Challenge: Iceland is a great power.

This is your challenge. Make Iceland a great power by 2005. The POD can be as eary as 1200.
ASB, I'm afraid.

Iceland is a small country on a great hunk of volcanic rock, partly covered in glaciers. "Good agricultural land" is where the grass grows thick enough to graze cattle.

1) if Iceland settled Vinland, then the latter would quickly grow apart and not be part of the same polity. See Greenland.

2) If there were some global catastrophe that spared only those of mixed Norse and Irish genetics (ya, right), then Iceland, Ireland and Canada would be the three powers left in the world.

3) Reykjavik airport is shut down due ?? volcanic eruption ?? and during that week a super bug wipes out 99% of the rest of the world.
 
Iceland stays neutral during the Cold War, and after a nuclear conflict in the 70's, it takes over Europe, drafting into its ranks many survivors who are willing to fight and work for the new world order.
 
A Scandinavian nation with Finland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Greenland and Iceland, centered in Iceland as it is the middle ground between the land could be a great power
 
Global warming starting in 1200 makes Iceland a semi-tropical world by 1900. By that time people have started to live there. The big glacier-carved formations and volcanoes amaze people and tourism becomes a major business. Meanwhile France is a barren desert and most of the US is similarly uninhabitable. The only places for people to live now are Scandinavia, the Himalayas, northern Asia, Greenland, Antarctica and Canada. An epidemic kills all of northern Asia, leaving Iceland one of the most powerful countries in the world, next to Greenland, Norway and Ellesmere Island.
 

Tprynn

Banned
During WW II, the governments in exile of Denmark, and possibly several other countries, move to Iceland rater then Britain talking their militaries with them. This provides Iceland with a economic boom.

Not sure how to make it to the 21st century, any body got any ideas
 
During WW II, the governments in exile of Denmark, and possibly several other countries, move to Iceland rater then Britain talking their militaries with them. This provides Iceland with a economic boom.

Not sure how to make it to the 21st century, any body got any ideas
Fatherland scenario. They stay there indefinetly.
 
Iceland has to get a military first during/after ww2. They join NATO. The USA gets really paranoid and doesn't trust the Europeans enough to give them nukes or even station missiles in Europe. So they move send them to Iceland instead. Iceland cracks the codes and takes over the missiles. Holds the world hostage.:D
 
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