Iceland votes on EU membership as Trump's Greenland ambitions reshape Arctic security debate

On a Saturday in late August 2026, some 275,000 Icelanders went to the polls to decide whether to reopen negotiations for European Union membership — a question that has long simmered in this small North Atlantic nation, but one suddenly charged with new urgency. The shadow of Donald Trump's openly stated ambitions to acquire neighboring Greenland had transformed what might have been a routine debate about trade and integration into something more existential: a reckoning with what security means for a country without an army, perched between shifting great powers. Iceland's vote was, in the o