On March 30, 1867, U.S. Secretary of State William H. Seward and Russian envoy Baron Edouard de Stoeckl signed the Treaty of Cession. With a stroke of a pen, Tsar Alexander II had ceded Alaska, his country’s last remaining foothold in North America, to the United States for US$7.2 million.

When Donald Trump first expressed interest in buying Greenland in 2019, he framed it as like ‘a large real estate deal’ but this time he said: ‘We need Greenland for national security purposes’ © FT montage;