Courtesy of The Financial Times, commentary on how President Trump – with his Greenland obsession – is reviving a national tradition: expansion via land grabs:
Perhaps Donald Trump really has suddenly given up on Greenland, but his obsession with the place has been long-term and telling. Sanewashers — the people who try to rationalise everything he does — spent last week explaining he needed it for security. Yet that contradicts Trump’s own early account of his interest. In 2021, he told the authors of The Divider, a book about his first presidential term: “I’m a real estate developer. I look at a corner, I say, ‘I’ve got to get that store for the building that I’m building,’ etc. It’s not that different . . . I love maps. And I always said: ‘Look at the size of this [Greenland]. It’s massive. That should be part of the United States.’” Trump embodies the new geopolitical trend: international relations is increasingly about real estate.
Land is the great prize of our time. Even as our economy becomes dematerialised, and our lives virtual, our obsessions just get more earthly. The McKinsey Global Institute has estimated that land, plus the housing and commercial property on top of it account for about two-thirds of the world’s $520tn of real wealth.
Real estate has long been a driver of domestic politics. The fact that only some people have housing wealth and can afford to live in strong job markets fuels inequality, the rural-urban and generational divides. House prices also feed anxiety over immigration (which raises competition for homes) and reduce fertility (because young people can’t afford enough space to have children). Much of this argument is outlined in the essay “The Housing Theory of Everything” by John Myers, Sam Bowman and Ben Southwood. But real estate’s merging with international relations is more recent.
The no-holds-barred fight for land that encompasses most of history paused with decolonisation in the 1960s, but restarted in 2014 when Vladimir Putin invaded Crimea. Trump has often suggested that the US, like Russia, should revive its national tradition: expansion through land grabs. This lust for land is driven by various trends, argues Michael Albertus of the University of Chicago, author of the new book Land Power. I spoke to him at last month’s Grand Continent conference in Aosta, Italy.
First, ever more people are competing for land. Just in my lifetime, since 1969, the global population has jumped from about 3.6 billion to 8.2 billion. The UN projects it will peak at 10.3 billion in the 2080s. One cause of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, for instance, is the 10-fold increase in Israel’s population since 1948 to 10.2 million.
Trend two: climate change is reshuffling the value of the world’s land. The US real estate website Zillow used to track this issue by publishing climate-risk scores for homes but, perhaps coincidentally, ditched the scores after estate agents complained they hurt sales. Only the brave or misinformed are still buying in south Florida, whereas the warming Arctic looks like a freshly delivered new neighbourhood, ready for habitation. In real estate jargon, Greenland now “has potential”, as do northern Russia and Canada. Centuries hence, when Trump’s personal idiosyncrasies begin to fade from memory, historians might say that what we lived through in January 2026 heralded the start of the scramble for the Arctic. Bits of Antarctica could be next.
The third factor driving land grabs, says Albertus, is that the taboo on them is fading — or perhaps, in the cases of Trump and Putin, has vanished. Trump’s plan for the “Gaza Riviera” recasts 19th-century imperialism in the language of 21st-century real estate. And here is how he describes his “peace proposal” to give Russia chunks of Ukraine: “You’re cutting up land in a certain way, it’s not the easiest thing, it’s like a complex real estate deal times a thousand.” European policymakers, who started 2026 still imagining the taboo existed, are hastily updating their worldview.
Putting all these trends together, Albertus sees a “Great Reshuffle” of the world’s land. That happens periodically in history: think of the 19th-century “Scramble for Africa”, or the “Barbarian migrations” by Germanic tribes that destroyed the late Roman empire. This time, the likely chief grabbers are the US, China and Russia, plus possibly Iran as “water bankrupt” Tehran ceases to be habitable.
Land grabs could lose intensity after 2100, when falling birth rates shrink the world’s population. But even then, climate change should keep people moving. A century from now, giant Nigeria might be bullying the US for the Alaskan Riviera.