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Comment by SXX | Hacker News Reader

Iceland is one of few countries that can actually afford to have no military. They live on an island. Closest landmass to them is Greenland that's certainly not plotting to annex them and its 300km away.

There's no natutal resources, no anything other than fish and 400,000 human population.

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They have a strategic location in the north Atlantic, if the US did not have defacto military control of iceland several other countries have historically been interested in annexing them (germany under WW2, soviet union after that). They also only got their independence from Denmark after WW2.

And yet they've done fine for 1000+ years.

Moreover, this whole narrative of defense is so childlish and asinine, generally spread by people of countries that are always on the attacking side like Americans.

It reminds me of the elementary kids in a local school that started to bring knifes to school because others had knifes too.

You have a country where there is people still alive who remembers their country getting independence, don’t you think that independence matters to them?

I think over the past year or so the calculus has changed dramatically. There was credible threat by the US of invasion of another NATO member in the same neighborhood. It's intellectually dishonest to say things are the same as in the 90s, when the US was defending the sovereignty of these places.

> And yet they've done fine for 1000+ years.

They got their independence after WW2, they have been either annexed or colonized by other powers since 1262.

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