Sometimes in geopolitics there are zero-sum games, with winners and losers. Seizing Greenland to prevent other rivals from seizing it might be such a game.

Noah Rothman writes to disparage a political tendency that sees both territorial expansion as a good and protection of domestic industries as a good. He writes:

There is something to be said about a particular disposition that regards territorial expansionism as a necessary tool of statecraft. It is the sort of outlook that was common to policymakers in the pre-War world — an environment typified by inviolable spheres of influence in which international free trade agreements were far rarer. If you are inclined to see resource acquisition as a zero-sum competition for finite commodities — indeed, if you view trade as a form of war by other means, as Moscow did in the years preceding its adventurism in Ukraine — you’re more likely to see expansionist wars of conquest as vital national projects.

The research on the subject is hardly ambiguous. Nations “with high levels of trade with their allies are less likely to be involved in wars with any other countries (including allies and non-allies), and . . . an increase in trade between two countries correlates with a lower chance that they will go to war with each other,” the abstract of a 2015 study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences read.

As for the study: Well, duh. Countries that go to war with each other have usually already gone through a process of de-linking their economies. It’s why people fear that economic decoupling from China will become a self-fulfilling war prophecy. The times of promiscuous trade and peace are counting the high points of British imperial supremacy and U.S. post–Cold War hegemony. Also, it’s easy to design historical studies that promote incumbent political and commercial interests. What do you expect scholars to be? Brave contrarians?

For a response, I would just say that sometimes in geopolitics there are zero-sum games, with winners and losers. We won, Mexico lost: we get California and a great deal of other valuable territory. That’s it.

In the case of Greenland there is zero prospect of its current 60,000 inhabitants developing and exploiting the resources of that landmass and trading them to us in a way that gives us all the benefits we could gain by controlling the territory ourselves and developing it with our resources. That’s not a sufficient case for invading the country and seizing the territory — other costs have to be considered, including the moral costs of an unnecessary war and the diplomatic costs of expansionism. At the same time, the permanent benefits to the United States, and the likely low costs of conflict, make such a mission relatively more sensible than some of the idealism we’ve had in the last two decades about turning the Islamic nations of the Middle East into a series of pro-American Jeffersonian democracies.

And in extremis — in case of global conflict — it is easy to imagine a case where we seize control of Greenland to prevent other rivals from seizing it. In that case we will certainly be privileging the interests of our 330 million citizens above the natural rights of 60,000 Greenland inhabitants and the legal claims of Denmark.