Greenland is in the news again, courtesy of Donald Trump's threats to take it away from NATO ally Denmark, and the not insignificant (one in three?) possibility that he would actually do it.

It might sound like the plot of a Marx Brothers movie, but what comes to mind first, given my academic bent, is John Mueller's (temporarily) influential book "Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War." "Temporarily" because Mueller's provocative thesis — that war had become obsolete — appeared to have been rudely refuted two years after publication by Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait and Operation Desert Storm.

In reality, those ridiculing Mueller's prematurity misunderstood his argument: He wasn't claiming that wars would cease to happen, but that advanced post-industrial democracies wouldn't consider fighting them against each other (fighting Iraq therefore didn't count, but taking Greenland from Denmark most certainly would).

Mueller's thesis was consistent with what had come to be called the "Democratic Peace Theory," the idea that democracies don't go to war with each other, with no undisputed exception in the historical record however creatively you defined terms like "war" and "democracy."

The possibility of democratic peacefulness was first suggested by Emmanuel Kant in an essay back in the late 18th century and popularized during the Great War by Woodrow Wilson ("the war to make the world safe........

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