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
Origins of the Cold War occurred. Western Allies conducted meetings in Italy in March 1945 with German representatives to forestall a takeover by Italian communist resistance forces in northern Italy and to hinder the potential there for post-war influence of the civilian communist party. The affair caused a major rift between Stalin and Churchill, and in a letter to Roosevelt on 3 April Stalin complained that the secret negotiations did not serve to "preserve and promote trust between our countries." Relations further deteriorated when, in January 1948, the U.S. State Department also published a collection of documents titled "Nazi–Soviet Relations, 1939–1941: Documents from the Archives