The whole “Trump wants to buy Greenland” thing reminded me of the U.S. expansion story, how the country often grew by acquiring land through something that looks a lot like M&A. From the founding of the country to World War II, over about 170 years, the U.S. kept expanding its territory. Roughly 40% of that expansion came through purchases or treaties, and only rarely through direct conquest. If you look at it purely in terms of return on investment, the U.S. government might be the best M&A fund on the planet, easily beating Wall Street.
So today I want to take a closer look at what’s different about America’s “operating system.” Why was the U.S. government so obsessed with expanding through acquisitions? Why did it stop doing that after World War II? And why does that acquisition impulse seem to be waking up again now?
Locke’s Code: America’s Property Fetish
If you think of the United States as a giant company, its founding charter—the Declaration of Independence—was written by Jefferson, but the deeper logic of its institutional design was heavily influenced by the English philosopher John Locke. Locke’s core instruction for this “company” was basically:
“The great and chief end, therefore, of men’s uniting into commonwealths, and putting themselves under government, is the preservation of their property.”
This created a legal and moral problem for an America that wanted to expand. If property is sacred and not to be violated, then taking land by force starts to look like a contradiction. To solve that contradiction, the U.S. leaned into a kind of “compliant expansion.” Instead of conquest, it used purchases and treaties to build a chain of title, a clean paperwork trail, so territorial acquisition could be framed as “legal” inside Locke’s framework.
A Few Code-Level Deals That Rewrote the Map
More than a century before Goldman Sachs or Blackstone even existed, the people running the U.S. government were already using tools that feel very modern: leveraged buyouts (LBOs), contrarian value investing, even something like incentive alignment.
Deal 1: Leveraged Buyout
In 1803, Thomas Jefferson pulled off one of the biggest leveraged buyouts in human history.
The seller was Napoleon, who was under serious financial pressure and needed cash to prepare for war with Britain. France controlled the Louisiana territory, about 828,000 square miles, and Napoleon eventually set the price at $15 million.
The U.S. was still young and didn’t have enough cash in the treasury. But Jefferson wasn’t stuck. He designed a financing structure that was surprisingly sophisticated: backed by the federal government’s “full faith and credit,” the U.S. issued $11.25 million in government bonds through British and Dutch banks acting as underwriters, and added another $3.75 million by agreeing to settle debts France owed the U.S. (with only a small portion actually paid in cash, around $2–3 million). Napoleon then turned around and sold the U.S. bonds to British financiers to convert them into usable money. At closing, the U.S. paid very little cash and essentially bought the Louisiana territory on credit.
A simplified flow looks like this:
1 U.S. government → France: delivers $11.25M in bonds (6% interest) + promises to settle $3.75M in debt
2 France (Napoleon) → British/Dutch banks (Baring & Hope): sells the bonds at a discount (about $0.875 per $1) and receives 52 million francs in cash (paid in installments: 6 million upfront + 2 million/month for 23 months)
3 British/Dutch banks → France: cash is paid out quickly (from July 1803, about 10 million francs was prepaid)
4 U.S. → British/Dutch banks: by 1823, the U.S. pays $23.3M in principal + interest (banks earn the spread and interest)
We can do a rough ROI estimate. The Louisiana Purchase area now covers about 15 U.S. states. Its combined GDP in 2024 was roughly $3.2 trillion. Using a Buffett-indicator-style multiple of 2.0 at the end of 2024, that implies a “valuation” around $6.4 trillion. The original $15 million price, adjusted for inflation to the end of 2024, is about $430 million. That works out to an approximate return of 14,883x, or about 9.2% CAGR.
Deal 2: Contrarian Value Investing
If Jefferson was the leverage guy, then Secretary of State William Seward was an early prototype of contrarian value investing.
In 1867, when he pushed through the purchase of Alaska from Russia for $7.2 million, Washington laughed at him. People called it “Seward’s Folly.” But this is the moment value investors live for: when sentiment is at its lowest, that’s when you buy. In Seward’s valuation model, what he saw wasn’t a frozen wasteland, it was strategic value that everyone else was mispricing. At about two cents per acre, the deal brought practical benefits like fishing resources, and strategically it tightened the U.S. position against the British.
If we do the same quick ROI math: Alaska’s nominal GDP in 2024 was about $71.5 billion. Using a 2x “Buffett indicator” style multiple, that’s roughly a $143 billion valuation. Compared to the $7.2 million cost in 1867 (around $160 million in 2024 dollars), that’s about an 890x return—plus the hidden upside of massive oil reserves that didn’t show up in anyone’s spreadsheet at the time.
Deal 3: Employee Stock Ownership Plan
Beyond external acquisitions, the U.S. was also unusually early in designing domestic incentive systems.
