As Iceland goes to the polls Aug. 29 for a referendum on whether to restart talks to join the European Union, geopolitics loom large. While the real challenges in actual accession talks are likely to revolve around fisheries and agriculture, the context of an international order in flux — even turmoil — is clear. Following Russia’s 2022 all-out onslaught against Ukraine, longtime neutrals Finland and Sweden raced to join NATO to enhance their security. Now Iceland may similarly seek European integration partly as a hedge against a more capricious and unpredictable United States, signaling growing European frustration with the antagonistic foreign policy of the Trump administration.
Russia’s War Backfires, Enlarges NATO
Russia’s illegal and ill-advised full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 became a seismic event for European security, shaking the very foundations of the international order. Four and a half years on, the war has evolved into a conflict of a global nature, if not (yet) a world war. North Korea has supplied troops, ballistic missiles, and artillery ammunition to Russia, with reports of increasing support this summer. Iran exported Shahed drones to Russia in the early part of the war, and now Russia makes its own Geran variant domestically. China remains a critical backer of the Russian war effort, supplying dual use components and political support without which continuing the conflict would be unthinkable. On the Ukrainian side, NATO, the EU and other backers have enabled Ukraine to defend itself against this war of aggression in line with the rights afforded by the United Nations Charter.
Russia’s war is first and foremost a war on Ukraine, and an existential one at that for the Ukrainians, but it’s also a systemic war — an attack on the post-1945 international order, which had successfully ensured peace and security in the modern era. Yes, there have been devastating wars and other exceptions to a peaceful order, but no full-scale wars between major powers have taken place since the end of World War II. While it’s in vogue to disparage the U.N. and the Security Council as ineffectual talking shops, it is hard to argue that the U.N. Charter and the Security Council have had no benefit for peace and security. As British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan once quipped, “It’s better to jaw jaw than to war war.”
One of Putin’s many and shifting justifications for his “special military operation” was that an encroaching and threatening NATO was moving closer to Moscow, never mind that the new members had practically beaten down the Alliance’s doors to get in – and away from Russia. If this concern about a NATO bogeyman was indeed part of the motivation in February 2022, then it must be infuriating to say the least for the master of the Kremlin to watch NATO grow far stronger, with Sweden and Finland joining the Alliance in response to Russian belligerence. In effect, Putin has managed to make Russia’s strategic situation far worse than before the war.
Swedish and Finnish leaders have been quite explicit that it was the Russian threat that brought them into the Alliance. In a March 2024 speech, Swedish Foreign Minister Tobias Billström said, “While I myself have been advocating for Swedish NATO membership for many years, it was Russia’s full-scale invasion on Ukraine that brought Sweden — and Finland — into the alliance.” Finnish President Sauli Niinistö, when asked by a journalist in May 2022 about the risk of Russian retaliation for Finland’s effort to join NATO, responded as if addressing Putin directly: “You caused this. Look at yourself in the mirror.”
The Impact of an Unpredictable Trump
Are similar factors at work as Iceland considers restarting EU accession talks? Iceland abandoned those negotiations, initiated in 2009, in 2013 after a change in government. Iceland’s strategic context is slightly different from other European countries, as it literally straddles the continental divide between Europe and North America. This geographic reality sums up Icelandic geopolitics as well. Iceland is a founding member of NATO and has a longstanding Bilateral Defense Agreement with the United States. With no armed forces of its own, it relies on NATO and primarily the United States for its defense. Meanwhile, Iceland is deeply integrated with Europe, it is a member of the European Economic Area, and the EU is its largest trading partner by far.
This arrangement has served Iceland well, but as cracks appear in the transatlantic alliance, the situation has become increasingly complicated. President Donald Trump’s aggressive use of tariffs against Europe contravenes the intent of economic cooperation rather than conflict in Article 2 of the North Atlantic Treaty that established NATO, and demonstrates how economic coercion by great powers can pose great risk to a small state like Iceland.
