Post-Cold War era

The Post-Cold War era is presented as a shift in the purposes and public justification of military power, not a clean end to its institutions. Intelligence agencies turn from monitoring traditional state adversaries toward new conflicts and terrorist bases, even as political pressure grows to expose their work and reduce their budgets. In Iceland, the same transition unsettles an economy and local communities shaped by the American military presence.

Intelligence After the Cold War

Building 312, an intelligence organization established shortly after 1960, had been created to analyse satellite photographs of the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, and other countries regarded as enemies of the United States. After the Cold War, its remit expanded to monitoring terrorist bases in the Middle East and conflicts in the Balkans. Its eight satellites, orbiting between 800 and 1,500 kilometres above Earth, continued to feed a system built to detect irregularities. The change in targets therefore left the organization’s surveillance infrastructure intact and gave it new subjects to watch.

That institutional continuity sits alongside a dispute over whether secret services should retain their authority and resources. The Secretary of Defense is described as a prominent opponent of state secrecy, an advocate of openness in secret-service operations, and a vocal supporter of cutting their expenditure and scrutinising their activities. The services, meanwhile, had acquired what the account calls a new and more wide-ranging role after the Cold War. The era thus brings expansion in the scope of intelligence work together with demands for its contraction and oversight.

The Military Presence in Iceland

The era’s consequences in Iceland are economic as well as strategic. Government policy stipulated that Iceland should derive no profit from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization presence on its shores; the military accordingly did not pay directly for its facilities at Keflavík Airport. Yet civilian contractors and service companies doing work for the military, or with useful political contacts, received tens of millions of dollars. The formal principle of no profit therefore coexisted with substantial indirect economic benefits.

Those benefits had become part of daily life in neighbouring villages, whose economies depended on the Iceland Defense Force. When operations on Midnesheidi were scaled down at the end of the Cold War, local residents protested vociferously. The reduction was not simply a change in military posture: it disrupted a local dependence that had grown around the base. The novel sets the national policy against profiting from foreign forces beside the material consequences of their presence, showing how those two realities could diverge.

A Contested Transition

For Vytautas Carr, the post-Cold War setting makes military intelligence more politically exposed. He must account for a C-17 transport plane left idle in Iceland indefinitely in winter and for the presence of Delta Force operators. He resents having to keep elected officials informed of the details of intelligence activity, contrasting this scrutiny with an earlier period when covert operations could remain covert. His frustration reflects a wider institutional tension: the missions persist and broaden, but their cost and legitimacy are increasingly subject to civilian challenge.

The Post-Cold War era consequently functions as an uneven transition. Intelligence organizations redirect their attention rather than disappear; Iceland’s military relationship with the United States continues to affect local livelihoods even as operations are reduced; and advocates of openness press for limits on agencies whose responsibilities have widened. The period’s defining contrast is between altered political conditions and durable systems of surveillance, military presence, and economic reliance.