In Iceland, Rubio Dodges a Diplomatic Flap Over a Trump Map

AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTPresident Trump had posted a map on his Truth Social account in September depicting Iceland as part of U.S. territory.Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Thorgerdur Katrin Gunnarsdottir, Iceland’s foreign affairs minister, held a joint press conference.Credit...Pool photo by Mark SchiefelbeinMichael CrowleyMichael Crowley covered Marco Rubio’s visit from Reykjavik and questioned the U.S. diplomat at a Tuesday news conference there.Oct. 6, 2026, 6:42 p.m. ETOne month after President Trump hinted that Iceland should belong to the United States, Secretary of State Marco Rubio needed to address the matter during a visit with the country’s leaders, insisting afterward that “everything’s very positive in our relationship.”Mr. Trump had posted a map on his Truth Social account in September depicting Iceland as part of U.S. territory.The post unnerved and angered Icelandic officials, who had watched Mr. Trump threaten to annex neighboring Greenland by force before agreeing to a long-term security deal instead.Mr. Rubio brushed off a question about the incident, saying he would not address social media posts. But it seemed clear that his counterpart, Foreign Minister Thorgerdur Katrin Gunnarsdottir, did not consider the matter trivial.“We discussed that,” she said alongside Mr. Rubio at a Tuesday news conference in Reykjavik, the capital.The chief Icelandic diplomat, who summoned the U.S. ambassador for an explanation after Mr. Trump’s post, added that the issue had been dealt with “constructively” and that U.S.-Iceland relations remained strong.Both Mr. Rubio and Ms. Gunnarsdottir sought to focus instead on what Mr. Rubio called the “critical” strategic relationship between their countries amid growing concerns about Russian military activity in the Arctic.The diplomats had earlier met in Reykjavik’s historic Hofdi House, site of a 1986 nuclear arms reduction summit between President Ronald Reagan and Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev that helped lay the groundwork for the Cold War’s end.But a new sort of Cold War has since emerged. In recent years, Russian ships and submarines have sailed close to Iceland’s shores in what Western officials call reconnaissance missions to gather information on NATO activities and to map vital undersea communications cables that could be severed to devastating effect.Visiting a NATO air base outside the capital, Mr. Rubio toured an American P-8 Poseidon aircraft equipped to detect, monitor and destroy ships and submarines.The United States built Naval Air Station Keflavik early in the Cold War as it established a permanent military presence meant to counter Soviet threats against the Arctic and northern Europe. With the Soviet threat gone, the United States turned the base over to NATO more than 20 years ago but has recently upgraded the facility and begun rotating forces through it on a regular basis.“While the world’s focus drifted over the last 20 years, the reality is the geography is always important, and we’re seeing that come now to fruition,” Mr. Rubio said, noting that Iceland lies at a naval choke point between Europe and the United States.At the same time, Mr. Rubio acknowledged that a U.S. military stretched thin by the seven-month conflict with Iran had contributed no ships or planes to NATO’s “Northern Viking” military exercises held annually off Iceland’s coast. The United States had provided hundreds of personnel for the exercises, conducted from late August to early September“Obviously, there’s things going on around the world,” Mr. Rubio said. “It requires us to allocate resources,” he added, saying that the protection of commercial shipping lines from Iran and “the need to backfill what’s happening in the Indo-Pacific as a result” has left fewer American forces available for exercises.He had less to say about the map, before flying on to Greece later in the day.Mr. Rubio, who on his foreign travels often drops figurative ice cubes into the hot water of Mr. Trump’s more provocative comments, dismissed a question on the topic.“We’re not talking about social media posts,” he said, before celebrating U.S.-Iceland military and economic relations.The map, which Mr. Trump posted with no comment, depicted all of North America — including Mexico, Canada, Greenland and the Caribbean islands, as well as Iceland — covered by the stars and stripes of the American flag.“There is nothing funny or normal about making fun of the sovereignty of states, especially today when it is not a given,” Iceland’s prime minister, Kristrun Frostadottir, said in response to Mr. Trump’s post.Iceland, a small but wealthy Nordic nation with a population of about 400,000, is a NATO member but lacks a standing military.Nor was the post an isolated incident. Iceland’s public broadcaster, RÚV, reported last month that Mr. Trump, in an informal phone call soon after his November 2024 election, had urged Iceland’s then-prime minister to consider U.S. statehood for his country. (Some of RÚV’s sources cautioned that Mr. Trump may have been joking, though others insisted the idea took a serious turn.)And Mr. Trump’s ambassador to Iceland, the former U.S. Representative Billy Long, apologized in January for a comment of his own about Icelandic statehood.Mr. Long, who had been nominated but not yet confirmed as ambassador at the time, said he was joking when he was overheard telling House colleagues that Iceland would follow Greenland into the United States and that he would become governor of the 52nd U.S. state.Iceland’s foreign ministry sought clarification from the U.S. Embassy in Reykjavik about the remarks.Mr. Long, a former auctioneer and talk radio host who spent 12 years representing Missouri in the House, was narrowly confirmed as ambassador by the U.S. Senate in May.The anger and worry in Iceland over Mr. Trump’s intentions comes at a moment of strong nationalism for the country, which made a clear assertion of its independence last month when voters in a hotly debated referendum chose not to resume talks to join the European Union.Michael Crowley covers the State Department and U.S. foreign policy for The Times. He has reported from nearly three dozen countries and often travels with the secretary of state.Related ContentAdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENT