The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Iceland and Norway Ponder EU Membership || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: March 10, 2026

As Trump has been screaming into the void about acquiring Greenland, the wheels over in Iceland and Norway are starting to turn.Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://bit.ly/47yhWu4

Everybody from a bright sunrise-y Colorado. Peter Zion here. Today we're going to talk about the Greenland fallout in Europe, not so much about relations with the Europeans and about how that's really changed the nature of the relationship. And when your primary security guarantee starts threatened to invade one of you, that's a big deal. But instead, the countries that now think that they might be in trouble and are starting to change their strategic policy. And that comes down to Iceland and Norway. Norway has about 5 million people. Iceland, like one tenth of that, Nordic countries on the North Atlantic that are, a little chilly, that have good relations with the Danes, and until now, very good relations

with the United States as well. But when they look at the things that Donald Trump was demanding, he's like, we need to have Greenland in order to prevent Russia and Chinese from entering the Arctic. We need to have Greenland in order to have a port up in the Arctic. We need to have Greenland for the critical materials. We need to have Greenland for the resources. You know, Greenland has almost none of those things, but Iceland and Norway do, and they are lightly populated, especially Iceland, which basically has under three quarters of a million people, three quarters of them in the area around the capital of Reykjavik. The rest of the country is open, and there are multiple, multiple, multiple deep water opportunities. There's a lot of zones where they know

they've got minerals, but they have it mined because of the climate, and they have a huge access to continental shelf. I might have to do this one later. We'll see how it goes. and huge fishing reserves. If the United States was going to want a North Atlantic bastion on the Arctic, it would absolutely be Iceland or maybe even Norway. And because Iceland has so few people, it doesn't even have an army and has relied upon the United States for its defense going back 70.

You're too cold. finishing this one up inside. Yeah, so Iceland doesn't really have a defense force in any meaningful sense because it doesn't have a population, much less a population that's capable of control. in its own territory, much less the wider seabed around it. It's an island in the middle of kind of nowhere. And so what we're seeing in both Norway and Iceland now

is a renewed debate, especially at the parliamentary level, about joining for the first time the European Union. The European Union does have a defense clause, but it has no military decision-making power. It just basically says that we all hang together, and if somebody threatens one of us, we're all kind of have a meeting about it. Nothing really big.

But it puts you in a group with 450 million people with an economy that's three-quarters of the size of the United States. And the idea is that there's strength and numbers. And now, when the rubber hits the road, that might not be worth anything. But if you were Iceland and Norway and you're currently on the outside of the EU and you've been relying on NATO for your security, and by NATO, I mean the United States. And all of a sudden, the United States is saying all of the things that it wants you have. It's forcing a change in mindset. The primary reason that these two countries have not joined the European Union until this point is cost and regulation.

If they joined, they'd be two of the richest members and they would be paying far more into the European Union budget that they would ever get back. But if all of a sudden NATO is led by a nation that is predatory when it comes to the Europeans on issues of resources and territory and ports in the Arctic, then all of a sudden, all of the math that they have relied upon for decades has gone out the way. window and they need to consider new options. The fact that this conversation is even happening is kind of a shock because even in the depths of the financial crisis back in the 2000s when Iceland was imploding, they still didn't seriously consider going to the European Union even when they thought they would get money back. So it gives you an idea of how much the mindset has changed among countries in northern Europe that until now, where the firmest allies the United States has ever had,

and all of a sudden they're all considering alternatives.