Far-Flung Frontier: American Basing Negotiations with Iceland, 1945-1947
Thursday, October 30, 2025
7:00pm
Lecture by Olivia Wynne Houck
Presented via Zoom; Pre-registration required.
NESAH is pleased to host a lecture from our 2024 John Coolidge Fellowship recipient, Olivia Wynne Houck of MIT, whose presentation on the strategic importance of Iceland in the founding of NATO will highlight research conducted in the NATO archive with the support of the Coolidge Fellowship.
Throughout the Second World War, the United States established temporary military bases on islands in the North Atlantic Ocean – spanning from Iceland and Greenland down to the Azores – as a means to protect the Western Hemisphere and facilitate the movement of materiel to Europe. However, after the war ended it became apparent that the strategic need for these bases remained vital to U.S. security, and the Americans embarked on a series of negotiations with the Icelanders in order to secure longer leases and maintain their presence on the island. These negotiations were eventually successful, but the contours of public debate around overseas U.S. basing, particularly in relation to the developing tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, reveal not just a more expansive understanding of American security, but also the valence that “bases” took on in diplomatic venues and public messaging. In these contexts, the “base” had three meanings – it was an instrument of power projection, or a way of enabling operational capacity; it was an object of negotiation, or a focal point from which to argue about larger tensions of intention and presence; and it was a tool for navigating and facilitating bilateral and multilateral security arrangements and guarantees. Not only were “bases” crucial nodes in the development of a growing global infrastructure, but they also were political and symbolic, evidencing larger accusations of “aggression” or “expansion.” By interrogating American negotiations to secure bases on the northern edge of the North Atlantic region, we can see how politics, diplomacy, and technology coalesced, laying the groundwork for the infrastructure that would comprise the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
Olivia Wynne Houck is a a doctoral candidate in the History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she focuses on the intersection of the built environment, diplomacy, and geopolitics during the early Cold War. She is particularly interested in the interplay between NATO, American foreign policy, technology, and infrastructure in relation to the European and North American Arctic regions. Her work considers American foreign policy and NATO from their coldest edges. Entitled “Concrete Security: Constructing and Defending the North Atlantic Region, 1940-1950” her dissertation centers the built environment as a means to investigate how the North Atlantic region became a strategic territory, in large part through the American desire for, and fear of, military bases on the islands of Greenland and Iceland during the Second World War and postwar period. Houck holds a B.A. in Art History from the College of William and Mary, an M.A. in Architectural History from the University of Virginia, and a Postgraduate Diploma in ‘Small States Studies’ from the University of Iceland. She is a Research Associate at The Arctic Institute and a Research Fellow with the North American and Arctic Defense and Security Network and has held visiting researcher positions and fellowships with the Fridtjof Nansen Institute in Oslo and the Arctic Institute.
Image caption and source: “Bases to Make America Secure," Chicago Daily Tribune, February 25, 1946.
