Vice president JD Vance toned down US rhetoric on his visit to Greenland on Friday (28 March), but the White House and Kremlin have fuelled fears of an Arctic security crisis.
Vance belittled Denmark's contribution to keeping Greenland safe from China and Russia, but avoided escalatory talk of annexation or using US military force to seize the Danish island.
"Our message to Denmark is simple, you have not done a good job for the people of Greenland. This is why [US president Donald] Trump's policy is what it is [that Greenland should become part of the US]," Vance said, speaking to US soldiers at the Pituffik Space Base.
But he also said: "We respect the self-determination of the people of Greenland".
"We do not think that military force is ever going to be necessary, we think this [Greenland freely joining the US] makes sense," he said.
"We think we're going to be able to cut a deal, Donald Trump-style," he added.
Vance flew to Pituffik with the US second lady, Trump's national security advisor, the US energy secretary, and a US senator, in the highest-ranking ever American delegation there.
"Apparently, I'm the first vice-president to ever visit Greenland," Vance said upon landing.
But for all his conciliatory remarks, Trump himself had doubled down on his more threatening messages earlier in the day.
"We need Greenland. Very importantly, for international security, we have to have Greenland," Trump told media back in the White House on Friday morning.
"I think, Denmark understands it, I think the European Union understands it. And if they don't, we're going to have to explain it to them," he added.
And Vance's trip was so unpopular in Greenland, which is an autonomous Danish territory, that the US second couple had to cancel a planned walk-around due to local boycotts, Greenland's Sermitsiaq newspaper reported.
Denmark was so disturbed by Trump's hostile rhetoric that its king Frederik spoke out on the Arctic crisis for the first time.
"We live in an altered reality. There should be no doubt that my love for Greenland [is] ... intact," the king said on Friday.
Russian president Vladimir Putin also dialled up tension ahead of Vance's trip.
The US was "serious" about Greenland "annexation", Putin said in a speech in Murmansk on Russia's Arctic coast on Thursday.
"About the plans of the United States to annex Greenland ... it is a profound mistake to treat it as some preposterous talk by the new US administration. Nothing of the sort. In fact, the United States had such plans as far back as the 1860s", he said.
US seizure of the island from Denmark would be an act of war between two Western allies, marking the death of Nato and the dawn of a new era in post-Cold War geopolitics.
But Putin said only: "This is an issue that concerns two specific nations and has nothing to do with us".
Trying to make sense of the situation, the US provocations on Greenland could be a Trump negotiating tactic to force Denmark into an unfavourable minerals deal in the island, a former senior Nato official, Jamie Shea, told EUobserver.
"The suspicion has to be that this is all about appropriating Greenland's considerable reserves of fossil fuels and minerals," said Shea, who now teaches war studies at Exeter University in the UK.
Ole Øvretveit, an Arctic researcher at Bergen University in Norway, said: "Like most others, I find it very hard to interpret the strategies of the Trump administration. The Vance visit may be seen as a signal to China to stay away, it might be Trump's aggressive pre-negotiation tactics."
But given Trump and Vance's "anti-European mindset", previously unimaginable scenarios were becoming more plausible, he added.
"If the Monroe Doctrine is correct, [US] green men on Greenland are not unthinkable," Øvretveit said.
The foreign policy doctrine of early US president James Monroe in the 1820s rejected European colonialism in America's near abroad.
And Øvretveit's "green men" alluded to Putin's "little green men" - Russian soldiers with no insignia, who seized Crimea from Ukraine in 2014.
But for Rafael Loss, a defence expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) think-tank, if Trump ever marched into Greenland, the US army would do it flying the American flag in broad daylight.
"Trump would be proud to enter history as one of the very few US presidents who expanded US territory," Loss said from Berlin.
Looking at Putin's Murmansk speech, Shea said the Russian leader might have avoided criticising Trump's Arctic expansionism on Thursday because he was currying favour for US sanctions relief.
Loss said Putin's first objective was to destroy Nato and that Greenland might be a price worth paying for the death of the Western alliance.
US seizure of the Danish island could also fracture the EU, if eastern EU states backed Trump in return for his ongoing protection against Russia, Loss added.
Vance and Trump claimed the US needed Greenland because Denmark had failed to safeguard it from growing Russian and Chinese threats.
Shea said Russia was the main conventional military power in the High North, while China played a minor role.
"Russia [dominates] in terms of its icebreaker fleet and its submarines ... It has more double-hulled ships than the US for winter operations in the High North and long-range maritime patrol aircraft. It also has a greater capacity to operate strategic bombers over the region," he said.
"China has no military bases there and its ships pass through the area in small numbers and on a sporadic basis," he added.
Neil Melvin, a security expert from the Royal United Services Institute think-tank in London, also said: "Western powers are playing catch up [to Russia], especially the US and Canada, and European countries have been slow to recognise the changes in the [Arctic] region and make the necessary defence investment".
"If the Ukraine war winds down, the High North is likely to become the second main area of confrontation with Russia and Nato countries", he warned.
And given Russia's polar dominance, Trump's Greenland threats made little sense, because a US split from Nato would make America less safe in the region, Shea said.
The US relied on Nato forces from Canada, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, and the UK to help protect remote assets, such as Pituffik (which forms part of US nuclear defence).
"Unlike Russia, the US also relies on [Nato] allies for its bases, both permanent and surge in wartime in Canada, Iceland, Greenland/Denmark, and Norway, so for Washington trying to step up in the High North while alienating allies who have traditionally been very cooperative with the US doesn't make a lot of sense," Shea said.
Andrew Rettman is EUobserver's foreign editor, writing about foreign and security issues since 2005. He is Polish, but grew up in the UK, and lives in Brussels. He has also written for The Guardian, The Times of London, and Intelligence Online.
Andrew Rettman is EUobserver's foreign editor, writing about foreign and security issues since 2005. He is Polish, but grew up in the UK, and lives in Brussels. He has also written for The Guardian, The Times of London, and Intelligence Online.