, fine. Maybe Denmark, a loyal ally for generations, has a price. Perhaps the people on the island can be convinced to sign on as Americans. It’s possible an agreement could be reached that Congress would approve.

And yet, to me, the editorial of the Kennebec Journal in 1897 still ring true: “For Uncle Sam to buy Greenland would be a cold deal.”