In 1862, Lincoln signed the Homestead Act. In history books it’s presented as an agricultural policy. But if you look at it through a business lens, it’s basically a national-level Employee Stock Ownership Plan.
Lincoln understood something simple: the vast western frontier was like inventory sitting on the balance sheet. If no one developed it, its value was basically zero. So he set up a clean, option-like structure: any U.S. citizen could settle in the West and farm the land, pay a small registration fee (think of it as the exercise price), and become eligible for 160 acres.
But you didn’t get the land immediately. The government imposed a strict vesting schedule: you had to live on it and cultivate it for five continuous years. In modern tech-company language, that’s a “five-year cliff vesting”. With that mechanism, Lincoln tied millions of immigrants’ incentives (the “employees”) to national growth (the “company”), and at very low cost turned unused land into productive farmland.
A Business Model Pivot, Why the U.S. Switched to a Platform Strategy After WWII
If the returns on territorial M&A were that good, why did the U.S. stop doing it after World War II, right when it had overwhelming power?
The pivot starts with a painful income statement.
In 1898, the U.S. paid $20 million to buy the Philippines. On paper it looked like a bargain. In reality, it turned into a mess. To manage what came after the purchase—public order, logistics, day-to-day control—the U.S. military ended up spending about 30 times the purchase price, roughly $600 million. That experience forced a blunt realization inside the U.S. government: buying land is an asset, but absorbing a large population can behave like a liability. If the population density is high enough, governance costs can eat the entire “profit” of the acquisition.
With that lesson in mind, the U.S. changed its approach after WWII. When dealing with defeated Japan, it walked away from the old idea of annexation and instead used something closer to corporate restructuring. The U.S. helped rewrite Japan’s “corporate charter” (the postwar constitution). It didn’t chase ownership, but it did lock in control—keeping basing rights and a veto-like influence over foreign policy direction. The result was that the U.S. got, at relatively low cost, a top-tier manufacturing hub and a geopolitical outpost that doesn’t sink.
Once the Japan model worked, the postwar strategy became clearer: instead of being a heavy-asset landlord, become a light-asset platform that takes a cut.
The Bretton Woods system in 1944 is the moment you can see the U.S. shifting into something like the world’s operating system. In this lighter model, the U.S. doesn’t need to purchase other countries’ territory, and it doesn’t need to manage other countries’ populations. As long as you move through the global trade and finance system, the U.S. can collect tolls—through the dollar’s central role, technology and patents, and financial services.
After WWII, the U.S. also held up liberal democracy as a kind of global “standard.” In platform terms, ideology became part of the product: a standardized service. It’s similar to Apple’s App Store. If you want developers (other countries) to build and do business smoothly on the platform, you need a consistent environment and a stable set of interfaces. Democracy and rule of law function like a compatibility protocol. When countries follow similar contract norms and property-rights rules, the friction cost of trade drops. And with U.S. power in the background, the dollar can circulate more easily.
At the same time, the beacon effect lowered customer acquisition costs. Countries wanted that lifestyle and that security umbrella, and many applied to become U.S. allies.
The Cycle Comes Back: The M&A Gene Waking Up Again
After operating as a global platform for about 80 years, the U.S. government seems to have reached an uncomfortable conclusion: being the platform owner comes with expensive “server maintenance”—global troop deployments and keeping sea lanes open—while the upside has started to flatten. It’s harder to attract new users, and meanwhile both old users (allies) and competitors are getting very good at extracting value from the system.
So when a businessman-president took over, he picked up a calculator and went through the company’s spending line by line. He decided the marketing budget for ideology was high, but the conversion rate was low. From a business point of view, if the ads don’t bring in sales, you cut the marketing department.
Then he looked at the long-term subscription customers—NATO, Japan, South Korea. In his view, they were enjoying U.S.-provided security while paying a very low membership fee. With the defense spending they didn’t have to cover, they poured money into high-end manufacturing, and then came back to compete with Americans in cars and home appliances.
Faced with what he saw as free-rider, Trump stopped talking about alliances built on shared values and switched to a blunt collections approach.
More seriously, when the U.S. government concluded that the free-trade rules it had led the world to adopt—the platform’s user agreement—had contributed to hollowing out American manufacturing, it didn’t hesitate to tear up parts of that agreement. From tariffs to disabling the WTO’s appellate function, the U.S. moved quickly from being an open ecosystem builder to being a careful gatekeeper, counting every penny.
The interest in acquiring Greenland is a signal that the United States’ 250-year-old M&A instinct is stirring again.
Closing
A lot of people say America has changed—that it’s no longer open, no longer committed to democracy and freedom in the same way. But if you look at it like a business, the core hasn’t changed. The U.S. is still acting like a fund that goes where the returns are. What it does—whether it opens up or closes down, expands outward or pulls back—is just different ways of following the same top-level instruction in its underlying code:
Protect the assets, and grow them.