Iceland Just Got Played

In a high-profile rejection of EU membership talks, everyone won but the Icelandic people.

On August 28, roughly a quarter of a million Icelanders took to the polls to register their thoughts on whether Europeans would steal their fish. Well, that wasn’t the question on the ballot. But it proved to be all Icelanders cared about. And as a result, Icelanders may have committed a Brexit-esque act of self-sabotage.

For the last three months, the island nation of roughly 400,000 people has played host to a heated referendum campaign on whether to reinitiate talks to join the European Union. Already a member of the European Common Market and the Schengen visa-free travel zone, Iceland has long flirted with the idea of EU membership. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, which exposed the vulnerabilities of the microstate’s currency, it launched a formal application to join, only to see talks stall in 2013 with the election of a Euro-skeptic government.

But following President Donald Trump’s repeated threats to annex Greenland—which he confused with Iceland in a high-profile speech at Davos—the idea of EU membership was greeted with new enthusiasm.

For Europe, Iceland is a valuable prize in the mid-Atlantic. Already aligned on trade and values, it is perfectly positioned to help further project the EU’s influence into increasingly contested Arctic waters. For Iceland, which maintains no standing army of its own, EU membership could replace the security guarantee offered by a struggling NATO alliance, as it faces the existential threat of Trump’s self-interested unilateralism.

But almost as soon as the referendum campaign was formally launched in May, these geopolitical considerations largely faded into the background. Instead,........

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