If you love Nova Scotia, you may like Greenland

I’ve been to Greenland, and if you love ice, granite, brightly painted houses and mosquito-free winters, it is a big, beautiful place.

Sadly, I doubt we are ever going to gobble it up into the United States.

Greenlanders can read a thermometer.

While the rest of us look at global warming and see flooded basements, big $$ air-conditioning bills, and Miami slowly becoming an aquarium, Greenlanders can look beneath all that melting ice and see real estate.

Farmland! Minerals! New shipping routes!

Give them another few degrees, and they may be selling beachfront condominiums north of the Arctic Circle.

This is what Harvard professors call a geostrategic paradigm shift. Ordinary people call it hitting the jackpot while your house melts.

You probably do not begin your morning lusting after Greenland. Most Americans can get through breakfast without once coveting Nuuk.

You are therefore forgiven for ignoring the subject—except that every few decades Washington develops a recurrence of its old imperial itch and starts looking at the map.

Greenland? Canada? Perhaps Cuba?

Why not?

It has been over six decades since we added any stars to the flag. The fellows in the flag business could use the work.

Perhaps your own inner imperialist has been awakened.

Maybe Greenland is beginning to s warm up and sound attractive.

Imagine a cute vacation bungalow outside Nuuk. Twenty-one hours of summer daylight. No air-conditioning. Magnificent fjords. An igloo for the grandchildren.

And absolutely no danger of anyone building a Trump Tower next door, unless events move very rapidly.

But before calling a Greenland real-estate broker, there is one minor problem.

Greenlanders already live there.

This irritating complication has spoiled many excellent empires.

Furthermore, they have been associated with Denmark for centuries. Whatever complaints Greenlanders may have about the Danes, Denmark arrives with a formidable competitive advantage:

The Danes are happy.

This is where our Greenland acquisition strategy collapses.

Every year, international happiness researchers publish rankings telling us that Denmark, Finland and the other Scandinavian overachievers are once again wandering around smiling contentedly while Americans are working three jobs, yelling at cable television and wondering why the neighbor bought a larger Lexus.

The Scandinavians apparently possess what sociologists at Harvard might describe as a multifactorial architecture of communal well-being.

I call it being annoyingly cheerful.

You may be thinking:

“So what? Since when did happiness acquire territory? Guns, tanks and money have been doing a perfectly satisfactory job for five thousand years.”

True.

But ask Russia how the tanks-only approach has been working out lately.

Modern imperialism has become complicated. Apparently, the natives are now expected to have opinions.

If we want Greenland to voluntarily say:

“Goodbye, Copenhagen! Hello, Washington!”

we have to become more seductive.

More affable.

More winsome.

Possibly even lovable.

We cannot simply arrive at Nuuk airport shouting:

“WE HAVE A BIGGER GNP!”

That lacks refined elegance.    

We Americans naturally consider ourselves irresistible.

We have Harvard, MIT, Hollywood, Las Vegas, Taylor Swift, Costco and approximately 147 varieties of breakfast cereal.

We invented the airplane, landed on the Moon and figured out how to put cheese inside pizza crust.

No civilization could offer more.

And yet those damned Scandinavians keep nailing  us in happiness.

We possess almost everything.

They appear to enjoy themselves.

That is a serious problem if we expect 67,000 Greenlanders to abandon their long relationship with Denmark and join a country where half the population is furious with the other half.

Picture the sales presentation:

AMERICA: “Join us! We are the richest major nation on Earth.”

GREENLAND: “Are you happy?”

AMERICA: “That is a very complicated question.”

GREENLAND: “The Danes seem happy.”

AMERICA: “Yes, but do they have six television networks devoted entirely to people screaming at one another?”

We need a new strategy.

Forget aircraft carriers.

Forget manifest destiny.

If we really want Greenland, we should begin with a massive national campaign of cheerful merriment.

Smile at strangers, hug family, club members, and neighbors

Relationships are the best predictor of happiness. Invite more people over

Stop treating every political disagreement as the Battle of Gettysburg.

Tell more jokes. Give humor equal billing with achievement.

Turn off cable news for an afternoon.

Perhaps Congress could declare one day each year when nobody is permitted to call anybody else a fascist, communist, traitor or moron.

Call it National Greenland Day.

If we could climb into the world’s happiness elite, Greenlanders might reconsider Denmark.

“Those Americans,” they might say, “used to be exhausting. Now they’ve become jolly  pleasant.”

And there is the beauty of my Greenland Acquisition Plan.

Suppose it fails.

Suppose Greenland keeps its ice, minerals, fjords and twenty-one-hour summer days.

Suppose we never acquire a single square foot.

We would still have accomplished something astonishing.We would have become happier even if we failed to steal it. And we’d still have Vegas and Taylor Sw