Iceland's foreign minister names infrastructure, not troops, as the real target in any future attack

• Iceland's geographic isolation no longer provides meaningful security in an era of hybrid threats
• Energy infrastructure described as foundation of Icelandic sovereignty, not just an economic asset
• Government and private sector must jointly harden resilience across power, communications, and data systems
• Warning echoes broader Nordic vulnerabilities including Baltic undersea cable concerns and drone strikes on Nordic diplomatic targets

An attack on Iceland would not begin with soldiers on a shore. It would begin with the lights going out. That was the blunt assessment from Foreign Minister Þorgerður Katrín Gunnarsdóttir at the annual Samorku energy conference in Reykjavík's Borgarleikhúsið (City Theatre) on Monday, where she told an audience of energy executives and officials that Iceland's critical infrastructure — power plants, undersea cables, radar stations, internet connections — constitutes the country's primary target surface. RÚV reports that the minister framed energy systems not merely as economic assets but as the foundation of Icelandic sovereignty itself.

"If an attack were made on Iceland, it would not, in my view, take the form of conventional land warfare as we typically imagine a first strike," Gunnarsdóttir said. "It would be an assault on infrastructure — energy installations, undersea cables, radar stations, the internet and our connection to the outside world — or even in the form of information disorder, which we are already seeing."

The speech marks a notable shift in how Reykjavík talks about defence. Iceland has no standing army and has relied since 1951 on its strategic mid-Atlantic position as both vulnerability and bargaining chip — hosting first American, then NATO, air policing rotations at Keflavík. Gunnarsdóttir's framing abandons the comfortable assumption that remoteness equals safety. She acknowledged directly that hybrid threats — cyberattacks, cable sabotage, disinformation campaigns — render geographic distance irrelevant. The Atlantic is crossed by fibre-optic cables carrying European and North American data traffic, and Iceland sits on top of them.

The minister called for cross-government and private-sector cooperation to build what she termed "áfallaþol" — societal resilience. The government cannot guarantee increased resilience alone, she said; the work must cut across ministries, agencies, and the private sector. This is a concession worth noting in a country where the state dominates energy production through Landsvirkjun, the national power company. If the state owns the infrastructure and cannot protect it alone, the question becomes who exactly fills the gap.

Gunnarsdóttir's warning lands in a Nordic security environment that has grown sharply more anxious. Sweden spent much of the past year investigating suspected sabotage of undersea cables in the Baltic. Finland's embassy in Baghdad was struck by a drone in early 2025, a reminder that Nordic targets abroad are not immune to kinetic attack. Norway has deployed its navy to patrol offshore energy installations after repeated drone sightings near oil and gas platforms. Each incident points to the same conclusion: the infrastructure that keeps small, open, digitally dependent societies running is exactly what an adversary would hit first.

Iceland's situation is, in one sense, more exposed than its neighbours'. A single undersea cable disruption could sever the island's data connection to Europe. Its geothermal and hydroelectric power systems, while domestically abundant, are concentrated in a small number of installations. And its radar and communications stations — critical to NATO's North Atlantic surveillance — are obvious high-value targets in any great-power confrontation. The country's entire defence posture rests on the assumption that allies will arrive in time. Gunnarsdóttir's speech was, at minimum, an acknowledgment that the cables those allies would use to coordinate might already be cut.

Iceland spends roughly 0.3 percent of GDP on defence-related activities, among the lowest figures in NATO. The Samorku conference audience was energy professionals, not generals. The foreign minister was, in effect, telling power company executives that their substations are military targets.

Sources: RÚV