Iceland Prime Minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir announced she will be missing Vice President Mike Pence’s visit to the country when he comes in early September.
“This is unprecedented for an Icelandic prime minister,” historian Thor Whitehead said Wednesday after they confirmed she would not stay for the vice president’s visit. “I doubt any other Western leader would decide to address a friendly conference abroad instead of welcoming a major foreign ally.”
Jakobsdóttir, 43, claimed the move was not a snub to Pence but rather that she had already planned on giving a speech to the Council of Nordic Trade Unions for their annual meeting in Sweden.
“This visit, that was organized by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, has been bouncing a lot around the calendar so that it has been very difficult to organize oneself around it,” Jakobsdóttir told Icelandic broadcaster RUV.
President Trump announced Tuesday he was canceling a visit to Denmark, Iceland’s Nordic neighbor. The president said Denmark disrespected the U.S. in the way it refused to consider selling Greenland.
Pence will be the first American vice president to visit Iceland, which has a population of 350,000, since George H.W. Bush visited Reykjavík as part of a four-country trip to Sacdinavia in 1983.
