Iceland is moving closer toward joining the European Union after Donald Trump confused it with another country that the president had threatened to take over.
Iceland is not part of the European bloc of 27 member states, but the country with a population of just over 400,000 will hold a referendum in August on whether to resume negotiations to join the EU.
As noted by The New York Times, Iceland’s usually fiercely independent residents have become more open to the idea of joining the EU, in part due to the 79-year-old president’s threats against its neighbor Greenland, and concerns over how Trump mixed up the two North Atlantic island nations.
Icelandic Prime Minister Kristrún Frostadóttir told the Times in February that the diplomatic crisis caused by Trump threatening to take over Greenland—by military force if necessary—“hit a nerve” among referendum voters. “Things have definitely shifted,” she said in a follow-up interview published Tuesday.
There is no real concern that Trump would actually confuse Iceland and Greenland to the point of ordering an attack on Iceland, but the potential defense assurances that come with joining the EU are now seen as a big bonus.
Iceland is the only NATO country without its own military, and some Icelanders feel it needs stronger ties with other countries, since they no longer consider the U.S. a reliable ally.
“People feel that they might be forced to pick a side,” Eiríkur Bergmann, a politics professor at Bifröst University in Iceland, told the Times. “And then there is really only one side to pick.”
Trump has made numerous threats to take over Greenland—an autonomous territory of Denmark, a U.S. NATO ally—since before his second spell in the White House. Trump claims the U.S. must control the mineral-rich Arctic island for national security reasons.
The 79-year-old raised concerns when he repeatedly confused Greenland with Iceland earlier this year.
During a January speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Trump mixed up the two territories while lashing out at NATO for not allowing him to seize Greenland.
“I know we’d be there for them. I don’t know that they’d be there for us with all of the money we expend, with all of the blood, sweat and tears… They’re not there for us on Iceland, I can tell you,” Trump said. “Their stock market took the first dip yesterday because of Iceland.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt desperately tried to defend the president’s gaffe by claiming his written remarks had referred to Greenland as a “piece of ice.”
However, Trump also mixed up the two places at a news conference at the White House the day before, while defending his aggressive tariff threats.
“Iceland, without tariffs, they wouldn’t even be talking to us about it,” Trump said. The president had threatened to impose tariffs on several European nations as part of a pressure tactic aimed at forcing Denmark to sell Greenland to the U.S.
Elsewhere, Magnús Tryggvason, who lives about an hour away from Iceland’s capital of Reykjavík, told the Times he plans to vote “yes” in the upcoming EU referendum.
“See what’s in the package,” he said. “Then people can decide.”
