The news that Hillary Clin­ton may be our next Sec­re­tary of State has trig­gered all the expected reac­tions in all the expected quar­ters: Clin­tonites are secretly ecsta­tic, polit­i­cal reporters are not so secretly sali­vat­ing, and many Obamaphiles are won­der­ing, in a word, WTF?

If the appoint­ment hap­pens, every­one agrees, it will owe much in inspi­ra­tion to Doris Kearns Goodwin’s 2005 Team of Rivals. The book’s sub­ject is Abra­ham Lincoln’s Cab­i­net, to which he appointed three of his rivals for the Repub­li­can nom­i­na­tion of 1860, and Obama’s fond­ness for both the book and its ani­mat­ing idea is well known. Back in May he described Team of Rivals as “wonderful” and spoke admir­ingly of how Lin­coln “basically pulled in all the people who had been run­ning against him into his Cab­i­net because what­ever, you know, per­sonal feel­ings there were, the issue was, ‘How can we get this coun­try through this time of crisis?’”

The Boston Globe recently asked Good­win what she thought of the Clin­ton possibility:

Goodwin…said Obama’s con­sid­er­a­tion of Clin­ton for sec­re­tary of state is anal­o­gous to Lincoln’s select­ing William Seward for the same post in 1861. Seward was con­sid­ered the favorite for the Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial nom­i­na­tion, as Clin­ton had been for this year’s Demo­c­ra­tic nom­i­na­tion. Though ini­tially dejected from the loss, Good­win said, Seward even­tu­ally accepted Lincoln’s offer to join his Cab­i­net and the two men devel­oped a pro­duc­tive friend­ship. “The par­al­lel with Hillary is almost eerie,” she said yesterday.

The deal isn’t done (though Politico’s Mike Allen is report­ing it’s close) and yet that hasn’t stopped the election-​deprived pun­di­toc­racy from feed­ing a frenzy about what the appoint­ment would mean for Obama, for Hillary, for Bill, for the Repub­li­cans, for Iran, etc., etc.

But there is, I submit, a more impor­tant ques­tion that needs our atten­tion: if Hillary Clin­ton is going to be the new William Seward, what’s going to be the new Seward’s Folly?

The old Seward’s Folly, you may recall, is Alaska, the pur­chase of which William Seward nego­ti­ated with Russia for a sum of $7.2 mil­lion in 1867, or about $104M in today’s dol­lars. (See the top of this post for the check used to pay the sum.) The Rus­sians wanted to sell the ter­ri­tory because it was dif­fi­cult to defend, and the U.S. gov­ern­ment (in the person of Seward) wanted to buy it to keep it out of the hands of British Canada. The deal, which was struck at four in the morn­ing and con­ducted in total secrecy, was roundly derided in the con­tem­po­rary press–Horace Gree­ley hated it and the New York World called it a “sucked orange.” But in finan­cial terms, at least, the pur­chase of Alaska was a remark­able suc­cess, thanks to the territory’s then-​unknown gold and oil deposits.

Today there are far fewer oppor­tu­ni­ties for Clin­ton to make a sim­i­lar defin­i­tive mark on the geo­graph­i­cal out­line of the United States. To pursue our tra­di­tional wes­t­er­ing com­pul­sion–our once-but-not-so-much-any-longer-Manifest Des­tiny–would mean push­ing our way into Russ­ian Siberia (an unat­trac­tive prospect for Amer­ica and Russia alike), or into some of the smaller arch­i­pel­a­gos of the Pacific Ocean (which, if rising sea levels have any­thing to say about it, likely won’t exist in hun­dred years).

Some might sug­gest that we should just get it over already and annex Canada. This would have the sin­gu­lar virtue of con­found­ing a great quan­tity of Cana­di­ans, who, no longer able to found their iden­ti­ties on the bedrock for­mula Canadian = ~American, would be forced into the exis­ten­tial vacuum in which the rest of us attempt to exist. It would also presage what for me at least would be the highly attrac­tive (and hilar­i­ous) prospect of nested sep­a­ratist move­ments: Quebeçois extrem­ists fight­ing for their auton­omy from Ontar­ian extrem­ists who are fight­ing for their auton­omy from Wash­ing­ton D.C.

There are other pos­si­bil­i­ties. Mexico, I sus­pect, would be will­ing to part with a few of its north­ern states, though what we’d do with more desert is beyond me. Unless the gov­ern­ment found a way to tax nar­co­traf­fick­ing, it just wouldn’t make much sense. Cuba is inter­est­ing, given the immi­nence of Fidel’s depar­ture from this life, and espe­cially because they might be able to teach us a thing or two about uni­ver­sal health care, but I think it fair to con­clude that our defile­ment of Guan­tanamo Bay has basi­cally dis­qual­i­fied any ambi­tions we might have for the rest of the island.

For my money, the best choice for Clinton’s future folly is Ice­land. It’s small enough not to cause too much trou­ble, it’s appar­ently quite pleas­ant to visit, and, most attrac­tively, it’s all but bank­rupt, which means that we could likely swoop in and pick it up for a song. Maybe not a 104 mil­lion dollar song, but prob­a­bly some­thing well shy of the $25 bil­lion we’re going to have to shell out to keep the Amer­i­can auto indus­try afloat. And last but cer­tainly not least, we’d get Björk. What’s not to love?