Date

Sep 30, 1957

Description

The JCS Chairman’s 1955 proposal for the purchase of Greenland may have never received a formal Department of State response, but a new JCS proposition in 1956 to either purchase or lease it for 99 years encountered a formal and highly negative State Department response. According to the critique by Ambassador to Denmark Robert Coe and Assistant Secretary of State C. Burke Elbrick, a U.S. proposal to purchase Greenland “could well be regarded as an insult by the Danes and could be seriously damaging to U.S.-Danish relations.” That line of argument flowed from Elbrick and Coe’s understanding of the history of Denmark’s economic interests in Greenland, its territorial policy and its “paternalistic—‘white man’s burden’”—approach to the Inuit, the nature of the 1951 U.S.-Denmark defense agreement, and U.S. security interests. The Elbrick/Coe presentation tracks with William Kerrigan’s critical analysis of JCS proposals in Part I of this posting but with more detail.

The JCS’s proposal did not show up in the file that included the State Department’s critique and it has not yet been found at the National Archives.

Source

National Archives, Record Group 330, Records of Secretary of Defense, Office of Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, 1956-1960, box 21, 092.2 Greenland

Document published in following posting(s):

The United States and Greenland: Episodes in Nuclear History, 1957-1968
Part II: The B-52 Crash and Its Impact

Oct 15, 2025