Iceland and Norway Ponder EU Membership || Peter Zeihan

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Everybody from a bright, sunrise-y Colorado,

Peter Zayn 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 you're primary security guarantor,

it 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, I'm 10th of that.

Nordic countries on the North Atlantic

that are, whoo, so 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 needed 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.

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 continent,

and they have a huge shelf.

Whoo!

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 years.

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 of populations,

that's capable of controlling its own territory,

much less the wider sea bed 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'll 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 in numbers.

And now when the rubber hits the road,

that might not be worth anything,

but if you were Iceland in 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

and the Arctic, then all of a sudden all of the math

that they have relied upon for decades

has gone out the 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 were the firmest allies

the United States has ever had,

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

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