Iceland Does Not Need Permanent US Troops in Country, Prime Minister Says
Channel: Bloomberg Television
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Read a transcript preview of “Iceland Does Not Need Permanent US Troops in Country, Prime Minister Says” from Bloomberg Television, uploaded on 2026-11-06.
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Language: English (original, creator captions)
[0:00] Now Iceland recently rejected continuing accession talks with the EU. So how are you trying to
[0:05] strengthen the ties with the EU following the referendum?
[0:11] I think it's very important that we that, this referendum wasn't on our relationship with Europe.
[0:18] I mean, we already have and are already part of the economic area. There's a lot
[0:22] of people that don't know this, which means that we're part of the single market. We
[0:26] already do a lot of work with the European Union. And so this question for Icelanders
[0:32] was a bit different than for accession talks for non EU, non EEA countries. So the
[0:38] message from the Icelandic population was basically this. 48% of the country said, we would like
[0:43] to deepen those ties. We would like to look into possibly joining the EU. Other people
[0:48] said, listen. We're fine with what we have, but we're happy with our current relationship with
[0:53] the EU. So this has been my message all around to the world, to to the
[0:57] European Union as a whole as well. So we will continue to deepen that relationship, but
[1:02] it just means that we're not taking the step forward at least at this point.
[1:07] Prime minister, you mentioned there the EEA agreement, which is basically the EU single market agreement.
[1:12] So how do you expect that to evolve to, you know, serve Iceland better going forward?
[1:21] I think, we definitely need to have further conversations on how we can deepen that relationship.
[1:27] I mean, we're not naive towards the fact that sometimes it's difficult to have these multilayer
[1:32] deals going o