Greenland Is a Distraction—Epstein Island Is the Scandal That Still Haunts Trump Fedlan News | FN Newsroom
There is something deeply misaligned about the way Trump's outrage is being directed. Once again, Greenland has been dragged into a fevered political conversation—
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President Donald Trump has revived talk of acquiring the vast Arctic island, framing it as a strategic necessity. Yet while attention drifts north toward ice and geopolitics, a far more troubling piece of American history lies to the south, largely unexamined and unresolved.
In 1917, Denmark sold the Danish West Indies to the United States for $25 million in gold. The deal was driven by wartime fears and strategic calculations. The islands—now known as the U.S. Virgin Islands—were seen as important to protecting shipping lanes and preventing German influence in the Caribbean during World War I. It was a straightforward transaction by the standards of empire, but it came with strings attached.
As part of the agreement, the United States pledged it would not challenge Denmark's control of Greenland. That assurance, formalized in what became known as the Lansing Declaration, was meant to settle Arctic questions once and for all. Greenland would remain Danish. The Caribbean islands would become American. The matter, at least on paper, was closed.
History, however, has a way of reopening old files.
More than a century later, one of those very same Caribbean islands—Little St. James, better known to the world as "Epstein Island"—would gain global notoriety for all the wrong reasons.
In 1917, Denmark sold the Danish West Indies to the United States for $25 million in gold. The deal was driven by wartime fears and strategic calculations. The islands—now known as the U.S. Virgin Islands—were seen as important to protecting shipping lanes and preventing German influence in the Caribbean during World War I. It was a straightforward transaction by the standards of empire, but it came with strings attached.
As part of the agreement, the United States pledged it would not challenge Denmark's control of Greenland. That assurance, formalized in what became known as the Lansing Declaration, was meant to settle Arctic questions once and for all. Greenland would remain Danish. The Caribbean islands would become American. The matter, at least on paper, was closed.
History, however, has a way of reopening old files.
More than a century later, one of those very same Caribbean islands—Little St. James, better known to the world as "Epstein Island"—would gain global notoriety for all the wrong reasons.
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