While walking to Greenland’s parliament, the Inatsisartut, I passed a film crew shooting some kind of skit with a heavily coiffed and made-up Trump impersonator. Some days later a Bavarian comic was confronted by passersby on that same spot while trying to hoist the Stars and Stripes up a flagpole in a stunt for German television. He was reported to the police but escaped with a fine. After I left, the actor Viggo Mortensen visited Nuuk and posed for Instagram photos with Jens-Frederik Nielsen, the prime minister.

One night, on my way to a restaurant just down the street from my hotel, I encountered more than half a dozen news crews occupying sidewalk fiefdoms. On the day Trump addressed the crowd at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting at Davos, declaring, “All the United States is asking for is a place called Greenland,” I watched CNN correspondent Nic Robertson react to the news on live television in my hotel room, then bumped into him minutes later in the lobby.

The NATO alliance, the future of the European Union, the existing world order—it was all in the balance. But the global media had descended upon this faraway island to cover a crisis that seemed to be taking place almost entirely on TV.

From my seat at the pub on a cold Nuuk evening in late January, it finally looked like the crisis was over. The conversations were crackling in both Greenlandic and Danish, and the local beer was flowing. I’d sat down next to a reporter from the Financial Times who’d arrived with the first wave of international media a few weeks before, but now the worst of it had passed and the pints were going down steady—until around 10:30 p.m., when the lights in the bar suddenly went out.

Outside, the snowy streets were dark too. A complete blackout had plunged all of Nuuk into shadow. At the next table, a half dozen men shouted “Booo!” in unison, like soccer hooligans whose team had just blown it. All around, people seemed to be making some version of the same joke: It’s the Americans!

Meanwhile, across town, the man in charge of Greenland’s energy sector walked from one window to another in his darkened home, scanning for signs of commandos or saboteurs. “I was certainly very worried,” says Jørgen T. Hammeken-Holm, then the permanent secretary of Greenland’s Ministry of Business, Minerals Resources, Energy, Justice and Gender Equality. “I was looking out the window and watching: Were there lights? How many cars are moving around?”