A visit by a US secretary of state to Reykjavik is rare. When it comes from an administration that spent much of this year threatening to seize Greenland, and in a month marking the 40th anniversary of the Cold War’s most famous summit, it deserves attention. On Tuesday Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters in the Icelandic capital that the United States and Iceland are keen to foster closer cooperation on security and defense. “Iceland, and its location, plays a critical role in the defense, both of Europe, but also the homeland of the United States because of geography”, he said. “We would be open to having those conversations to see what more we can do together”. The statement was deliberately open-ended, but its meaning is clear enough: the North Atlantic is returning to the centre of American strategic thinking.
Rubio met Iceland’s foreign minister, Thorgerdur Katrín Gunnarsdóttir, at Hofdi House, the venue of the 1986 summit between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. That meeting did not produce an arms agreement, but it is widely regarded as the beginning of the end of the Cold War. Choosing the same house for a conversation about defense is a message in itself: Washington wants to place the new talks in the tradition of Iceland’s role as a meeting point between East and West. Rubio then held talks with Prime Minister Kristrún Frostadóttir.
The visit is the first by a US secretary of state since Antony Blinken travelled to Iceland as part of a wider group in 2021. Rubio said that it grew out of a conversation with his Icelandic counterpart at a NATO summit earlier this year, and called Iceland a “good friend”. The State Department said he would discuss both economic and security collaboration. From Reykjavik he continues to Greece and then Portugal, which places Iceland in a tour of NATO’s northern and southern flanks.
Iceland’s position inside NATO is distinctive. It is a founding member of the alliance, yet it has no army of its own and no troops permanently stationed on its soil. Its roughly 400,000 people rely for defense on the alliance, on a bilateral arrangement with the United States, and on rotating deployments of allied aircraft and ships for air policing and exercises.
For decades the American presence at the Keflavik base underpinned that arrangement. The United States kept a continuous military presence there until 2006. Rubio was careful to describe the departure as unrelated to any dispute: it ended “not because of anything that was going wrong, but because we shifted forces to other parts of the world”. The base had been built for a Cold War purpose, hunting Soviet submarines and monitoring air traffic across the North Atlantic, and the post-Cold War era seemed to remove the need. “The reality of it is, the world has changed over the last 20 years”, Rubio said, and he meant that the world has changed again.
Rubio’s phrase about “the homeland of the United States because of geography” points to the logic. Iceland sits in the gap between Greenland, Iceland and the United Kingdom, a corridor through which naval forces and submarines must pass to reach the Atlantic from northern waters. Control of or access to that corridor matters for protecting transatlantic shipping and reinforcement routes to Europe, and for early warning of threats approaching North America. As Arctic ice retreats and great-power competition grows, the strategic value of the high north has increased.
The context also includes the Greenland episode. Earlier this year President Donald Trump threatened to seize Greenland, then negotiated an agreement, last month, to expand the US military presence there. Seen together, the Greenland agreement and the Iceland outreach look like parts of one approach: rebuilding American access across the northern Atlantic. Rubio’s insistence on “very concrete” alignment and shared “perspectives of the world” fits that framing, although the public statements offered no specific proposals.
Rubio gave no details, and the language was conditional: if opportunities “make sense for both countries”, Washington would pursue them. The range of possibilities nevertheless matters. At the modest end, it could mean more frequent visits by US aircraft and ships, joint exercises and use of existing facilities at Keflavik for deployments. A larger step could involve upgraded infrastructure, a rotational presence of US personnel or enhanced surveillance capabilities. A full return to permanent basing would be the most far-reaching option, and nothing said on Tuesday suggests it is imminent.
The Icelandic side has its own considerations. The country has never had a military, and public opinion about foreign troops has been sensitive since the original defense agreement of the 1950s. A government in Reykjavik will want to show that cooperation strengthens national security without compromising its sovereignty or its relationships with European partners. The Greenland dispute adds an extra sensitivity: Iceland has been in the spotlight since the president’s threats, and any deal will be judged in light of how Washington has treated a close neighbour.
For European allies, the visit is a mixed signal. On one hand, it shows that Washington still sees the defense of Europe as tied to its own, with Rubio explicitly linking Iceland’s location to both. On the other, it reveals a preference for bilateral arrangements and for places the administration regards as strategically important, not for the alliance as a whole. European governments are likely to welcome added capability in the North Atlantic while watching closely how it is organised, and whether it comes with demands on other issues such as trade and defense spending.
A small country can have outsized strategic weight. Iceland has no army, but it has a position that great powers repeatedly find indispensable. Washington’s renewed interest is a reminder that the geography that mattered in the 1940s and in 1986 matters again, and that the end of the permanent American presence in 2006 now looks to many like a pause rather than a conclusion. The details of any new arrangement remain to be seen, and so does the reaction in Reykjavik. For now, the message from the visit is clear: the United States wants to talk about returning, and Iceland has agreed to talk.
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