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Virgin daughter? Melodramatic. I'm afraid you have made a sacred taboo out of something that is not sacred at all. Peaceful land deals are historically normal, the United States was built on them, Europe was built on them. (Do you have this same attitude when Spain asks the UK for Gibraltar? You are never going to convince a Manhattan real estate developer that asking, simply asking for a land deal is inherently offensive.)
Not even the Danish politicians involved are this precious about it.
Sometimes I get the sense talking to Europeans that they have a fixation with keeping borders static. I understand that Europe has seen a lot of war and that the World Wars were especially devastating and that Europeans today regard the current order as a step forward into a different future. This stability is somewhat romanticized (borders have changed in Europe post-1945, quite a lot), but I can at least respect the ideal itself.
(The ideal tends to glaze over extreme post-WWII "population migration"-genocides of minorities in postwar national borders. It also effectively sweeps the Soviet Union under the rug if you want to talk about the appropriate relationships between larger states and smaller states. So the ideal is extremely recent, only applies to Europe, only to a particular part of Europe, and masks the literal violence that was predicate to establishing it.)
So I don't want to put words in your mouth -- but when I hear that even asking to negotiate is inherently offensive, I have to speculate because what is America even supposed to do with that? What am I arguing here supposed to do with that? Europe denied America the use of many of its bases in the war with Iran, so it's perfectly rational for America to want to prevent that from happening in Greenland, and it's perfectly rational for America to improve its Arctic and Home Defenses through Greenland. So, what, asking to buy some land is itself offensive? Because this is the most peaceful disruption possible to the ideal of stable borders, and if Europe can't negotiate these things rationally it will not like when America also decides to get irrational.
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