Iceland in the Cold War Iceland in the Cold War Throughout the Cold War, the nation of Iceland was a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and allied with the United States, hosting a US military presence in Keflavík Air Base from 1951 to 2006. In 1986, Iceland hosted a summit in Reykjavík between United States President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, during which they took significant steps toward nuclear disarmament. Five years later, in 1991, Iceland became the first country to recognize the renewed independence of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania when they broke away from the Soviet Union. Early in
Canada in the Cold War student at Cambridge and Harvard he was a part of a Marxist communist study group. This made Pearson, who was still External Affairs Minister, backed by outrage across the country, send a note to the US Government, threatening to offer no more security information on Canadian citizens until it was guaranteed that this information would not slip beyond the executive branch of the government. It was during the Cold War period that Canada began to assert the international clout that went along with the reputation it had built on the international stage in World War I and World War II.