Donald Trump says he needs for national security. The vast island has found itself at the centre of a geopolitical storm bearing Trump’s name, and people here are clearly unnerved.

Yet on arrival, Greenland appears strikingly peaceful. Ice- and snow-capped mountains stretch as far as the eye can see, broken occasionally by glittering fjords, all lying between the Arctic and the Atlantic Oceans. Often described as sitting atop the world, much of the island lies above the Arctic Circle. Greenland is nine times the size of the UK, but has only 57,000 inhabitants, most of them indigenous Inuit.

The largest concentration of Greenlanders is found on the south-western coast, in the capital, Nuuk. We arrived as a frozen twilight crept across snow-covered pedestrian streets. Parents pulled their children home from school on sledges, while students drifted in and out of brightly lit shopping centres.

Few people wanted to speak openly about the anxiety linked to Trump’s interest in the island. Those who did were deeply pessimistic. One pensioner struck the ground with his walking stick for emphasis as he told me that the US must never plant its flag in Greenland’s capital. A woman, who said she mistrusted everyone these days and declined to give her name, admitted she was “scared to death” at the prospect of Trump taking the island by force, after watching his military intervention in Venezuela. (BBC)