I’ve exchanged comments with Andy over at the always excellent Siberian Light about the possible loan of more than $5.4 billion to bail out its rapidly failing banking sector. The question on everyone’s mind is whether or not such a large loan might include access to a military base in this strategically important NATO country, or whether they will get some support in terms of their territorial claims in the Arctic. Or maybe there is no nefarious political imperative, and the media is making a mountain out of a molehill. The Canadians, who have shown some aggressive responses to Russia’s arctic shenanigans, tend to view the Iceland loan with a good dose of cynicism. From Brian Milner in the Globe and Mail:

For months now, Iceland has been the problem child of the industrialized world. Now this island of 320,000 people in the North Atlantic has become the poster child of the new dark age of global finance. Faced with the very real danger of financial collapse after being frozen out of the credit markets, an increasingly desperate Icelandic government yesterday seized the country’s second-largest bank, Landsbanki; pumped fresh capital into the biggest one, Kaupthing Bank; pegged its currency, the krona, to the euro in an effort to stem its nosedive; and revealed that it has lined up an emergency infusion of €4-billion ($6.03-billion) from a most unlikely source – Russia.