Exclusive — Sen. Tom Cotton: It Is ‘Clearly in America’s Interest that We Obtain Sovereignty over Greenland’

It is “clearly in America’s interest that we obtain sovereignty over Greenland,” Sen Tom Cotton (R-AR) said during an interview on Breitbart News Daily.

“President Trump and I talked about this in private some in his first term,” Cotton said of acquiring Greenland. “And then it got out that, that he was considering this, talking about it with — within his administration, with senators, and he was mocked and laughed at the way he was in 2015, as you point out.”

“And he encouraged me to write a defense of it. And of all places that wanted to publish that defense, it was in the New York Times. So your listeners can can go back to the New York Times op-ed page in the summer of 2019 and see my op-ed that lays out the very detailed case for why America should obviously buy Greenland,” he said of his defense of the idea, which can be read here.

Cotton noted that Trump is not the first American President to express interest Greenland.

“Harry Truman tried to buy Greenland, and for the same reasons; we’re so grateful now that Abraham Lincoln and William Seward acquired Alaska from Russia, which at the time was called Seward’s Folly. And no one thinks it’s folly anymore, when you consider all of the oil and gas up there, the critical strategic terrain it provides for early warning systems for Russian or Chinese missiles — just like Greenland would do,” Cotton said.

“The fact that if Russia had a foothold in North America, it would expose us to much greater danger, just like China’s trying to obtain a foothold in Greenland,” he pointed out.

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“For all these reasons, it is clearly in America’s interest that we obtain sovereignty over Greenland. I know the left gets the vapors over such things, thinks it’s, you know, a relic of the colonial era. I would point out that the patron saint of modern progressivism, Woodrow Wilson, also bought territory from Denmark. We now call it the Virgin Islands,” he said, adding, “So there’s a long precedent for that.”

Cotton also added that it “would be better for the people of Greenland.”

“It is a major strain on the budget and resources of a relatively small country like Denmark to support them, which is why they don’t have the services that they otherwise would. While they don’t have the services that Alaskans do, it would be better for them to have the United States and our resources and our $28 trillion economy to back them up,” he added.

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