The US and Iceland are keen to foster closer cooperation on security and defense, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said.
“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,” Rubio said during a visit to Reykjavik on Tuesday. “We would be open to having those conversations to see what more we can do together.”
Rubio met with Icelandic Foreign Minister Thorgerdur Katrín Gunnarsdóttir at Hofdi House, site of a 1986 summit between US President Ronald Reagan and the Soviet Union’s Mikhail Gorbachev that marked the beginning of the end of the Cold War. October is the 40th anniversary of that meeting, known as the Reykjavik Summit. Rubio then went to a meeting with Iceland’s prime minister, Kristrún Frostadóttir.
“There’s interest in doing more together, and obviously if there’s opportunities that make sense for both countries, it’s something we would pursue,” Rubio said.
Although Iceland is a founding member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, it has no army of its own and no troops are permanently stationed in the country. The US had a continuous presence at a military base at Keflavik until 2006.
“We obviously had an enduring presence here that ended in 2006, not because of anything that was going wrong, but because we shifted forces to other parts of the world,” Rubio said. “The reality of it is, the world has changed over the last 20 years.”
Rubio said as he left Washington for the visit on Monday that his trip stemmed from a conversation with his Icelandic counterpart at a NATO summit earlier this year. He said Iceland has been a “good friend” of the US.
Rubio’s visit is the first by a US Secretary of State since Antony Blinken traveled to Iceland as part of a broader group in 2021. The State Department said Rubio would discuss economic and security collaboration during his trip.
From Iceland, Rubio heads to Greece and then Portugal.
Iceland, an island nation of about 400,000 people, has been in the spotlight since US President Donald Trump earlier this year threatened to seize Greenland, before negotiating an agreement last month to expand US military presence.
“Our alignment with Iceland is generally, you know, very concrete,” Rubio said. “I think we share the same perspectives of the world.”