Why is Iceland a NATO member if it lacks a military?

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This is the script for my video posted on October 14, 2026. Watch it on TikTok.

Iceland has no army, navy, or air force. But at the same time it’s a founding member of NATO. So why is a country without a proper military such a key part of a military alliance?

When WWII kicked off, Iceland was a small, unarmed country with no standing military, just like today. It shared a king with Denmark, which handled its foreign affairs, and it had declared itself permanently neutral back in 1918.

In April 1940, Germany invaded Denmark, leaving Iceland to fend for itself. But the trouble was that Iceland’s position in the middle of the North Atlantic made it strategically invaluable for controlling shipping lanes and would have given German U-boats a major advantage if Germany seized the island.

About a month after Germany occupied Denmark, Britain invaded Iceland under Operation Fork. British warships came to Reykjavík with a poorly equipped force of just 746 Royal Marines, and because Iceland had only about 60 police officers and a few hundred reservists to fight back, its government chose not to resist and settled for a formal protest.

The capital was quickly secured. German nationals were arrested, and the British were able to establish critical ports and airfields to patrol the Atlantic, track German submarines, and escort convoys. Without Iceland, it would have been far harder to secure the shipments of food and war supplies traveling from the US to Britain.

In 1941, British troops were needed elsewhere, so under pressure, Iceland’s government agreed to let the technically neutral US take over its defense, months before Pearl Harbor pulled the US into conflict.

While Iceland technically remained neutral on paper, the massive Allied presence transformed the country into a key stronghold for the rest of the war. Its 1918 agreement with Denmark also allowed Iceland to end their union after 1943, so with Denmark under German occupation, Iceland voted to break its remaining ties and declare full independence in 1944.

WWII eventually came to a close, but the Cold War almost immediately filled the gap. Communism was expanding around the world, driven by the Soviet Union, and even though the US held a monopoly on nuclear weapons, Western Europe feared the Red Army might still push west.

Their fears were not unfounded. The Soviets reoccupied the Baltic States, which they had first annexed in 1940, and kept territory taken from Finland, Poland, Romania, Germany, and Czechoslovakia. The Red Army stayed in liberated countries like Hungary and Bulgaria and worked to rig elections and orchestrate communist takeovers, building a buffer behind the Iron Curtain.

To counter this, twelve countries came together to form the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, to combat Soviet expansion, prevent the resurgence of nationalism and military conflict, foster cooperation, and establish a commitment for mutual defense.

Iceland was one of these first NATO members, bridging the Atlantic between the US and Canada and their allies in Europe. Iceland sits at the crossroads of the GIUK gap, which remains the main route for submarines to leave naval bases in northern Russia and access the Atlantic. But they only signed the treaty after their future allies informally assured them that Iceland would never have to raise armed forces or host foreign troops or bases in peacetime.

Of course Iceland’s own people were not necessarily thrilled about leaving behind neutrality. On the day the Althing voted to join the alliance, a riot broke out in the square outside, where the government had called on its supporters to defend the building. Police and volunteers managed to break it up with tear gas, but the protesters had made their point.

Icelandic nationalists feared that foreign troops would push out the Icelandic language and culture, and the country’s Socialist Party actually wanted closer ties with the Soviet Union and demanded a referendum, which the Althing voted down.

During the Korean War, Iceland agreed to host US forces in exchange for a defense guarantee, with the US defending Iceland on NATO’s behalf. This established the formal mechanism by which Iceland provides support without a military. Instead of troops and equipment, they give land, airfields, and access, and in return they are protected.

In the early decades of the alliance, though, Iceland remained sensitive about its own waters. Between 1958 and 1976, it fought three Cod Wars with the UK, a fellow NATO member, over fishing rights in the North Atlantic.

The conflicts saw standoffs, boardings, cut trawl nets, and dozens of ship rammings. Iceland repeatedly threatened to leave NATO and close the US base at Keflavik, and in 1976 it became the first NATO member to cut diplomatic ties with another. The UK finally gave in that June and accepted Iceland’s 200-mile fishing zone, demonstrating just how much leverage Iceland actually has.

By the late Cold War, Iceland hosted more than 3000 US service members, or around 5000 Americans counting their families, as well as anti-submarine warfare equipment, maritime patrols, fighter aircraft, an array of underwater microphones to track submarines, and critical air defense radar sites.

In the late 1950s, the US Navy also built a facility to store nuclear depth bombs, which the Icelandic workers who built it thought was for torpedoes, and the truth only came out decades later. The US even debated secretly deploying nuclear weapons to Iceland, but historians consider it settled that it never actually did.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, transits through the GIUK gap fell sharply, and the need for a US presence came into question. The permanent US military footprint ended in 2006 with the closure of Naval Air Station Keflavik.

With Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea though, the US began rotating forces back through Iceland, joining the NATO allies that had been flying air policing missions there since 2008, and federal funding for US military projects in Iceland returned too.

Despite not having a military, Iceland isn’t completely without resources. Its coast guard picks up some of the slack, operating patrol vessels, surveillance aircraft, and helicopters, as well as the four NATO radar sites and the NATO security area at Keflavik Air Base.

The 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine also brought an increase in Russian gray zone tactics and threats from submarines and ships against undersea cables and shipping lanes. Cutting cables isn’t a new tactic, as Britain cut Germany’s undersea telegraph cables in the first days of WWI, but modern economies depend on those cables so heavily that protecting them is arguably as urgent as tracking Russian nuclear-armed submarines.

But the current US administration has also provoked Iceland directly. In September 2026, the president posted an uncaptioned map with the US flag covering Canada, Greenland, Iceland, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean, and Iceland responded by summoning the US ambassador for a formal rebuke.

With the US looking less predictable, Iceland has hedged by signing a security and defense partnership with the EU, though in August 2026 the general population narrowly voted against resuming EU membership talks that had been suspended since 2013. Even so, its government has publicly reaffirmed the US alliance.

Some question whether NATO truly benefits from Iceland being a member, or if it’s simply riding for free. The country spends just 0.14% of its GDP directly on defense, and in cases like the Cod Wars it has used its leverage in uncomfortable ways, even while the US presence served as a huge economic boon, especially in the early Cold War.

But Iceland is uniquely valuable and very hard to replace. Without Iceland’s support, NATO would find it far harder to watch the GIUK gap, move reinforcements across the Atlantic, or close gaps in its radar coverage. Iceland provides a base, operates the radar systems, and hosts air policing at minimal cost to the alliance, and it accepts being a potential target of Russian sabotage.

The truth is, Iceland is neither a free rider nor a model to be replicated somewhere else. Its geography is invaluable, and this is fundamentally why it’s a member, even without a military to back it up.

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