US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has travelled to Iceland to press American interests in the Arctic, two weeks after Washington sealed a security pact covering Greenland.
Rubio was due to meet Icelandic officials in Reykjavík to discuss “economic and security collaboration”, the US State Department said. He travels on to Athens and Lisbon between October 5 and 8.
The stopover follows the trilateral pact signed by the US, Denmark and Greenland on September 22 at the United Nations General Assembly in New York, which Trump described as handing Washington permanent control over the island’s security.
The accord amends a 1951 defence treaty, allowing the expansion of the Pituffik Space Base and the creation of two new American defence areas at Narsarsuaq in southern Greenland and Mestersvig in the northeast.
It also appears to have ended President Donald Trump’s threats to buy or annex the autonomous Danish territory, a campaign that soured relations with the European Union and prompted the European Commission to announce a €200 million investment package for Nuuk.
Iceland has had no military since independence in 1944 and relies on NATO and a bilateral defence pact signed with the US, also in 1951. Washington has no permanent base on the island though it is seeking to consolidate control of Arctic routes coveted by Russia and China.
Rubio is the first US secretary of state to visit since Antony Blinken in 2021. He arrives five weeks after Icelanders rejected the reopening of EU accession negotiations by 52.8 per cent to 47.2 per cent in the August 29 referendum, on a turnout of 82.5 per cent.
Prime Minister Kristrún Frostadóttir, who framed the vote as a now-or-never moment, said afterwards her Government would not revisit the question before the 2028 election. Talks with Brussels have been frozen since 2013.
Relations with Washington have had their own friction. In early September Reykjavík summoned the US ambassador over an AI-generated map shared by Trump that showed Iceland, Greenland and the rest of North America under the US flag, telling AFP the image was “wholly inappropriate”.
Trump returned to the theme on October 4, posting an AI-generated image of his face above a Greenlandic landscape.
In Athens, Rubio is to take part in a strategic dialogue with Greece on regional and energy security, as the country positions itself as a gas hub for southeastern Europe.
That leg is overshadowed by an October 1 letter to Rubio from Congressman Gregory Meeks, who sought answers over a Wall Street Journal report alleging that the US ambassador to Greece, Kimberly Guilfoyle, had told a dinner that Washington could bring about political change in allied countries. Rubio has publicly backed her.
