If Astrid Lindgren, the creator of Pippi Longstocking, had written Nordic westerns then she would have set them in a place like Nuuk.
A sprawl of multicoloured wooden homes on snowy hills, Nuuk feels like a frontier town and, as the world’s most northerly capital city, is tucked into the southwestern coast of Greenland.
The giant Arctic island may be larger than western Europe, but most of it is an uninhabited snowy tundra where about 20,000 people – a third of Greenland’s population – cluster in the capital.
On a snowy grey Friday morning, it feels a small, lonely and vulnerable place. Particularly since Donald Trump, property developer turned US president, turned his attention back to what he views as prime real estate.
Earlier in the week the White House said acquiring Greenland was a “national security priority”. Trump senior aide Stephen Miller declined to rule out the use of military force to achieve this aim, saying: “Nobody’s going to fight the US over the future of Greenland.”
Sitting in her office at 11am, with the promised sunrise nowhere in sight, Nuuk mayor Avaaraq Olsen shows no interest in her homeland becoming the 51st state of the union.
“Frustration is what I hear the most from people here about other countries talking about us like an item to be bought or swapped,” she says.
“We have our flag, we have our national anthem and we are our own people. We feel that we aren’t being respected.
“How would the Americans react if China said they were going to take over a state because that is what they needed?”
In this heated Arctic collision of history, geopolitics and pride, there is no obvious outcome.
Three centuries of Danish rule over Greenland have shifted in recent decades towards greater autonomy, alongside the Faroe Islands, in the three-state Kingdom of Denmark.
Greenland lives largely from fish and financial transfers, and a lingering resentment towards Copenhagen is palpable, fired by revelations in recent years of forced adoptions and birth control treatments.
But all that has been eclipsed in the last year by renewed overtures from Washington.
Inside the Esmeralda cafe, as Ella Fitzgerald sings The Nearness of You, fisherman Ilatsiag Markussen eats double-fried chips as he fumes over Trump’s unwanted approach.
“I don’t like his tone, and certainly not what he has to say,” Markussen says. “We don’t know what is coming to be honest.”
When Denmark refused an offer by Trump to buy Greenland in his first term, it wasn’t the first such approach. The United States had offered $100 million in gold bars in 1946. Three decades before that again, in 1917, Copenhagen sold the Virgin Islands to Washington on condition of its continued recognition of Danish sovereignty over Greenland.
But Trump has shrugged that all off now, making unsubstantiated claims Greenland is “covered with Russian and Chinese ships all over the place”. US vice-president JD Vance said Danish neglect of the region’s security, and knock-on effects for the US, is why Trump was “willing to go as far as he has to”.
Denmark rejects such claims strenuously, insisting that its recent security spending in Greenland is almost 100 billion Danish kroner (€13 billion). Its foreign minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen, biting his diplomatic tongue hard this week, described Trump’s claims on Russia and China as “not correct”.
“This is a misreading of what is up and what is down,” he said. “The shouting match must be replaced by a more sensible dialogue. Now.”
With that in mind, Danish ambassador to Washington, Jesper Moller Sorensen, and Greenland’s chief representative in the US, Jacob Isbosethsen, held talks in the White House on Thursday.
In Nuuk, Greenland government aides say they remain in the dark about the format or even location of further talks scheduled for next week with US secretary of state Marco Rubio.
Geographically part of North America, the key to Greenland’s future may lie in two historical documents signed within months of each other.
The first is a 1951 agreement between the US and Denmark allowing Washington considerable freedom to establish and operate military bases here. There were 17 such bases here in the Cold War era, now there’s just around 200 people in one, the Pituffik Space Base, which serves crucial missile warning and space surveillance for the US and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato).
Denmark is prepared to offer greater leeway here, but that may not amount to much. For Washington-based Danish analyst Otto Svendsen, White House national security arguments over Greenland are “not congruent with recent US policy towards the territory”.
“Neither Greenland nor the Arctic are mentioned at all in the recently published US National Security Strategy,” he says.
Instead, he suggests a recent Trump assertion – that control of the territory is necessary “because that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success” – shows how tricky it will be for Denmark to ease tensions with economic or military concessions.
“It is unclear what a diplomatic off-ramp would look like,” Svendsen says, suggesting all signs point to a Trump will for territorial expansion.
That prompted European Union leaders to issue a statement this week that “it is for Denmark and Greenland, and them only, to decide on matters concerning Denmark and Greenland”.
Given EU priorities elsewhere, however, particularly Ukraine, many in Nuuk fear things will get even darker.
Already Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen aired on national television the previously unthinkable scenario: one Nato country invading another.
“If the United States chooses to attack another Nato country militarily, then everything stops,” she said. “That includes Nato and thus the security that has been provided since the end of the second World War.”
Such unprecedented security considerations in Copenhagen have brought into play a second historical document, a so-called precautionary order from 1952. It was drafted in response to events of April 1940 when, amid a build-up of Nazi forces on its border, Danish armed forces were left without orders on how to respond.
The 1952 document is a response to a deep historical trauma, but its “never again” tone has a worryingly timely tone.
“In the event of an attack on Danish territory or on a Danish military unit outside Danish territory, the attacked forces must immediately take up the fight without waiting for or seeking orders,” it states. If such an attack comes before a declaration of war, the order says, such an attack “is to be considered an order for mobilisation”.
The Danish defence ministry has confirmed that the order remains in effect and that it is “unambiguous” in including an attack from an alliance member.
About 300 Danish soldiers are stationed on Greenland, along with military helicopters, a frigate and fighter jets.
Danish military analyst and retired officer Kenneth Ohlenschlaeger Buhl describes the order, which he says applies to Greenland, as “clear and unambiguous instructions on how to respond. Danish officers are trained in scenarios like this”.
“It certainly raises the stakes,” he says. “The fact that Trump has declared that he wants Greenland no matter what – and still does not rule out a military solution.”
Back in Nuuk in mayor Olsen’s office, the sun is still nowhere to be seen through heavy cloud and snowfall. Far away from Europe, does she fear Trump aide Miller is right and no one will fight for Greenland?
She pauses for a moment. “I don’t want to move into foreign politics, but it helps people here when they hear other countries saying they stand with Greenland,” she says. “When we hear other countries are going to stick up for us it makes us feel less lonely.”