Countries Without Conflicts: Notes from Iceland

It's hard to imagine a place in the world where one would feel less threatened by geopolitics than Iceland. It's an island. It's pretty far from anywhere else. And it has very few people (the entire country has a population of only 330,000). It has not had any kind of real international conflict since the 1970s-era Cod Wars with Great Britain, which---despite the name "wars"---mostly involved fishing boats and coast guard and naval vessels ramming each other and cutting fishing nets. ISIS and Syria and Iraq and all the other problems that afflict the world could not feel further away. When you're bicycling in Iceland, as I've been the past few days, the only security threats worth talking about are cars. Volcanoes are a much bigger issue here than is Al Qaeda. There's something about countries without conflicts---countries where violent conflict is all but unthinkable---that makes them different fundamentally from countries that face security problems. I don't walk around Washington fearing Al Qaeda or worrying about Vladimir Putin's impact on me. But an American cannot help but be concerned about the world's capacity to embroil his country in its most difficult problems. Its problems can come to American shores. And more frequently, they can drag America even to those regions of the world from which presidents campaign on extricating our forces. By contrast, an Icelander need have no fear of Al Qaeda (what sort of terrorist would go after Reykjavik?). And whatever happens in Iraq, in Somalia, or in Yemen, an Icelander need not fear it will involve her country. The reason is not chiefly the sort of pious anti-interventionism that keeps many European countries whining about U.S. security policies and overseas military activities while simultaneously living comfortably under the American security umbrella. That all may be there too, but the real issue is just size. With a population roughly half that of Washington DC, Iceland is just not big enough to play any kind of role in world affairs---particularly now that the Soviet Union is gone and the U.S. military base at Keflavik is closed. Yes, it's a NATO member. But it's a NATO member that's not anywhere near Russia and faces no chance of attack from any external threat and zero capacity to project military force against anyone else. Lone wolves, of course, can show up anywhere---even in Norway---but one cannot plan for them, and one does not price the possibility of a such a person into one's emotional experience of the world. The result is a fully modern country that is almost completely isolated from the military and security problems of the rest of the world; think of a country almost as remote and with just seven percent of the population of . . . New Zealand. It's hard to imagine a place where one would be safer. Ever since I got here, I've been trying to imagine what it would be like to grow up and live in a country for which security is simply not an issue---a country for whom external attack is as unthinkable as the external projection of force. I can't do it. Perhaps it is the emotional training of a person who was born during the Vietnam War and has lived through Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Kosovo, Iraq, 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, now, once again, Iraq---and countless other controversial American deployments of force in between. Perhaps it is the intellectual training of a person who works on questions of security and law---a vocation which necessarily assumes that security problems exist and require management. It may also be conditioned by the fact that living in urban America necessarily involves the contemplation of violence in the form of street crime. I have been mugged at gunpoint---an experience that, while not scarring by any means, does offer the occasional reminder that the world is not a safe place. Whatever combination of factors it is, I have trouble putting myself in the shoes of a polity that simply does not have to contemplate security questions, a country whose total prison population numbers (as of late last year) 152. The country was hit very hard by the financial crisis in 2008, but this absence of security concerns is an astonishing blessing which few other countries can truly claim.