Powered by territorial expansion and later justified by the Monroe Doctrine, American foreign policy has long been devoted to building and maintaining empire. When Donald Trump first floated the idea of buying Greenland during his first term, the proposal was widely treated as another bizarre eruption from a uniquely bizarre presidency. Mark Kawar’s America, but Bigger: Near-Annexations, from Greenland to the Galápagos reveals that it was nothing of the sort. Trump was continuing a long American tradition of looking at foreign territory and asking, “Why isn’t that ours?”
