You learn something new every day. Iceland has no army. It has a coast guard, as you would expect for an island nation. They have a couple of boats and a couple of planes but nothing major. Then again, the entire island’s population is less than 400,000. The nation broke free of Denmark in 1944, while that nation was still under occupation by Nazi Germany.
But Iceland maintains no other armed force besides its coast guard. Yet, somehow, it’s a member of NATO?
The Wall Street Journal has a story out today on the internal Icelandic debate over its armed forces, or lack thereof. They’ve been following events in Greenland and wondering if they should do anything. The Journal notes the contradictions,
A founding member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, it has no standing military. Though rooted in Europe, it isn’t part of the European Union.
Above the Arctic Circle, it’s strategically located,
The U.S. considers both Iceland and Greenland critical to homeland security. Greenland sits along a path that Russian nuclear warheads targeting America could trace across the sky, so is vital to missile detection and defenses. Russian submarines, meanwhile, must run a gantlet near Iceland that NATO calls the Greenland-Iceland-U.K. Gap.
What to do?
Iceland, like other Nordic countries, has long tried to keep the Arctic from being militarized. With that no longer possible, Icelanders are assessing what expanded defenses might look like.
The world is changing, and the ripples will eventually reach all shores.
