Not just Greenland, these are all the places on the planet that the United States has bought or seized in 200 years

For more than two centuries, the United States, an abstract invention that took away land from the native population, grew through a mix of diplomacy, purchase, treaties, genocide, and warfare that put land under its control from coast to coast and across the globe. In a sense, Trump wanting Greenland is nothing new.

One of the first and largest territorial purchases happened in 1803. The Louisiana Purchase from France doubled the size of the young republic, adding more than 800,000 square miles of land west of the Mississippi River for a then-staggering $15 million. This deal laid the foundation for future inland expansion into what are now around 15 modern states.

In 1819, the United States reached another significant agreement with Spain to acquire Florida. Under the Adams-Onís Treaty, Spain ceded East and West Florida. The arrangement also settled various boundary disputes, and the US took formal control of the territory that had long been a point of contention.

However, not all acquisitions were straightforward purchases. The Republic of Texas, which had won independence from Mexico in 1836, was annexed by the United States in 1845. This move was controversial at the time and triggered the Mexican-American War.

When the conflict ended in 1848 with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexico ceded vast swaths of the American Southwest, including present-day California, Nevada, Utah and parts of several other states to the expanding dominant force.

We continue. In 1853, the US paid Mexico $10 million for the Gadsden Purchase, securing a strip of land along the present-day Arizona-New Mexico border that smoothed the route for a southern transcontinental railroad.

Further west, the Alaska Purchase in 1867 brought what was then Russia’s North American territory into the American sphere for $7.2 million. After the Spanish-American War of 1898, the US took control of former Spanish colonies including Puerto Rico and Guam, and also governed the Philippines until its independence in 1946. Hawaii was annexed in the same period, becoming a territory and later the 50th state.

In the Caribbean, the US purchased the Danish West Indies in 1917 for $25 million, creating what are now the US Virgin Islands.

Of course, the Greenland fiasco, despite it being the definitive step in the breakdown of NATO and modern western alliances forged in the aftermath of the Second World War, is, like the Iranian intervention and ICE’s increased rates of murder of US citizens, a huge distraction from the Epstein Files, which push Trump even closer to Epstein that we previously thought.

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Not only is Trump taking away the civil liberties upon which the United States was founded almost 250 years ago, pushing the people he purports to serve into a climate of fear and oppression, but also he doing everything he can to stop you from realising just what type of man he is.

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