The Danes should have taken Harry Truman's offer for the Alaska/Greenland land swap.
The United States in 1946 proposed to pay Denmark $100 million in gold to buy Greenland. But the original idea was for the United States to trade land in the Point Barrow district of Alaska for those portions of Greenland that the United States considered of military value. Under this plan, the Danes would have received the rights to any oil discovered in the district but would have had to sell the oil to the United States. The richest oil strike in U.S. history was made in 1967 in the Prudhoe Bay area, just east of Point Barrow. The Point Barrow area now is part of the National Petroleum Reserve, which are oil fields reserved for national defense.
With all that oil, if the Danes had swapped land in Greenland for Point Barrow land in Alaska they would now be the richest per capita nation in the world.
