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
Treaty on the Creation of the USSR position but officially took over as a supreme authority in the USSR. One area where the Soviet division of power was not resolved at the time of the Treaty's signing, was Soviet Central Asia which contained several problems. A major battleground during the Russian Civil War, the region would remain unstable afterward. Turkestan came under Russian control fairly recently, between 1867 and 1885. Moreover, unlike other ethnic borders of the former Russian Empire, which were delimited during the Tsarist days (e.g. Transcaucasia lost its feudal administration by the mid-19th century), the Soviet authorities inherited two provinces that were "de jure"