What the stories about the Amazon, Hong Kong, and Greenland have in common

Who owns a country and who are its people?

President Trump.
(Image credit: Illustrated | REUTERS/Ueslei Marcelino, NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty Images, arbaz bagwan/iStock, ANTHONY WALLACE/AFP/Getty Images)

What do the fires in the Amazon, the Hong Kong protests, and the Trump administration's yen to buy Greenland have in common? In different ways, they're about two big political questions that sound much easier to answer than they really are: Who owns a country and who are its people?

Take the case of Greenland first. When Trump proposed buying the northern island, most of the world's reaction was "that's absurd" — buying territory is something that went out with the age of European imperialism. Nowadays, territory belongs, in some sense inalienably, to the people who live there, even when it isn't expressed in the form of complete independence.

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Noah Millman

Noah Millman is a screenwriter and filmmaker, a political columnist and a critic. From 2012 through 2017 he was a senior editor and featured blogger at The American Conservative. His work has also appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Politico, USA Today, The New Republic, The Weekly Standard, Foreign Policy, Modern Age, First Things, and the Jewish Review of Books, among other publications. Noah lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son.