Published On 5 Oct 20265 Oct 2026<\/p>\n
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has arrived in Iceland\u2019s capital, Reykjavik, on the first leg of a four-day European tour, during which he will also visit Greece and Portugal.<\/p>\n
\u201cEconomic and security collaboration\u201d tops the agenda for his talks on Monday with Icelandic officials, according to a statement from the Department of State.<\/p>\n
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Ahead of his departure, he told reporters he would not directly tie the US decision to remove its B-1 bombers from Britain\u2019s Fairford airbase to last week\u2019s incident.<\/p>\n
\u201cI wouldn\u2019t just directly tie that to the move that was made,\u201d Rubio told reporters, adding that \u201cthe Department of War is constantly reallocating resources where they need to be\u201d.<\/p>\n
Rubio asserted confidence in the security of all US bases and praised the cooperation of authorities in the United Kingdom.<\/p>\n
Five British men were arrested near the base on suspicion of preparing \u201cterrorist acts\u201d and were later released on bail. A sixth man, a dual UK-Iranian national arrested separately in London, has also been released on bail.<\/p>\n
B-1 bombers, which had been used for strikes on Iran, flew home to the US.<\/p>\n
\u201cSome Threat\u201d<\/p>\n
President Donald Trump later confirmed that \u201csome threats\u201d prompted the US to pull its bombers from the UK.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere were some threats, and rather than tempting the enemy, we\u2019ll capture the enemy and beat the enemy. But why should we leave them there? So we moved them around a little bit, not very far,\u201d Trump told reporters at the White House earlier on Monday as he departed for an election event in Nebraska.<\/p>\n
However, a NATO military source said: \u201cIt is still believed that Iran poses an acute threat to US assets in the UK\u201d.<\/p>\n
Iran\u2019s Revolutionary Guard previously said the Fairford base was a legitimate target, but Tehran denied any links to last week\u2019s incident.<\/p>\n
Rubio is also visiting Greece to lead the US delegation for the sixth US-Greece Strategic Dialogue, focusing on defence cooperation and regional and energy security. He is due to wrap up his tour in the Portuguese capital Lisbon, where he will discuss defence, economic and technology cooperation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Published On 5 Oct 20265 Oct 2026 US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has arrived in Iceland\u2019s capital,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":793099,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[924,591,59,57,58,2043,791,585,165283,632,151,3105,50,229,3517,56,54,158,55,3544],"class_list":["post-793098","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-crime","tag-europe","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-greece","tag-iceland","tag-iran","tag-islamic-revolutionary-guard-corps","tag-middle-east","tag-military","tag-nato","tag-news","tag-politics","tag-portugal","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-united-states","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-us-canada"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/793098","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=793098"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/793098\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/793099"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=793098"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=793098"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=793098"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}