President Donald Trump has thrown the European Union a lifeline. I am sure he did not mean to. He makes no secret of his disdain for the EU, which he sees, with good reason, as anti-democratic, inimical to national sovereignty, and implicitly hostile to the United States. Yet he is about to give it a major victory, pushing a wealthy and successful Western state into its arms.
Brexit should have marked the end of EU expansion. Sure, the organization might yet pick up some poor and frightened former Soviet republics. But never again, or so we all thought, would it attract a serious Western European state. The question was not whether Norway or Switzerland might join — it was whether Denmark or the Netherlands might leave.
Then along came Trump, tariffs, and the threat to NATO, and suddenly things began to look different. I have written before about the way in which MAGA has had the effect of weakening conservative and pro-American parties everywhere else. The annexation threats against Canada blew up a 20-point Conservative Party lead and let the Liberal Party retain office. The tariffs on Mexico pushed its left-wing leader, Claudia Sheinbaum, to an 85% approval rating. The isolationist rhetoric is driving some of my Taiwanese friends to consider a closer relationship with China.
But the one that hurts me is Iceland. That frozen lump of tundra has, until now, shown no interest in EU membership, and you can see why. Iceland is a contender for the prize of the richest, happiest, and freest place in the world. Its GDP per head is nearly twice that in the EU, even without admitting Ukraine or Moldova. Its greatest national resource is its fisheries, but the EU insists on defining fish stocks as a “common resource” to which all member states have “equal access.” The EU was not a solution to any Icelandic problem.
Then again, Iceland had, until now, felt militarily secure. The U.S. has always recognized the strategic importance of that island, straddling as it does the European and North American tectonic plates. Even before Pearl Harbor, there was an American military presence in Iceland, and the two nations signed a mutual defense agreement in 1951. Iceland, which has only 400,000 people, has no army, but it has a navy and was an enthusiastic founding member of NATO.
Iceland has flourished outside the EU. It is a member of the European Economic Area, which, while an imperfect deal, gives it access to EU markets while allowing it to negotiate its own trade deals with the rest of the world — it signed one with the U.S. in 2008. Until last year, the question of membership had disappeared from the horizon.
Then came Trump’s threat to annex Greenland, and Iceland’s tiny band of Europhiles saw their opportunity. If they could convince their countrymen that they, too, were vulnerable, perhaps they might succeed in casting the EU as an alternative source of security. The new left-leaning government has declared that there will be a referendum before the end of 2027 — in other words, while Trump is still in office. Cleverly, they are framing it, not as a referendum on membership, but as a mandate to open talks, with the promise of a second vote at the end, their calculation being that people who vote in favor the first time around will then be emotionally invested.
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Iceland is a country in which I have my own emotional investment. I first visited as a student in 1991 and was immediately blown away. Iceland’s language had not altered in 1,000 years: its people could read the 11th-century sagas with no more difficulty than you read Mark Twain. It was the only developed country whose inhabitants lived by hunting wild animals. Those people had patronymics, Ólafsson or Ólafsdóttir, for example, instead of surnames. Despite this, they all seemed to know exactly how they were related — though, after 20 years of immigration, that is no longer true.
I have returned perhaps 10 times in the intervening 35 years, including for my bachelor party. I have watched Iceland surge ahead of other places economically, not least because it was the only advanced country not to bail out its banks following the financial crisis in 2009. I still think, on balance, that Icelanders, who are as level-headed a people as you will come across anywhere, will reject the proposal. Still, they are now going to have a massive distraction for the next two years, pitting neighbor against neighbor, and all to no end whatsoever. Thanks a bunch, Mr. President.