While the prospect of trade wars is a cause for concern, aggressive U.S. territorial claims against Greenland and the Kingdom of Denmark have caused far greater alarm. What seemed to be a blip or a punchline during the first Trump administration has become a full-blown crisis since this president returned to office. It is a testament to how unpredictable the United States is in the eyes of allies that Denmark flew blood bags and explosives to Greenland in preparation for a U.S. attack when the crisis was at a boiling point. NATO has scrambled to defuse the situation, including by standing up an Arctic security mission, Arctic Sentry. But the Danish prime minister has said the issue remains unresolved, and Trump reiterated his aim to acquire Greenland by hook or by crook only recently.
Icelandic Prime Minister Kristrún Frostadóttir has admitted her concern, particularly after Trump seemed to confuse Greenland and Iceland in his Davos speech earlier this year. “Obviously, all of this Greenland matter concerns people, right?” she said in a July interview. “It’s a huge problem. The fact that we have leaders in the free world talking like this is an issue. It’s a massive issue, and I know Icelanders are very concerned about it.”
Trump’s Greenland threats happen in a wider context in which the bonds of the transatlantic alliance are under severe strain generally. In addition to shrugging off Article 2, a normal recourse to Article 4 — consultations among NATO allies over issues of territorial integrity or security disputes — also is not available to the Danes in the case of Greenland, as the aggressor is the strongest member of the Alliance. Instead, the U.S. administration has resorted to browbeating and even encouraging Russian attack on allies it sees as laggards on defense spending. The effect has been to critically undermine Article 5 mutual-defense commitments and weaken allied deterrence at a dangerous time when a Russian attack on a member state is generally considered a realistic likelihood.
Special Trump Venom for the EU
This U.S. contempt for Europe is particularly venomous when aimed at the EU. Trump has claimed falsely that the EU was born to “screw” the United States and has generally treated European allies worse than adversaries like Russia and North Korea. As the tariff war on Europe shows, this is not mere presidential rhetoric. Moreover, this presidential animosity towards Europe was clearly articulated in the 2025 National Security Strategy, in which the administration pledged to interfere in European domestic politics to “cultivat[e] resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations.” This can only be considered a declaration of political war, and it reflected the vitriolic message delivered by Vice President JD Vance at the Munich Security Conference in 2025, after which he went on to shun German authorities in order to meet with the opposition right-wing party Alternative for Germany (AfD).
All this crystallizes that the United States on its current trajectory is moving away from the shared values of the West, which had done so much to advance common security and economic interests.
It thus begs the question, as Icelanders go to vote: to what extent does the new geopolitical reality of a revanchist Russia and an unpredictable, and indeed unreliable, United States factor into voters’ calculations? While not the overriding factor, it is clearly — and should be — a serious part of the nation’s contemplation. To put it more bluntly, if Iceland votes to start EU accession talks, how much is that decision motivated by Donald Trump’s aggressive and unpredictable foreign policy? (Polling on that point is unfortunately scarce.)
Should accession talks between Iceland and the EU result in membership, that may then serve as a catalyst for hitherto reluctant Norway to see if third time’s the charm on its own EU journey. Norwegian voters once rejected membership in the EU’s predecessor, the European Economic Community, in 1972, and then turned down the government’s bid to join the EU in 1994. But the country’s conservative opposition leader recently called for trying again, and the Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre has said that Norwegians should pay close attention to Iceland’s upcoming EU referendum, noting that if Iceland were to join, it would leave Norway and the small principality of Liechtenstein the only non-EU members of the European Economic Area.
To extend this potential domino effect yet further, a successful EU path for both Iceland and Norway might serve as a catalyst for the United Kingdom’s eventual reentry further down the line, as both Iceland and Norway will require accommodations from the EU to be brought into the fold which would demonstrate a more flexible and strategic EU than the one that negotiated an acrimonious divorce with the U.K. Even if Icelanders vote to not begin EU accession negotiations in the referendum, concerns and questions about the reliability and values of the United States have been a big part of the pre-referendum debate. Washington would do well to heed yet another sign of concern and mistrust from its oldest allies.
