Kuala Lampur, Jan. 15 -- Following the talks between the United States and Denmark over Greenland which saw the two countries having a major disagreement, the world should be prepared for an American acquisition of it. Yet the quest to own Greenland is one that is downright historical too.

Thus, the American fascination with Greenland is neither sudden nor accidental.

It is a long arc of strategic imagination that stretches from nineteenth-century expansionist thought to Cold War military planning and, more recently, to renewed concern over Arctic geopolitics.

To look northward is to see how geography, power, and ideology intersect over time, and how the logic of American expansion has evolved without ever fully disappearing.

In the a...