A distant island and a European border

It’s at roughly 80°49′35″ North latitude and 66°27′30″ West longitude.

Or, you might also know it as being in the Kennedy Channel of the Nares Strait in the high Arctic.

It’s Hans Island, an island that’s split between the Kingdom of Denmark and Canada.

The border was a bone of contention between the two nations for years, but not one that sired threats of annexation. Each simply claimed it as their own.

In fact, Hans Island was the site of the Whisky War: it has been called both “the friendliest war” and “one of the most passive-aggressive boundary disputes in history.”

Canadian and Danish officials and military would take turns planting a flag on the island and claiming sovereignty, leaving either schnapps or Canadian Club behind as a gift for their opponents. (With heated conflicts like that, the next thing you know, they’d be curling for ownership on a rink that allows both in-game beer drinking and smoking.)

In 2022, the two governments agreed to split the island essentially down the middle.

And maybe it’s the way nations with a sense of humour deal with international disagreements. Hans Island is a rocky knob of an island. There could be oil and gas or earth metals there. Three hundred and twenty acres, uninhabited, made up mostly of limestone topped with glacial sediments. It was mentioned in 1853 by Elisha Kent Kane in an account of the Second Grinnell expedition: “Nearby was a low and isolated rock-ledge, which we called Hans Island. The glaucous gulls, those cormorants of the Arctic seas, had made it their peculiar homestead.”

Speaking of glaucous gulls, cue U.S. President Donald Trump, who apparently has never seen a part of the Danes’ Greenland possession he didn’t covet.

Presumably, if he seizes Greenland, he’d get half of Hans as well. Don’t for a moment expect a bottle of bourbon in return. He prefers the art of the steal to the true art of the self-deprecating inside joke.

Hans Island is also, although a bit of a stretch, a crucial piece of land for Canada’s involvement with new trading partners other than the United States.

You can’t join the European Union, some have argued, unless you’re a nation that shares a land border with a country on the European continent.

Of course, there’s actually a lot more to it than that, including adhering to a host of EU standards and overarching rule-making. But for the purpose of this editorial, let’s pretend that all you need is a land border. Which, hey presto, we happen to have. It’s, perhaps, a Hans-on solution to a pressing issue.

There now seem to be ongoing efforts by Canada to make a new deal with the European Union, perhaps because the EU actually views legal contracts between nations as binding, rather than as a perpetual starting point for a U.S. president with delusions of empire.

Prime Minister Mark Carney has said Canada isn’t looking to join the EU, per se, but perhaps to become an associate member. It’s an inroad into a foreign market separate from the tariff train wreck that seems to be constantly piling up courtesy of the White House.

Maybe we could just convince Trump that what he really needs in Greenland is just the rocky lump of Hans Island — and give it to him in perpetuity, while all the rest of us sit down without him for a whisky or a schnapps and a good dose of international fellowship.

We could spend a few happy hours forgetting about the sputtering demagogue to the south of us.

Hans Island is roughly 430 million years old. Same as it ever was.

Trump is 80, and fading fast.

This too shall pass.

» Winnipeg Free Press and The Brandon Sun