President Donald Trump published an image on Truth Social showing Iceland and a string of neighboring countries under the American flag. Iceland’s government answered on Monday, September 7, 2026, by summoning the U.S. ambassador in Reykjavik.
The flag stretches across Canada, Greenland, Iceland, Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean along with the United States itself, and one label — “United States of America” — runs the length of the whole landmass. The Gulf of Mexico is marked “Gulf of America,” and islands such as Cuba are folded in. French media noted that Guadeloupe, Martinique, Saint-Martin, Saint-Barthélemy and Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon also appeared in U.S. colors.
The president said nothing about what the image meant, and no explanation has surfaced since. He did not call for annexation, and his administration has announced no policy to incorporate the countries shown. The post remains up.
A Summons in Reykjavik
Foreign Minister Þorgerður Katrín Gunnarsdóttir called in Billy Long, Washington’s envoy to Reykjavik, who had presented his credentials only in August.
Iceland’s foreign ministry told RUV: “The position was clearly expressed that the post was completely inappropriate.”
Both she and Prime Minister Kristrún Frostadóttir addressed the post publicly at a government briefing the next morning. “There is nothing funny or normal about making fun of the sovereignty of states,” Frostadóttir said, calling the map an insult to Icelanders, Canadians and Greenlanders. The foreign minister was drier: “If this is supposed to be a joke, then it is a bad joke.”
Greenland Money and Denmark’s Message
Nerves in that part of the world were already frayed. Trump has insisted that the United States must take possession of Greenland, a semi-autonomous Danish territory, and has refused to rule out taking it by force — straining ties between Washington and Copenhagen, both NATO founding members.
The European Commission had unveiled a €200 million investment in Greenland, about $232 million, the same day the president posted, as its president, Ursula von der Leyen, visited Nuuk.
France answered with a trip of its own. The Élysée announced on September 13 that President Emmanuel Macron would visit Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon, the French archipelago off Newfoundland that appeared on the map, from September 19 to 21, with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney joining him on September 20 — the first official visit by a Canadian prime minister to the islands. France and Canada share an ambition to act independently, the Élysée said, “in a world marked by the return of power politics.”
In Nuuk, Denmark’s prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, met the question of Greenland’s future head-on in remarks to the Danish news agency Ritzau. “The Greenlandic government and the Greenlandic people have said again and again that they do not want to be American,” she said. She added that she hoped nobody in the United States or anywhere else in the world was in any doubt about it.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum answered the map on X, invoking Mexico’s independence month: “In the month of the homeland we reaffirm that Mexico is not and will not be a colony or protectorate of any foreign country. We are proudly a free, independent and sovereign country.” Iceland alone lodged a formal diplomatic protest; Denmark, Mexico and France objected publicly without summoning anyone.
Iceland’s Referendum and the U.S. Question
Iceland, home to a little more than 400,000 people, had weighed where it belongs weeks before the post: in an August 29 referendum, voters turned down a restart of European Union membership talks, 52.8 percent to 47.2.
Backers of resuming talks had argued that uncertainty about how far Washington could be counted on was itself reason to look again. Analysts read the outcome differently, pinning it on domestic concerns over fishing, sovereignty and the economy rather than on transatlantic security.
Iceland has surfaced in the president’s comments before, occasionally as a substitute for Greenland. At Davos in January, he went after NATO for opposing an American takeover of Greenland while naming Iceland over and over, telling the audience the allies would not be there for the United States “on Iceland.” He blamed Iceland for a stock market slide in the same appearance and said it had cost the United States a great deal of money. Karoline Leavitt, then the White House press secretary, defended the remarks by saying the president meant Greenland as a piece of ice.
He had muddled the two the day before as well, at a news conference defending tariff threats designed to push Denmark into selling Greenland. “Iceland, without tariffs, they wouldn’t even be talking to us about it,” Trump said.
He has suggested Canada could become the 51st U.S. state, and he renamed Lake Ontario “Lake America” by executive order on August 27. The map came in the same Labor Day weekend posting spree in which he shared an image depicting New Mexico as “New America.”
A week after the map, Icelanders learned the idea had been put to their own government directly. RUV reported on September 10 that Trump twice raised Iceland becoming the 51st state in a call with then-Prime Minister Bjarni Benediktsson in late November 2024. The call was public at the time; the remarks were not. Parliament’s foreign affairs committee was briefed two days later. “It is serious when powerful people joke about Icelandic sovereignty,” its chair, Pawel Bartoszek, said, while cautioning against escalation.
Long, barely a month into his posting in Reykjavik, is left in the middle of the dispute. A former Republican congressman, he had joked before his posting that he could be Iceland’s governor if the island were made a U.S. state, and apologized in January.
What the image was meant to represent, and who put it on Trump’s account, remain unclear. Trump aide Natalie Harp helps craft his social media output, posting with his approval. She and Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Scavino are named in a lawsuit filed in August by The Intercept and the Freedom of the Press Foundation over subscriptions of up to $100,000 a month for early access to his Truth Social posts.